Full Body Burden
Page 40
slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night
Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?
I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years
I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your dreadful presence lasting majestic as the Gods,
Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light,
Sophia’s reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirlpools of starspume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!
Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self oblivion!
Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages’ prayers, old orators’ inspired Immortalities,
I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River, Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque
I yell thru Washington, South Carolina, Colorado, Texas, Iowa, New Mexico,
where nuclear reactors create a new Thing under the Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hanger-Silas Mason assembles the terrified weapon secret by ten thousands, & where Manzano Mountain boasts to store
its dreadful decay through two hundred forty millennia while our Galaxy spirals around its nebulous core.
I enter your secret places with my mind, I speak with your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with mortal mouth.
One microgram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of heavy metal dust adrift slow motion over grey Alps
the breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance speeds blight and death to sentient beings?
Enter my body or not I carol my spirit inside you, Unapproachable Weight,
O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your consciousness to six worlds
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger birthed in fear O most
Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion of metal empires!
Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!
Judgement of judgements, Divine Wind over vengeful nations, Molester of Presidents, Death-Scandal of Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly industrious!
Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate! Manufactured Spectre of human reason! O solidified imago of practitioners in Black Arts
I dare your Reality, I challenge your very being! I publish your cause and effect!
I turn the Wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons! Your name enters mankind’s ear! I embody your ultimate powers!
My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your form at last
behind your concrete & iron walls inside your fortress of rubber & translucent silicon shields in filtered cabinets and baths of lathe oil,
My voice resounds through robot glove boxes & ingot cans and echoes in electric vaults inert of atmosphere,
I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums underground on soundless thrones and beds of lead
O density! This weightless anthem trumpets transcendent through hidden chambers and breaks through iron doors into the Infernal Room!
Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony floats audible, these jubilant tones are honey and milk and wine-sweet water
Poured on the stone block floor, these syllables are barley groats I scatter on the Reactor’s core,
I call your name with hollow vowels, I psalm your Fate close by, my breath near deathless ever at your side
to Spell your destiny, I set this verse prophetic on your mausoleum walls to seal you up Eternally with Diamond Truth! O doomed Plutonium.
II
The Bard surveys Plutonian history from midnight lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps till in dawn’s early light
he contemplates a tranquil politic spaced out between Nations’ thought-forms proliferating bureaucratic
& horrific arm’d, Satanic industries projected sudden with Five Hundred Billion Dollar Strength
around the world same time this text is set in Boulder, Colorado before front range of Rocky Mountains
twelve miles north of Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility in United States of North America, Western Hemisphere
of planet Earth six months and fourteen days around our Solar System in a Spiral Galaxy
the local year after Dominion of the last God nineteen hundred seventy eight
Completed as yellow hazed dawn clouds brighten East, Denver city white below
Blue sky transparent rising empty deep & spacious to a morning star high over the balcony
above some autos sat with wheels to curb downhill from Flatiron’s jagged pine ridge,
sunlit mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street’s summer green leafed trees.
III
This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers, you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and consonants to breath’s end
take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breathe out this blessing from your breast on our creation
forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains in the Ten Directions pacify with this exhalation,
enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder through earthen thought-worlds
Magnetize this howl with heartless compassion, destroy this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind and body speech,
thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone out, gone beyond, gone beyond me, Wake space, so Ah!
—July 14, 1978
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I HAVE many people to thank in the process of researching this book, including neighbors, old classmates, scientists, Rocky Flats workers, activists, attorneys, journalists, physicians, and developers. In addition to the many interviews I conducted myself, I depended heavily on the remarkable archive of Rocky Flats interviews at the Maria Rogers Oral History Program at the Carnegie Library in Boulder, Colorado, where I owe special thanks to Dorothy Ciarlo, Hannah Nordhaus, and Susan Becker. Thanks to J. Wendel Cox and Jennifer Dewey at the Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy department, and David M. Hays at the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Archives department.
