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‘How Many More Workers Have to Die?’ |
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The war may have been “cold” but the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant that made atomic bombs for America’s nuclear arsenal was “hot”—with radiation that now, years after it was shut down, has killed and is killing former workers who have developed a wide range of cancers, according to the United Steelworkers (USW).
This week, a federal board, created specifically to help former workers in the nuclear weapons industry, denied some 3,000 former Rocky Flats workers and USW members immediate medical care and compensation. Instead, the workers will be forced to go through a time-consuming (742 days, on average), case-by-case process some estimate will cost the lives of one in 10 workers before compensation is approved.
After the board’s 6–4 ruling June 12, USW District 12 director Terry Bonds asks:
How many more workers have to die?
The USW petitioned the federal Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health for special status—known as “special exposure cohort” status for the 3,000 workers who say the daily radiation doses they received at Rocky Flats and through accidents and spills are the cause of their cancers. That designation would allow the stricken workers to bypass the long case-by-case process.
Says former Rocky Flats worker Jennifer Thompson:
This is heartbreaking for the people who are sick. The whole reason we did this is they didn’t have to go through thus grueling process.
The plant, which operated from 1952 until 1989, had a troubled safety history, including a 1969 fire that involved 7,000 pounds of plutonium. In 1989 the FBI raided the plant amid charge that the plant operator—Rockwell International—had discharged chemicals into creeks that ran into water supplies, burned toxic waste and failed to monitor ground water around the plant. Rockwell was fined $18.5 million.
Many of the radiation badges, designed to record workers’ exposure, are missing, and workers say the remaining records do not accurately reflect the high levels of radiation to which they were exposed.
But the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) says it doesn’t matter. The agency claims it can accurately estimate the decades-old exposure of each worker and then determine if their cancers were caused by workplace exposure. Says Bonds:
It is an outrage that six of the advisory board members decided to believe the faulty, insufficient and incomplete data NIOSH uncovered, over workers’ experiences of what actually happened at that plant. These workers told the truth behind those faulty numbers and they were ignored.
The science behind these dose reconstructions is imprecise. How many more workers have to die before NIOSH is 100 percent certain their cancers and illnesses were caused by their on-the-job exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals?
Workers told the board about their exposure. Time describes their testimony.
They told of missing and inaccurate records, of being warned by their managers that their radiation exposure levels were too high, and so their radiation detection badges were quietly put away in office drawers so they wouldn’t lose their jobs or be transferred to lower-paying positions.
They told of seeing an orange cloud surrounding a building following an accident; of routine radioactive material spills where everyone would “bail” from a building and then have to return to mop things up. They told of 55-gallon drums of vile materials exploding and an individual who single-handedly entered a room wearing just a face mask to turn off a valve where radioactive material was spewing forth, suffering burns on both of his arms.
USW President Leo Gerard says the workers and the union will appeal the decision and Congress should step in to
resolve this lack of compensation and medical care for sick nuclear workers.
Our union is prepared to get justice for these nuclear workers who sacrificed their lives for our national security.
It is certain that many of the cancer-stricken workers will die before the appeal is heard or before their individual cases are decided. It is unlikely their families will take much comfort in words of advisory board chairman Dr. Paul Ziemer. He says that even if a worker dies before his or her case is decided, “their estate can still be compensated.”
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This is extremely sad and is another indication of how the federal government and courts have once again failed working people. A friend of mine, healthy, extremely fit and young of age, now has five different forms of cancer all over his body after having worked for two years at Yucca Mountain.