Authors: Kristen Iversen
His wife and his job were waiting when he returned. But after two years in Vietnam, Stan wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to Rocky Flats. He’d have to carry a gun and he felt a little jumpy. And he wasn’t naïve. He knew what they did at Rocky Flats. It was a bomb factory. Most employees didn’t want to think too much about that. No one used the word
bomb
. They had special words for the plutonium disks that rolled off the production line: triggers, pits, buttons. The bomb was called nothing more serious than a “device” or “gadget.” The workers were making the parts, not pulling the trigger.
Stan wasn’t the only one who felt uneasy. Like some of the old-timers who had been in the Navy and seen the nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, or served in the Army and experienced some of the atomic bomb tests in Nevada, employee Jim Kelly—who started working at the plant in 1958, and eventually presided over the union—knew right from the start what they did at the plant. He knew the destructive power of the bomb. It was terrifying. He and other workers reconciled themselves with the notion that when the “device” left the plant, it couldn’t explode. That was technically true, since the nuclear bombs from Rocky Flats were sent down to Amarillo, Texas, where they were packed into a nest of conventional explosives.
Jim admitted to himself that this argument was like somebody saying
he worked in a dynamite factory, but he didn’t make explosives because the blasting caps were made somewhere else. It was a way to deny what they were doing. It bothered him, but he kept it to himself. He didn’t talk to his family about it, and like others he tried to repress the enormity of what was going on.
Other workers had similar sentiments. Dr. Robert Rothe, a nuclear physicist who performed approximately 1,700 nuclear experiments—many of them extremely dangerous—at a laboratory at Rocky Flats, felt “
somewhat divorced from the actual nuclear weapon itself. In fact, I have hardly ever even seen any of the components for a nuclear weapon.”
As far as Stan Skinger was concerned, the world had lost its innocence when the first atomic bomb was dropped. He had been three years old when that happened. But he remembered. He remembered his parents talking about it. You couldn’t go back after something like that. It was a done deal. In a rational world, there would be no need for nuclear weapons. But human nature didn’t allow people to be rational, he felt. At least not all at the same time.
He gave it some thought and decided to go back to Rocky Flats after all. There he met a kindred spirit, a guard named Bill Dennison, and they became fast friends.
Bill Dennison is a big, soft-spoken man, fifteen years older than Stan. He, too, keeps his war experiences to himself, although his are from a different war. After ninth grade he dropped out of school, left home, and spent his teens working on ranches in Colorado and Wyoming. At seventeen he joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he served as a machine-gunner in an infantry company until, as he later described it, a mortar shell “blew him all over the field.” He was surprised to find himself still breathing. Of the 120 men in his unit, he was one of only 36 who survived. He and his buddies were trapped for three days without water before they crawled far enough to find a stream. They drank and got sick.
A few days later they reached a point upstream and realized the water was filled with rotting bodies.
Bill’s health was never the same.
When Bill returned to the states in 1951, he needed a job. His older
brother worked at Los Alamos, the laboratory in New Mexico that developed the first nuclear bomb. Los Alamos was a tight-knit, closed community—a company town, really—surrounded by a stunning landscape. Bill liked it. His brother told him to check out Rocky Flats. The pay was good and the work steady.
It turned out that Bill was old enough to fight for his country but too young to work for Rocky Flats. He had to wait a few months until he turned twenty-one and the government completed his background check. Finally, in August 1952, Bill became Rocky Flats employee number 972 and started work as a guard. It wasn’t long before he was offered a promotion to chemical operator—a worker on the production line in the hot zone—and the raise that went along with it. He took the job.
Bill knew the basics of radiation: you couldn’t feel it, you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t smell it, you couldn’t taste it. You wouldn’t know if you were exposed. But with enough exposure, you got sick. Too much exposure and you died. Like most employees, though, he wasn’t too worried. There was a lot of talk about safety. Given what he’d been through already, it seemed a relatively small risk.
But Bill didn’t last long as a chem op. He was surprised to discover that he didn’t have the nerve to work the glove-box line, holding plutonium semi-spheres the size of small half-grapefruits in his lead-lined gloves. Lingering health problems made it hard for him to stand for long hours, and it was a very tense business. Sometimes things went wrong.
