Full Body Burden (17 page)

Later, in a whispered conversation with Karma, I learn that Adam is not alone in his experience.
Karma’s had a crush, too, on Scott, a tall, blue-eyed, athletic boy at school. She’s been too shy about it to tell me or Karin. Scott, too, has testicular cancer. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says. “He would die if anyone knew.”

A few years down the road, in 1981, a scientist by the name of Dr.
Carl Johnson will publish a study on high cancer rates in three exposed areas around Rocky Flats, including our neighborhood. “The remarkably higher incidence of cancer of the testis in the three exposed areas merits special attention,” he’ll report. “One possible explanation is the demonstrated propensity of plutonium to concentrate in the gonads.”

But no one will believe him.

D
OW
C
HEMICAL
and the AEC don’t bother doing water samples before releasing a statement that the Rocky Flats plant has no source that could possibly account for tritium contamination.
The Colorado Health Department tests the water again and confirms that radioactive tritium, released from Rocky Flats between April 1969 and September 1974, has entered Walnut Creek and flowed into Great Western Reservoir, the primary water supply for the city of Broomfield. The Environmental Protection Agency—which had just been established in 1970—confirms the sharp increase in tritium levels. Tritium emits low-level radioactivity and passes through the body over a period of days or months, but if left in the water supply it continues to be replaced in the body, which can lead to health problems. Nearby families are asked for urine samples, including a couple with a new baby.
Several residents, including the new mother and baby, test high for tritium—seven times higher than what officials consider to be “normal”—but the woman’s husband, oddly, tests negative. Officials are stumped until the man admits he drinks a six-pack of Coors every night when he comes home from work and never drinks water at home.

AEC officials are slow to acknowledge that the tritium leak has occurred, and when they finally do, months after the initial discovery,
residents are told by state officials that the tritium levels are far below what might be “judged to be harmful.” Dr. Ed Martell once again disagrees. Broomfield’s water reservoir tests at 23,000 picocuries of tritium per liter of water, and the AEC itself considers normal background radiation in Colorado to be approximately 1,200 picocuries per liter.

Even the latter number, Martell claims, is unsafe. Radiation is measured in curies, which quantify its rate of decay or disintegration. A picocurie
is one-trillionth of a curie.
Scientists estimate that 50 to 100 curies of tritium, or 50 to 100 trillion picocuries, eventually reach Great Western Reservoir.

Rocky Flats maintains there is no threat to residents, and current and past discharges of radioactive material are in “very low quantities.”
The Environmental Protection Agency sidesteps the controversy by concluding that the public health impact of these radiation doses is “considered to be minimal based on established criteria.”

Laverne Abraham, a resident of Broomfield, isn’t taking any chances. Every Monday morning, two five-gallon jugs of bottled water are delivered to the Abrahams’ front porch. Laverne doesn’t want her family, including her six-year-old daughter, Jennifer, to have one sip from Broomfield’s “plutonium-lined” reservoir, never mind tritium. Plutonium is heavier than water, and residents are told that the plutonium in the reservoir is harmless as long as it remains where it is—at the bottom of the lake. Rocky Flats officials stress that plutonium in Great Western Reservoir and Standley Lake will stabilize into lake sediment and not create a hazard. Plutonium, residents are told, isn’t dangerous unless it’s inhaled into the lungs. But Laverne is concerned that even the tiniest amount of plutonium could cause cancer, whether it’s ingested or inhaled. “They keep saying it isn’t dangerous,” she says to a reporter as she shops for groceries with her daughter. “Well, even if it was, I don’t think they’d tell us.
We won’t drink the water here until we get a new reservoir.”

But where did the tritium come from? Had there been a criticality at Rocky Flats?
Rocky Flats officials explain that the tritium is not their fault; it was apparently brought on-site via scrap material shipped to the plant from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.

The tritium incident is a public relations nightmare.
A storm of publicity eventually forces the plant to reveal that over a period of seventeen years, hundreds of tons of contaminated material were buried in seven trenches and at five other sites at the plant. The mixed waste included asphalt, soil, sewage, and radioactive materials including plutonium and uranium. Rocky Flats officials insist that the buried wastes pose “no hazard.” Tests by the Colorado Department of Health will later
confirm that plutonium, americium, and strontium-90, a by-product of a nuclear explosion, exist in areas off-site. Strontium causes particular concern, as it can be readily absorbed in the body and deposits in the bones of humans and animals.
The presence of strontium strengthens the suspicion that a criticality occurred, perhaps during the 1957 fire.

Al Hazle, who’s worked with the Colorado Department of Health for years, is beginning to feel like a detective.
As an aside to Broomfield’s worried city manager, he jokes that “Broomfield has its mouth over the plant’s anus.” That’s just the way it is, he says. There’s a direct connection.

H
AZARDOUS OR
not, Rocky Flats is a boon to the Denver economy. In 1972, Rocky Flats employs 3,700 people working in three shifts, seven days a week. Plutonium triggers are rolling off the assembly line. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars are being pumped into local communities through salaries and commercial contracts. Real estate is booming. Jefferson County, which includes Rocky Flats, is the county with the second-highest population in Colorado and is growing fast. In 1973 the Health Department of Jefferson County needs a new director.

Carl Johnson didn’t get an easy start in life. Diagnosed with tuberculosis at age twelve, he changed his diet and began a strict weightlifting regimen to work himself back to health. In 1946 he joined the army, and after serving three years, he decided to go to medical school. An epidemiologist and radiation specialist, he was hired at the University of Colorado as an associate clinical professor, and in the fall of 1973 Johnson is appointed director of the Health Department of Jefferson County.

