Authors: Kristen Iversen
Ultimately the suit is settled out of court for about $9 million in favor of McKay and the other landowners for about two thousand acres of contaminated land. Other details of the settlement are not released. Under the terms of the settlement, all confidential documents received during discovery are returned to the DOE. This effectively seals off information about contamination from use by journalists, scientists, or concerned citizens. Hundreds of contested acres will remain “open space and recreation,” where residents can hike or bike. In other areas, residential development will continue as long as homebuilders take remedial measures such as plowing contaminated soil below the surface level before laying the foundation for a house—an act that in itself can redistribute plutonium into the air and does not take into consideration movement of soil by weather, burrowing animals, or other forces and conditions.
Under the settlement agreement, the state of Colorado agrees to
provide the McKay family with a certificate attesting that levels of plutonium and americium in their land are at or below the state standard of two disintegrations per minute per gram of dry soil. Charles McKay, the nephew of Marcus Church, is pleased with the result. The settlement allows development to continue on land with levels of contamination five times higher than what Johnson and others consider safe, and it also eliminates further controversy for the DOE by sealing the records. “
The purpose for the lawsuit was to get our land back,” McKay says. “Our basic intention was to have the federal judge bless the land.”
Even without the pulpit of his job, Carl Johnson doesn’t let up. “Radiation is sneaky,” he says to the press. Cancer and leukemia can take years to show up.
In fact, he reminds the press, in 1984 the DOE prepared a point-by-point response that confirmed most of the data in the Howard Holme and Stephen Chinn report, demonstrating a likely connection between contamination and illness.
Further, Johnson notes, the court system is flawed. “The burden of proof is on the victim, not the defendants. I think the nuclear industry has traded on that fact. Officials have permitted excessive plutonium exposures knowing that they will be through with their careers and retired before the evidence is apparent.”
T
HE CHORUS
of people calling for relocation of the plant grows. Representative Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) is very vocal about moving Rocky Flats away from Denver for public health and civil defense reasons. Other politicians agree. The Colorado Medical Society unanimously calls for the removal of plutonium operations at Rocky Flats.
The group Physicians for Social Responsibility calls Rocky Flats a “creeping Chernobyl.” The DOE, on the other hand, is pressing for expansion of the plant, based on production quotas and waste storage requirements, but even the governor—who seems to have been reluctantly convinced of the necessity of weapons production—is opposed to that.
Under political pressure, the DOE agrees to do a study on the future of Rocky Flats, focusing primarily on worker safety and upgrading facilities.
Pat Schroeder insists the study be conducted by independent experts. “I have yet to see an agency study itself and turn itself in,” she says.
Indeed, rather than focus on risk and potential health effects, the results of the DOE study emphasize the economic loss Denver would suffer if Rocky Flats were relocated.
Moving plutonium operations would result in a loss of 3,500 jobs and a payroll of more than $40 million, and moving the entire plant would mean a loss to the general Denver metro area of six thousand jobs and millions of dollars. Colorado fears the bomb, but can’t live without it.
If Denver wants to keep Rocky Flats for economic reasons, then perhaps the best thing is to give people a good emergency warning system. But the Radiological Emergency Response Plan continues to be locked in debate.
Officials can’t agree on what type of accident could actually occur and, if something does happen, what they should tell people to do. Should evacuation centers be established? If so, officials argue, should people be able to bring their pets? The proposed plan begins by stating that “the actual danger posed by the plant is very small,” but in the event of a radioactive emergency, residents will be instructed to remain indoors, close all windows and doors, and turn off circulation systems. People who have been outdoors will be told to take a shower and change clothes. There are no instructions for full-scale evacuation.
Dr. Carl Johnson, who has filed an appeal in his lawsuit against the county board of health, feels that the response plan is completely inadequate. A radioactive plume, he says, is similar to a dust storm, and plutonium is likely to lodge in windowsills, bricks, and cracks in wood. “It’s not just a matter of a sort of gaseous cloud passing overhead that will soon dissipate,” he says. “We’re talking about particles that drop to the ground and remain dangerously radioactive.… Even getting in a car and rolling up the windows may be safer than staying indoors.” He also believes the government’s levels for acceptable plutonium dose exposures are far too high and would result in a rise in radiation-related cancer and spontaneous abortions.