I am grateful to all of the people who granted me interviews and were very generous with their time. Particular thanks go to workers Randy Sullivan, Stan Skinger, Charlie Wolf, Doug Parker, Laura and Jeff Schultz, Dr. Robert Rothe, and Debby Clark. Charlie Wolf is missed by many. Neighbors and residents include Tamara Smith Meza and her family (as well as physician Nicholas Gonzales); Ann White; the Kirstin Dunn family; Stacy Gardalen (née Bunce), Curtis Bunce, and Patricia Bunce; Bini Abbott; and the Duane Hart family. Dr. LeRoy Moore with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center was an invaluable resource and I am deeply grateful for his assistance. Thanks to Representative Wes McKinley; Dr. Harvey Nichols, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Len Ackland, author of Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West. Attorney Peter Nordberg and his wife, Mykaila, shared remarkable stories, and I am grateful to Karen Markert for her assistance with court documentation. Peter Nordberg is deeply missed. Thanks to those who have been involved in the Rocky Flats story in so many ways and shared their stories: Patrick Malone, Shirley Garcia, Hildegard Hix, Mary Harlow, Jack Cohen-Joppa, Pam Solo, Judy Danielson, Paula Elofson-Gardine, Anne Guilfoile, Ellen Klaver, Bob McFarland, Chet Tchozewski, Kenneth Nova, Elene Rosenfeld, Jyoti Wind, and Bob Kinsey. Thanks to Rex Haag and particularly Charles C. McKay, who shared stories of his grandparents and great-grandparents. Thanks to investigativ
e journalists Ryan Ross, Eileen Welsome, and Patricia Calhoun. I am grateful to my dear friend Christie Smith, who sent useful newspaper clippings for years, and Theron Britt for helpful commentary. Alex Stein offered insightful comments and unflagging faith that I would finish this project. Marge and Joe Meek were ever supportive of this work. Warm gratitude to Roberta and Rick Robertson. Photographer Arin Billings shared her remarkable photographs of Rocky Flats workers, and I continue to be inspired by the photography of Robert Del Tredici as well as by Robert Adams and his photos of people living near Rocky Flats.
Thanks to physicist Robert Philbin, who helped me understand the complexities of radioactivity, and Ross Proctor, lieutenant with the Memphis Police Department, for helping me understand issues of domestic preparedness and nuclear weapons.
I am grateful to the research assistants who helped with transcriptions and footnotes: Wendy Sumner Winter, JD Wilson, Andrew Sall, Matt Martin, John Schulze, Derek Gray, Sean Meek, and especially, in the final stretch, Colleen Pawling and Tom Useted. Gwendolyn Ashbaugh Mooney and Greg Larson read the manuscript closely. Thanks to my colleagues in the MFA program at the University of Memphis for their encouragement and support, particularly Richard Bausch, Rebecca Skloot, Sonja Livingston, and Aram Goudsouzian. I’m grateful to Stephen Usery at Book Talk and Corey Mesler at Burke’s Books. They are the heart of the literary community in Memphis.
I am indebted to Grant and Peggy Pound at Colorado Art Ranch and the remarkable residents of Trinidad and Libre, Colorado, for two writing residencies that gave me the time and quiet space to complete the final stages of this project. Thanks to the San Jose Literary Arts Council and the University of Memphis for grants, and Denver International Airport and Colorado Art Ranch for exhibiting photos and text from this book over the summer of 2010.
I owe deep gratitude to the people who made this book happen. John Glusman was extraordinarily enthusiastic, and his comments in the early stages were invaluable. I am extremely fortunate to have the talent and energy of Rachel Klayman, my editor at Crown, as well as the other wonderful people at Crown, including Mark Birkey, Chris Brand, Julie Cepler, Stephanie Chan, Michael Gentile, Leila Lee, Rachel Rokicki, Annsley Rosner, Jay Sones, and Barbara Sturman. Publisher Molly Stern has been hugely supportive of this book. A very special thank-you to my agent, Ellen Levine.
Molly Giles believed in this book—and me—from the very first sentence. Heartfelt gratitude—and lefse and lutefisk—to Greg Larson, for love, support, and late-night editing. It turns out that a Norwegian and a Swede make a pretty good team. Thanks, most of all, to my remarkable family: my two sons, Sean and Nathan; my mother, now gone; my father; and my beloved siblings, Karin, Karma, and Kurt.
ROCKY FLATS TIMELINE*
1942 The Manhattan Project begins.
1945 The U.S. Army conducts its first nuclear weapons test on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico. The weapon is referred to as “the Gadget.” On August 6, the “Little Boy” atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb, an implosion-design plutonium device, is dropped on Nagasaki.
1946 President Harry S. Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act, creating the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
1951 The Denver Post reports, “There Is Good News Today: U.S. to Build $45 Million A-Plant near Denver.” The site for the plant lies sixteen miles from central Denver and nine miles from Boulder, and site plans rely erroneously on wind pattern reports from Stapleton Airport, not the high mesa of Rocky Flats. Dow Chemical is chosen as the operating contractor.
1957 A major fire occurs in plutonium processing Building 771. Despite the spread of radioactive and toxic contamination to the Denver metropolitan area, residents are not told about the fire until 1970.
1962 The Cuban missile crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union brings the world to the brink of nuclear war.
1969 A major fire in plutonium processing Buildings 776 and 777 becomes the costliest industrial accident in the United States at that time. Cleanup takes two years. The public is largely unaware of the fire.