Johnson is familiar with some of the problems at Rocky Flats. Still, it’s a surprise when a newspaper article crosses his desk revealing that yet another radioactive element is quietly in use at the plant: curium, which is three hundred times more toxic than plutonium.
Al Hazle notes in the article that “curium is hazardous, and when they have significant amounts of it at Rocky Flats, we would like to know about it. We’re kind of upset when we find out about things [in the newspaper], without the plant letting us know.”

One day Johnson is approached by the Jefferson County commissioners,
who seek his approval for a new housing development about to break ground just three miles from Rocky Flats, expected to house approximately ten thousand new residents. Johnson checks the state’s radiation surveys and discovers the land is contaminated with plutonium. He’s shocked that anyone would want to build houses on contaminated land, but he proceeds cautiously. He tells the county commissioners that further study must be done before any development begins, and he gains their approval to go ahead with a study to be conducted by himself and soil scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, working with scientists from the Colorado Department of Health and the Colorado School of Mines.
The study will measure levels of radioactivity in breathable dust on the surface of the soil.

The results are worse than he anticipated. Tests show plutonium concentrations forty-four times greater than what had been measured at the same locations by the Colorado Department of Health method of sampling whole soil, not surface dust.
Several of the readings exceed earlier ones by one hundred times or more, one by a remarkable 285 times.
The readings are much higher than what Martell and the CCEI found in their study.

Further, he takes issue with the state standard for soil contaminated with plutonium (two disintegrations per minute per gram of soil), which does not take into consideration the size of particles that can be suspended in the air and inhaled into the lungs. Developers typically plow contaminated soil beneath the surface, and while this may bury the soil, it also creates breathable dust. Studies show that concentrations of plutonium are much higher in dust than in soil and that the particles are easily carried and dispersed by wind.
Johnson feels this creates a potential hazard for children playing outdoors and that, even for adults, ordinary activities like gardening could be risky.

Johnson presents the results to the local planning board. The board vetoes the proposed development.
It’s decided that no more subdivisions will be approved near Rocky Flats until further studies are done.

The response from Rocky Flats—and local homebuilders—is swift. In an interview with the
New York Times
the following day, Dr. Robert
Yoder, in charge of safety at Rocky Flats, states that Dr. Johnson’s plutonium sampling techniques are questionable and that he has vastly overstated the amount of plutonium in the soil. “We don’t think he’s shown an increased hazard,” Yoder says. “He is just measuring it [plutonium] differently.”

Harold Anderson, chairman of the Jefferson County commissioners who originally approved the housing subdivision, sides with local home builders and believes there is no hard evidence that the plant is a hazard. “If
it were,” he says, “I’d be the first to get it moved.”

Others aren’t so sure. Local rancher Marcus Church owns some of the land for the proposed development. Ranching is the family business. His family homesteaded the land, bringing the first Hereford cattle to Colorado in 1869. They grew hay, raised cattle, and gradually expanded their landholdings. Church’s Crossing was a popular stop on the Overland Stage Route for bullwhackers and stagecoaches on the two-day ride between Denver and Boulder.

Marcus Church’s nephew, Charlie McKay, wants to be a rancher like his uncle and the two generations that came before him. The family feels deeply connected to the land. Charlie’s been coming to the family ranch at Rocky Flats since he was two, spending summers riding out to Standley Lake to count calves and check fences.

In 1951, when Charlie was nine, the federal government approached the Church family to buy roughly 1,400 acres of their land at Rocky Flats, along with land owned by two other families. Only the price was negotiable: the federal government can take private land for roads, dams, or national security through eminent domain. Landowners were originally offered eighteen dollars an acre and refused the price. Four years later the government agreed to fifty-six dollars an acre. Marcus Church wasn’t happy with the price, and a deal was reached only when the government threatened to condemn the property.

The government moved in with guards and fences, and Marcus fought to maintain access to the irrigation and mineral rights he still owned. He grew accustomed to throwing hay to his cattle under the close scrutiny of armed guards with binoculars.

Marcus knew little about what went on inside Rocky Flats. But as the years went by and information about the plant’s rumored activities began to surface in the media, he started to worry about the value of his property. The family had big plans for eventual development of homes, business parks, and a shopping mall, but after reports of plutonium in the soil and no clear determination of how much plutonium was “safe,” Marcus could no longer get building permits. Charlie watched as his uncle grew increasingly frustrated.

In 1973, Marcus Church decides to sue the government. He contacts the head of a local law firm, who puts a young attorney, Howard Holme, on the
case. “It’s really gone too far here,” Marcus tells Howard.

Church family members aren’t the only ones who are unhappy. Builders and developers are angry about falling land values. The city of Broomfield wants the AEC to divert Walnut Creek, which is contaminating the city drinking water with tritium, and wants a new wastewater reprocessing plant to keep radioactive material out of the city water supply.

The same year Church files his lawsuit for property contamination, Dow Chemical awards its employees cash rewards in recognition of “superior performance in safety, environmental control, production and energy use reduction.” Soon, however, the situation changes. Dow Chemical has been the AEC’s contractor at Rocky Flats for twenty-two years. To the early employees of Rocky Flats, the corporation was known fondly as “Mother Dow.” To the early activists, Dow Chemical was known not only as the producer of plutonium detonators, but as the manufacturer of napalm during the Vietnam War. But Dow has grown tired of ongoing accidents, leaks, protests, media scrutiny, and its relationship to the AEC. And its reputation in Washington is suffering. Employee Jim Kelly, now president of the Steelworkers Union at Rocky Flats, tells a congressional committee that Dow is not operating the facility safely. The company decides not to renew its contract, and the AEC requests bids from private contractors for a new company to run the plant.

Dr. Carl Johnson finds himself facing a growing storm.