Bill asked to be reassigned to guard duty.
He understands better than most the problems Rocky Flats has had with off-site contamination. “I work out there,” he tells people, “but I wouldn’t live out there.”
On this May day, the four men turn onto Indiana Street and reach the east entrance of the plant. Normally there’s a line of cars at the gate at shift change, but because of the holiday, it’s a short-shift day with minimum staffing. Bill glances up at the guard towers, where invisible figures watch over the six thousand acres of land bounded by strands of barbed-wire and No Trespassing signs. One might expect a top-secret
nuclear weaponry facility to look like something out of a James Bond film—a fortress of gleaming metal and glass—but Rocky Flats is a cluster of shabby gray concrete buildings with a distinct government feel. Every building has a number. Every employee has a number.
The men pull up to the gate, ready to show their badges even though the guard usually recognizes their faces. But this time the guard waves them down. “Hold on, you guys,” he says, his face tense.
Stan rolls down his window. “What’s up?” he asks.
“There’s a fire at the 771 complex.”
Stan turns to Bill in surprise. That’s the plutonium line.
“Better hurry,” the guard says. “It’s a bad one.”
O
N THIS
particular afternoon, Willie Warling isn’t thinking about work. He’s headed down to the local bar for a beer. Maybe two. It’s a beautiful day and he has the day off. He could use the relaxation. He’s got a stressful job.
Willie works in the 771 complex—the Hell Hole, people call it. Chain link and razor wire surround the heavily guarded two-story building half-buried in a rocky gulch.
It’s the core of the plant, where plutonium is molded and shaped before it’s sent to the Pantex facility in Texas to be put in bomb casings.
Willie didn’t start out working as a radiation monitor. He began at Rocky Flats as a janitor, worked a couple of years as a shop clerk, and then moved into what they called health physics. A radiation monitor’s job is to control contamination. Contamination on the surface of the skin can usually be scrubbed off, but if an alpha particle is inhaled or ingested, it lodges in the body and emits a high, localized dose of radiation.
Internal alpha emitters like plutonium are more harmful per unit dose than gamma or X-ray radiation. The damage is permanent and ongoing. The lungs are especially vulnerable. Plutonium can ignite spontaneously when exposed to air, and as it burns, it turns into a very fine dust, similar to rust. This dust consists of intensely radioactive particles that remain in the air for long periods and are easily inhaled. Even a single
particle of plutonium can lodge in the lungs and continuously expose the surrounding tissue. Cancer may result, although it can take years or even decades to manifest.
The weight of plutonium is measured in micrograms.
A single microgram—that is, one millionth of a gram of plutonium—is considered by the Department of Energy (DOE) to be a potentially lethal dose. A needle in a haystack, a dot on the head of a pin, a flea in a cathedral. In 1945 the AEC defined the “tolerance level” for nuclear workers exposed to plutonium as one microgram. In other words, by the time you’ve reached your tolerance level, you’ve received a potentially fatal dose.
Willie’s job is to make sure the plutonium stays put.
He suits up for work every day in a Halloween costume of sorts: full-face mask, cap, protective clothing, rubber gloves—sometimes two or three sets of rubber gloves—and often a tank of supplied air. He makes sure the other employees suit up correctly. He tests them before they go in to work on the glove boxes, and he tests them before they go home.
The work gets hot in more ways than one. Willie sweats beneath his uniform, especially when there’s been a spill and he has to stay on duty for hours without a break. Sometimes it takes two or three weeks to clean up just one spill. And it’s a never-ending story of cleaning one thing up and something else going wrong. A valve leaks, a glove box leaks, a pipe breaks.
Willie works at Rocky Flats for almost a year before he begins to understand what is coming off the assembly line. When he does understand, he never speaks to his wife about it. Or his three kids. He never speaks to anyone about it. It’s important work. He wants to protect the secrets of Rocky Flats, just like everyone else. National security is at stake.
But on this Mother’s Day, Willie isn’t thinking about work. He’s thinking about having a beer.