1970 After a team of independent scientists discovers plutonium at off-site areas around Rocky Flats, the AEC admits to the contamination but announces that it is not a result of the 1969 fire, but rather of the 1957 fire—of which the public was never informed—and of thousands of drums that have been leaking radioactive and toxic materials since the 1960s.
1972 The AEC expands the buffer zone around Rocky Flats and Congress spends $6 million to purchase an additional 4,600 acres, bringing the Rocky Flats site to a total of approximately 6,400 acres.
1973 The Colorado Department of Health discovers tritium in drinking water downstream of Rocky Flats, but does not alert local officials for five months. The AEC initially denies the presence of tritium.
1974 Governor Richard Lamm and Representative Timothy Wirth establish the Lamm-Wirth Task Force on Rocky Flats to help determine the future of Rocky Flats, given its proximity to the Denver metropolitan area. The task force concludes that nuclear-weapons work should be ended at Rocky Flats and moved to another location.
1975 Rockwell International replaces Dow Chemical as managing contractor of Rocky Flats.
1978 Large-scale protests begin at Rocky Flats. Protesters set up camp on railroad tracks leading into the plant site and remain on the tracks from April until January 1979.
1979 A core meltdown of Unit 2 at the Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, occurs on March 28. On April 28, thousands of protestors rally at Rocky Flats, including Daniel Ellsberg, Allen Ginsberg, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne. A counterdemonstration is held by pro–Rocky Flats workers and the United Steelworkers of America.
1983 More than fifteen thousand protesters link hands and nearly encircle the seventeen-mile perimeter of the plant on October 15.
1984 The first Rocky Flats worker is diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease, an incurable illness irrefutably linked with work conditions at the plant.
1986 The Department of Energy (DOE), the Colorado Department of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sign an agreement to allow, for the first time, partial regulation of radioactive and hazardous waste at Rocky Flats. That same year, the Chernobyl disaster on April 26 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine releases a large amount of radioactive contamination that spreads over much of Europe. At the time, it is considered the worst nuclear accident in history.
1987 The Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, a community oversight organization, is formed.
1989 The FBI raids Rocky Flats to collect evidence of alleged environmental lawbreaking at the plant. Production of plutonium triggers ends. A federal grand jury is impaneled to review the evidence and embarks on a nearly three-year-long investigation, hearing hundreds of witnesses and examining thousands of documents.
1990 EG&G takes over from Rockwell as the operator of Rocky Flats. A class-action lawsuit, Cook v. Rockwell International Corporation, is filed on behalf of thousands of residents living downwind of the plant. The suit alleges that Dow and Rockwell allowed plutonium from Rocky Flats to contaminate residents’ land.
1991 The Soviet Union is dissolved. The Cold War ends. This same year, the Rocky Flats Beryllium Health Surveillance Program is initiated.
1992 The U.S. Attorney and Department of Justice bypass the grand jury and negotiate an out-of-court settlement with Rockwell in which the company pleads guilty to ten violations of the Clean Water Act and federal hazardous waste laws, including illegal storage of hazardous wastes. Rockwell pays a fine of $18.5 million. Outraged grand jurors refuse to be dismissed and write their own report detailing ongoing contamination and calling for the indictment and trial of several Rockwell and DOE officials. Though the report is sealed by the judge and jurors are forbidden to speak about the case, someone leaks a redacted version of the report to Westword, a Denver weekly. Meanwhile, President George H. W. Bush announces the end of the W88 warhead prog
ram, effectively ending production at Rocky Flats.
1993 The Rocky Flats Citizens Advisory Board replaces the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, its mission to provide ongoing community and local government oversight of the cleanup at Rocky Flats.
1994 The Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant is renamed the Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site.
1995 In the ongoing class-action lawsuit Cook v. Rockwell International, a U.S. district judge holds the DOE in contempt of court for failure to release millions of pages of documentation regarding missing plutonium, health issues, and other information about the plant. The DOE estimates that it would take seventy years and $36 billion to clean up Rocky Flats, and says that the technology to do an adequate cleanup may not exist. Also, the DOE, the EPA, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment sign the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement, which specifies cleanup levels for soils contaminated with radioactive materials at Rocky Flats. Local residents and scientists protest that the levels are too high.
1999 Shipments of transuranic (i.e., plutonium-laden) nuclear waste from Rocky Flats to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, begin.
2000 The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act is established to compensate nuclear industry workers whose health may have been harmed by workplace exposure to radioactive and chemical toxins. Due to missing and inaccurate records, many workers find it difficult to prove exposure.
2001 The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Act is signed into law. Kaiser-Hill LLC agrees to clean up the Rocky Flats site for an estimated cost of $7.3 billion and sets a target completion date of 2010.
2003 DOE, EPA, and CDPHE revise the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement, setting new cleanup levels for radioactive materials in the soil at the site.
2004 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announces that public recreation will be allowed at the proposed Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.