Felix Owen, director of information services for Rockwell, says there is no reason for anyone living around Rocky Flats to fear for their health. Not only is an accident very unlikely, he says, but small amounts of plutonium have only “negligible” effects on human health. “I personally feel
low-level radiation is overemphasized,” he says. “We live in a sea of radiation. Man has built an immunity to it. The human body is already developing defense mechanisms against it.”
However, Johnson states, “Very little of Colorado’s normal background radiation comes from alpha-emitting plutonium. People in this state are just not usually exposed to inhaling alpha-radiating particles unless they live around a facility like Rocky Flats. Low-level radiation from internal sources is particularly dangerous; we certainly have no natural immunity to it.” The emergency plan, he feels, should be based on the premise that all of Denver might have to be evacuated should a radiological accident occur.
The plan never moves beyond the drafting stage and is never fully tested, due largely to lack of support from Rocky Flats.
Niels Schonbeck, the biochemistry professor and member of the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, later notes, “My impression is that the public is without a clue as to what they would do in the face of an accident at Rocky Flats.… [To implement an effective emergency response plan] would alarm an otherwise uninformed public.” The government stance seems to be that educating the public about what to do in the event of an actual radioactive emergency would only result in panic and confusion.
Rocky Flats continues to grow in order to meet production quotas. Back in March 1980, officials announced the completion of Building 371, a $215 million plutonium processing building intended to replace Building 771, the site of the 1957 fire. Designed to last twenty-five years, Building 771 is now thirty years old and, in the words of General Edward Giller of the AEC just after the fire in 1969, is an “old, outmoded, and increasingly hazardous operation” that must be replaced. “The present facility,” he said, “is deteriorating due to the severely corrosive atmosphere inside the glove box lines.… The corrosion causes equipment and glove boxes to fail, resulting in spills or leaks of contaminated materials into the working areas.” Nearly a decade has passed since then, with 771 still in full swing.
Manager Jack Weaver is assigned to oversee the new Building 371.
There are problems, though. In Building 771, everything is on one floor. Building 371 is three floors and contains seventy-seven miles of pipes for processing plutonium, from the ground floor to the basement and sub-basement. During construction, Weaver and his crew find cracks in the concrete walls and other problems.
Building 371, despite the best efforts of Jack Weaver’s crew, never quite works right. Equipment and filters malfunction. Plutonium is lost in the system. In Weaver’s first inventory of the facility in April 1983, he reports that 25 percent of the plutonium in the facility is snagged in the piping or ducts. Building 771, on the other hand, is unable to account for only 2 to 3 percent of its plutonium, according to its twice-yearly inventories.
Two years after Building 371 begins operations, Rockwell shuts it down for safety and security reasons. It never reopens.
Full production resumes in Building 771, now referred to by the media as “the most dangerous building in America.”
In March 1982, Bruce Shepard, a Colorado Springs developer and administrator at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), recommends abolishing the Rocky Flats Advisory Notice, which has been in effect since 1979. The notice required that homeowners within a ten-mile radius of the plant be informed of plutonium contamination and emergency response procedures before buying a home with FHA mortgage insurance or any other HUD assistance. Other local developers support his efforts, believing that it has had a negative effect on property values and home sales.
HUD lifts the requirement. Someone buying a home in Bridledale will no longer have to sign a piece of paper as my parents did. The developers involved in rescinding the Advisory Notice have invested in at least two housing developments near Rocky Flats.
M
Y MOTHER
reluctantly puts our house on the market. A real estate agent in bright lipstick and pantyhose appears and puts a sign at the end of the driveway. “I don’t know where we’ll go,” my mother says, “but at
least I won’t have this house hanging around my neck anymore.” She stays inside and rarely answers the phone. She sits at the dining room table, lighting one cigarette after the other, gazing out the front picture window.