T
HE SPARK
in the glove box grows. The two utility operators on shift are busy attending to another area. The spark feeds on the steady supply of oxygen from the ventilation system and bursts into an intense flame. The
Plexiglas window on the glove box suddenly begins to burn, releasing hot, noxious gases. The lead-lined rubber gloves catch fire. The Benelex shielding—considered nonflammable—ignites. Fire fills the glove box and moves into the next in line. It snakes quickly, quietly through the linked glove-box lines of both Building 776 and Building 777.
At 2:27 p.m., a building heat detector finally triggers an alarm at the Rocky Flats fire station. Three firefighters are on duty: two men by the name of Skull and Sweet, and their captain, Wayne Jesser. A minute later, one of the utility operators returns to Building 776 and smells smoke. He is the first and only man to pull an alarm.
W
ILLIE
W
ARLING
is about to take a sip from his third beer of the afternoon when the bartender approaches. “Your wife is on the phone,” he says.
“What?”
“Your wife.” The bartender looks away.
Willie walks behind the register and picks up the receiver.
“Mom?” he asks. He can’t remember exactly when he started calling her that. It must have been somewhere along the line between all the kids.
“Something’s wrong,” she says. “You need to come home.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your manager called. They’re having a problem.”
He drives home. It could be anything. Things happen all the time.
His wife meets him at the door. “He said to call back right away,” she says. “Hurry.”
Willie calls. His supervisor’s voice is tense. “I need you to come in to work. We need you right now.”
“Well.” He pauses. This is a surprise. “I don’t know whether I should come out there.”
“Why is that?”
Willie clears his throat. “I should tell you I’ve had a couple of beers.”
“We need you now, Willie.”
He looks over to see if anyone is listening. “They always told us not
to go to work if we’ve had any beer, any alcohol or drugs or anything,” he says. “I don’t know if I should come in.”
“Listen, Willie,” says the supervisor. “We need you. You come on out here right now.”
“All right.” Willie hangs up the phone. “I’m going into work, Mom,” he says. “I should be home soon.” Suddenly he feels sober.
T
HE THREE
firemen jump into the fire truck and roar to the west side of the building. Sweet stays in the truck. Skull and Jesser climb into their protective suits, pull on their hard hats, strap on oxygen tanks, and head into the building. Dense black smoke fills the room. Flames shoot a foot and a half above the top of the glove-box line. The men can’t see well enough to move forward. They look down at their feet and try to follow the emergency evacuation markings painted on the floor, ducking to avoid the hot, glowing beads of lead dripping from the radiation shielding above.
They’ve been trained not to use water on plutonium. Each man grabs a canister of liquid carbon dioxide and together they try to shoot down the flames.
It doesn’t work. Jesser grabs two more CO
2
canisters off a second line and they try to shoot down the fire again. It has no effect.
The men hastily retreat to rethink their strategy. They burst through the doors into the fresh air and pull off their equipment. A couple more workers have arrived, and Skull and Jesser are checked for radiation.
They’re blazing hot.
“You can’t go back in there. You’re contaminated,” the radiation monitor shouts. Jesser can’t tell who’s behind the mask.
Is that Willie Warling?
he wonders.
“We’ve got to,” Jesser yells. He jerks off his mask.
“You’re hot, sir,” the radiation monitor yells. “Screaming hot. You’ve got plutonium all over you. Put that mask back on and don’t take it off again.” The monitor is breathing hard. He can feel the heat coming from inside the building, right through his coveralls, and he’s standing outside in the wind. He can’t imagine what it’s like inside. And there’s smoke,
black smoke, coming out of the stack of Building 776. Black smoke isn’t supposed to come out of those filters.
B
ILL AND
Stan arrive at the guard center at Building 21. The skeletal guard crew is in a state of panic. “A couple firefighters are down there,” a guard says. “And they’re hot. Already. They can’t go back in.”
“How big is this fire?” Stan asks.
“Can’t tell. Big.”
“Who’s in there?”
“Not sure. The first responders are hot—they went in to check it out and weren’t in full suits. The Health Physics guys won’t let them back in.”