Full Body Burden (46 page)

There’s a long pause, and then the word comes down. “Yes,” Paul says. “We’re bringing a line in now.”

The moments pass interminably. Finally a firefighter appears at the bottom of the stairs. They establish the line and the standpipe, and then snake the line into the glove-box room. Randy keeps pulling pieces of trash, radioactive and otherwise, out of the glove box, while the man behind him holds the water line. “Just knock it gently,” Randy says. “Put a little water on the burning charcoal. Real slow.” Suddenly he pulls out a plastic liter bottle. “That’s not good,” he mutters. Plastic liter bottles are used to store plutonium-laced liquids.

The water seems to be working. The two men are rapidly gulping air, going through one tank, then another. The room is intensely hot, the work physically and emotionally draining, and it’s taking longer than expected. Randy can’t read his partner’s face behind the mask, but he knows they’re both nearing exhaustion.

“We need another crew!” Randy yells into his radio. “We need someone to spell us. It’s getting pretty difficult in here.”

There’s no response. He’s not sure anyone’s heard him. Finally the new operations chief shows up in a face mask and regulator, with a fresh crew behind him. The entire firehouse crew, as a matter of fact. This is what firefighters call “dumping the house.”

By the time they arrive, though, the fire is essentially out.

Randy orders his exhausted crew out of the building, with instructions to fill their air tanks before they start up the stairs and head for decon. “We have a long way to hump out,” he shouts. “Top off your
tanks.” But they don’t listen. They just want out. As the two men head up the stairs, Randy hears the men’s personal air alarms go off. They’re anxious to get out and think they’ve got enough air to get up the stairs, or they want to leave more air for the new crew. “Crap,” Randy mutters. “It’s like herding cats.”

Nonetheless, he keeps going until he’s sure the fire’s out. He looks around the room. It’s a mess. Dry chem and water and God knows what. Visibility is still poor. But at least the fire is under control. The new crew can begin to clean things up. As a captain, Randy is always the first in and the last out, and now it’s time for him to get out. He takes pride in protecting his crew. He waits until his last guy is up the stairs, and then he begins the climb.

Abruptly his own air alarm goes off. He looks down at his air tank gauge. It’s red.

He keeps going. He reaches the top of the stairs and bursts out of the building, where a radiation monitor hands him a fresh respirator. He breathes deeply. A staging center for decontamination has been set up right in front of the building. They’re trying to keep everything contained. Randy’s crew is already getting scrubbed.

He’s told that most of his crew likely suffered not much more than alpha radiation. But his case is different. He was in that room for a long time, with all that dry chemical in the air. Plutonium and other contaminants bond to airborne material. And plutonium particles are microscopically small. It doesn’t take much to cause a problem. Even though he was wrapped up as tightly as possible, he’s got internal contamination.

He takes off his gear, peels off his clothes, and steps into the decontamination room wearing nothing but his boxers and a respirator. The radiation monitor passes a wand closely over his entire body.

“You’re pretty hot, sir.” The man steps back a little.

“How hot?”

“Your skin contamination is high. High, high, high.”

This is not good
, Randy thinks.
Definitely not good
. It’s a warm afternoon but he’s shivering.

The radiation monitor leaves and Randy hears voices in the other room. A doctor emerges. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We can’t do you here, Captain. Your counts are too high to decon you here.” Only basic decontamination could be done at the site of the fire. He’ll have to be taken up to the decon room at the medical building, a special trailer for decontamination consisting of one big room with three separate chambers behind glass doors. The room is filtered, with a shower and a cot in case a contaminated employee has to spend the night.

Randy shivers and waits. Some of the men from his own crew, freshly scrubbed and decontaminated, come into the room. They truss him up in tiebacks, pull gloves on his hands, and tape him up so that no part of his body is exposed. He is isolated and quarantined within his own skin. The mood is somber and no one speaks. An ambulance pulls up. They put him on a gurney, roll him into the back, and drive him, red lights flashing, to the medical building.

Once again Randy is stripped down, but this time all he gets to keep is the respirator. A special medical team shows up, a team with long experience working with contaminated people in Building 771. A doctor stands by with a DTPA syringe, which Randy and his co-workers know as “the big honking needle.” DTPA, or diethylene triamine pentacetic acid, is a chelating agent that isolates internal contamination from radioactive materials—plutonium, americium, or curium—and binds with the radioactive material or poison and then passes it from the body in urine. DTPA can’t reverse health effects caused by the radioactive material, but it helps decrease the amount of time it takes the radioactive poison to leave the body. He gets scrubbed from head to toe with a bleach solution until he feels raw all over. The radiation monitor checks him again. He’s still hot. Screaming hot, especially around the belly, from having leaned repeatedly into the glove-box door.

They scrub, check, scrub, check, scrub, check. This goes on for nearly three hours. Randy hears the doctors talking about his radiation counts in the other room. Then they come in again and scrub him some more.

There’s talk about whether or not his entire body should be shaved.
Hair can sometimes be a trap for radioactive particles. “At least I’m a Cherokee,” Randy jokes. “Not much body hair.”

He escapes being shaved. Finally they stop scrubbing. But it’s not over yet. Now they begin to try to measure internal contamination more specifically and determine how much soluble plutonium is passing through Randy’s body. Insoluble deposits in lymph nodes, the liver, or the bone—plutonium that stays in the body—are very difficult to measure or detect. Randy gets a nasal swipe and lung count, then has to provide fecal and urine samples.

When Randy finally gets back to the fire station, it’s past dinnertime. He calls his wife. It’s been a long day, and it will be a few more hours before they’ll let him go home. He worries, as always, whether or not he’s bringing any radioactivity home with him.