But the house doesn’t sell. Month after month it sits on the market and no one comes to look. We paint the fence and have the curtains cleaned. Even the animals are on their best behavior. No one calls.
“It’s Rocky Flats,” says the real estate agent. “People are nervous to buy in this neighborhood.”
“Nonsense,” my mother snorts. It’s just family luck, she’s sure. Or the blundering real estate agent. “Your dad always said not to trust women agents,” my mother muses as the agent click-clacks in her high heels down the driveway to her car. “Maybe I should have believed him.”
The neighborhood is changing. Everyone’s gone: the packs of kids who swam in the lake and irrigation ditches, who ice-skated on the pond and galloped their horses around the perimeter of Bridledale and Meadowgate, who roared their minibikes up and down the street—all are off to college or vo-tech school or working at the supermarket or waitressing. Randy Sullivan is working as a bouncer in a bar. Even the turkey farm is gone, the land turned into open space as part of a legal settlement.
Karma knows she will leave home. She packs a duffel bag and asks Mom to drive her and her friend Laurie out to the freeway. Our mother slides behind the wheel of our old green station wagon with her usual fortitude and grace. She doesn’t have a second thought about allowing her youngest daughter to hit the road. Just as she put us out the back door and didn’t allow us to come back until dusk when we were small, she expects each of us to stand on our own.
The girls throw their bags in the back and count the dollars between them. When they reach I-70, Mom pulls over to the side of the road. The girls get out, swing their duffel bags over their shoulders, and Karma reaches into her pocket for a quarter. “Tails, east, heads, west,” she says. She flips the coin into the air and catches it in her palm.
“Heads,” Laurie says. “West.”
“West it is,” Karma agrees.
Mom turns the car around and waves as the girls trudge up to the shoulder of the highway to catch a passing truck. In an instant, Karma is gone.
My life feels rudderless. I’m grasping at straws, looking for an invisible god.
I meet a boy named Andrew at the university and he stops by the English department, gets my class schedule, and waits for me after my Chaucer class. Six months later, while we’re driving down a Boulder street in my red VW bug, he proposes. I choose a wedding dress off the rack at the mall and there’s hardly enough time to send out invitations. The ceremony takes place at a small community church in Boulder, and the reception is held at our tiny duplex with our two cats locked in the bathroom. My new husband and I are barely old enough to drink the champagne at our own wedding.
In December 1983, our house finally sells at a bargain-basement price. The house my parents designed and built, filled with Scandinavian knickknacks and secondhand Italian furniture, leaky pipes, and a flea-bitten bear rug, the house weathered by a steady torrent of found cats, wayward dogs, mean Shetland ponies, fast-reproducing hamsters, hardy mice, parakeets always making a break for it, and a goat just passing through, is gone. The horses are sold or given away. My mother leases a small apartment in Arvada and packs up as many boxes as she can fit into one of the bedrooms. Most things she has to sell or give to the thrift store. She and my brother take one pet with them, a grumpy gray cat named Colby. The apartment feels cramped and dark, with orange carpet and an avocado kitchen. My mother works full-time and takes night classes to become a hospice nurse while Kurt finishes high school. Two weeks before graduation, Kurt is suspended from school for a senior prank that earns the respect of all his friends. He and his buddies paint brightly colored polka dots on the “temporaries”—the long wooden trailers parked behind the school building to accommodate overflow students, trailers that became permanent long ago. In a final salute, the
boys ring the flagpole in front of the school with radial tires. When the security guard catches them, Kurt’s friends run, leaving him suspended on top of the pole.
The principal threatens to deny graduation and hold him back. Our mother vigorously defends him. It’s decided that Kurt will graduate, but can’t attend the graduation ceremony.
That’s all right with Kurt. On graduation day he crawls up into the heating duct above the gym and scoots across the ceiling on his belly. When the ceremony begins, he lights small firecrackers and drops them on his unsuspecting compatriots in crime as they walk across the stage.