The tests for internal contamination will go on for weeks and months, and he’ll need to bring in fecal samples regularly. The other guys joke with him about it. “You get to do the Cool Whip container thing!”

“Yeah,” he says. It’s like being a member of a special Rocky Flats club. He thinks back to how the day began, with the warm morning sun and a breakfast burrito. “This turned into a whole full-blown thing, didn’t it? A damn big deal.”

Later, when he’s interviewed by DOE officials, Randy learns that the glove box he’d been leaning into was a guillotine box, poised to mechanically spring and sever anything that intruded—a hand, an arm, or a head. Why hadn’t it operated properly? No one seems to know. Why wasn’t he informed? Apparently the workers were panicked trying to control the fire.

“That disturbs me,” he remarks to Paul. He tries not to think about it.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
19, 2005, Tamara Smith Meza returns from church with her husband and is talking on the phone with a friend. She’s had to cut back on her teaching, of course, but at her last checkup her doctor gave her a clean bill of health. Three years have passed since the brain tumor. Both she and her husband are relieved.

Suddenly a sharp, searing pain shoots through her head. Tamara
gasps. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she says to her friend, “but my head hurts so bad I think I better go. I gotta go.” She hangs up the phone. “David!” she yells. “David!” He rushes into the room to find her kneeling on the living room floor, touching her head and then looking at her hands as if she were looking for blood on her fingers. She begins to cry, and then vomits. “I can’t feel my left side!” she cries, and then passes out.

David picks her up and lays her on the couch. He calls 911. He hangs up the phone and sees that Tamara has stopped breathing. He can’t see any vital signs. He clears her airway and starts doing CPR, and continues until the ambulance arrives.

The tumor has returned. Tamara has surgery again. This time the side effects are more severe: she has trouble with walking, balance, and memory. But she recovers.

Four months later, a third brain tumor appears. The first tumor grew in the memory region of her brain, the second in the speech and language section, and the new tumor is in the cavity left by the removal of the first tumor.

Tamara Smith Meza’s surgeries and health problems make it impossible for her to continue teaching. She and her husband return to Colorado and buy a house just a few minutes away from the house she grew up in, where her parents still live.

Sometimes people ask her if she thinks Rocky Flats might have affected her health or caused her condition. She doesn’t think too much about it. She’s focused on her treatments, on her diet, on her relationship with her family and with God. But Tamara’s husband, David, does think about whether Rocky Flats might have had something to do with it. There’s no way to prove it, of course. It’s all invisible, unseen, unverifiable.

Silence is an easy habit. But it doesn’t come naturally. Silence has to be cultivated, enforced by implication and innuendo, looks and glances, hints of dark consequence. Silence is greedy. It insists upon its own necessity. It transcends generations.

Silence is almost always well-intentioned. What parent hasn’t scolded their child?
We don’t talk about things like that. Just look the other way. Keep your thoughts to yourself. This is just for our family to know. You can forget this ever happened. Let’s not upset anyone. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all
.

The cost of silence and the secrets it contains is high, but you don’t learn the price until later. Secrets depend upon the smooth façade of silence, on the calm flat water that hides the darker depths.

I
N THE
weeks and months that follow my surgery, I try to forget about Rocky Flats. My symptoms come and go, and I continue to see various physicians. When I mention to one doctor that I grew up near Rocky Flats and briefly worked at the plant, and I wonder if there might be a
connection of some kind, he laughs. “You can’t worry about things like that,” he says.

And it isn’t cancer, after all. I should feel relieved.

What does it matter, anyway, where my symptoms come from? It could be anything. Allergies, viruses, flu, exhaustion, bad weather, a bad day at the office. Maybe it’s all in my imagination. The uncertainty is frustrating.

But my siblings share many of my symptoms. And it’s still there, the lingering feeling that this chapter wasn’t supposed to be part of my story, or my family’s story, or anyone’s story. Governments aren’t supposed to poison their own people.

We weren’t supposed to know about Rocky Flats during the production years, and now we are supposed to forget it ever existed.

O
NE DAY
, not long after I quit my job at the plant, I’m having lunch with a friend when she mentions a woman named Ann White. “You’d like her,” she says. “And she knows a lot about Rocky Flats.”

Ann White turns out to be a very energetic woman with gray hair and a quick smile. And she does know a lot about the plant. She’s long been involved with citizen groups that are concerned about ongoing contamination issues at Rocky Flats, and she tells me how she was arrested for protesting.

“They say they’re going to clean it up,” she says. “Cheap.”

When I worked at Rocky Flats, the DOE projected that it would take until 2065—nearly one hundred years from when my family moved to Bridledale—and more than $36 billion to clean up the nuclear waste. There was a question of whether they even had the technology to clean it up, and some non-DOE scientists talked about making the Rocky Flats site a “national sacrifice zone,” completely closed off to the public.

She told me how in 1996, the year after I quit Rocky Flats, Mark Silverman, the DOE manager at Rocky Flats—whose voice I had known well from the crackling loudspeakers over my head at work—had acknowledged to her and a group of citizens that Rocky Flats was facing a crisis. Tons of plutonium were unsafely stored in proximity to more
than two million residents. He talked about an Accelerated Site Action Plan (ASAP) that would include a 130-acre cement cap over the high-security, highly contaminated processing areas. By 2010, he said, most of the major buildings would be demolished and plutonium would be consolidated and sealed behind thick layers of concrete.

“They’re just going to cover it up?” I ask.

“Apparently so,” Ann replies. “Parts of it, anyway.”

“By 2010?”