Full Body Burden (35 page)

Sanchini is reluctant to let agents into his office to go through his files. He tells them that he’s seen notices of noncompliance from regulatory agencies, but they were minor and quickly corrected. Problems got solved, he says, if the DOE wanted to pay for them.

It’s a long day, but at the end of it, Lipsky is pleased. The raid will require more long days of investigation, sampling, and interviews with employees—eighteen days, as a matter of fact. But the hard part, Lipsky thinks, will be finding someone who’s willing to open up about what’s actually going on behind the scenes at Rocky Flats without fear of retaliation. Already it’s become apparent that few employees are willing to talk to the FBI. There is a strong sense of collegiality among workers and they’ve observed a code of silence for years.

J
ACQUE
B
REVER
started working in the cafeteria in 1982, when she was divorced with a kid and putting herself through school. Like Debby Clark and many other Rocky Flats employees, she’d heard that Rocky Flats paid well. She’d been taking art classes, but soon after she started in the cafeteria, Jacque added a few math and physics classes so she could qualify to become a chemical operator and work with plutonium, where the real money was made.

When she qualified, she was immediately assigned to Building 771.

Jacque didn’t know much about the facility, and she knew very little about nuclear weapons. All she really cared about was that she had a daughter to raise on her own, and she was about to make more money than she’d ever thought possible. Production at Rocky Flats was at an all-time high.

Her first day in Building 771 was a shock. She’d expected a tidy lab with flasks and vials and workers in lab smocks, but the building was forbidding, the equipment looked old, and the room where she was to work was crowded with glove boxes and piping.
It felt like a factory. “Oh, my goodness, what have I gotten myself into?” she thought.

There were other challenges too. She was one of the first women hired to work in Building 771—or any of the hot areas—and some of the men made it tough for her. She learned to cuss and talk back and hold her ground. But there was also a strong sense of camaraderie and bravado that she liked. Practical jokes were common. Other workers talked about Flats employees as being one big happy family, but she considered it to be one big family “working through denial.” The work was dangerous and everyone knew it, but no one talked about it. You couldn’t work in that kind of environment if you thought too much about the potential consequences.

Most of all, the pay was great.
She joined the Steelworkers Union. In addition to her salary, Jacque earned extra money by working in the hot areas, and she could work all the overtime she wanted. Some nights she slept in the locker room between shifts to get in the extra hours. Eventually she was promoted to crew leader and began training other chemical operators. Her own training had been spotty. She bought a little black notebook and began keeping a daily work journal to help with training and to keep track of what she did and what she learned.

Some things made her nervous. Managers seemed to look the other way or cover things up in order to meet production quotas. Sometimes there were accidents—spills or leaks or procedures gone awry. Everyone called them “incidents.” One day, at the beginning of her shift, she was called to an incident that could have been fatal for her and her crew. A problem in the plutonium line was very near the criticality stage.
Jacque shut down the line just in time. Her journal took on new significance. “It eventually evolved,” she would later testify, “[to the point where] I was writing down things we shouldn’t have been doing, like safety concern stuff.” Working conditions, she felt, were intolerable. She complained to Rockwell and filed grievances with the union, and got herself labeled a troublemaker.

On the morning of the raid, Jacque has just arrived at work when FBI agents abruptly enter the processing area, wearing coveralls and carrying radiation-detection equipment. She and her crew watch as the agents order the managers to leave their offices. They begin going through desk
drawers and filing cabinets, seizing documents.
They order everyone to leave the building while they assess the amount of stored radioactive material and count the number of drums filled with radioactive waste.

Jacque can’t help but feel a little amused at the managers, usually so calm, scrambling to deal with the situation.
They look like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off
, she thinks.
At last the cavalry has come. Finally they’ll see what an unsafe place this is, and maybe somebody will do something about it
.

But she has no intention of talking to anybody. Especially the FBI.

T
HE NEXT
morning the raid is splashed across the front pages of the Denver newspapers. Readers learn that all production at Rocky Flats has been halted. Processing lines with plutonium in various stages have stopped in the middle of production.

It’s the first time that most Coloradoans hear about problems at the plant. Even the governor of Colorado is shocked. Although he had been attempting to work with Rocky Flats, he didn’t know about the investigation leading to the raid, the raid itself, or the extent of the potential environmental violations. “
I have been victimized,” Governor Roy Romer tells the press. “I am outraged—absolutely outraged.… I have been trying to say to people that this [Rocky Flats] operation is an operation that we’re monitoring closely and it’s not endangering your health. Today I have to say to people, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t know yet.’ ” He threatens to close the facility if there is any real threat to public health or safety, but it’s unclear if he has the authority to do that.
Romer flies to Washington to meet with Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins and DOE officials to ask them to begin cleanup immediately at Rocky Flats, rather than wait for the FBI and EPA to complete their criminal investigation of alleged cover-ups.

A special telephone line is established by federal investigators to take tips from whistle-blowers and angry and concerned citizens.
A local radio station begins playing the Rocky Flats jingle, sung to the tune of “Rocky Top,” which includes the lines: “I was born next door to Rocky
Flats / That’s why I have two heads” and “Rocky Flats, you’ll always be / radioactive to me / Good Old Rocky Flats / Rocky Flats you lied to me!”

Suddenly everyone—not just the protesters—is talking openly about Rocky Flats. A series of billboards appears along Highway 93, near the West Gate of Rocky Flats:
CLOSE ROCKY FLATS
, and
THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY
.
Now, for the first time, the controversial 1983 film
Dark Circle
is shown on public television. The film alleges many of the same crimes now being investigated by the FBI.

Dark Circle
includes interviews with sick Rocky Flats workers and their families, including Don Gabel, the worker who died of a brain tumor from working under radioactive piping, and Rex Haag, the builder of our house in Bridledale, who talks about the death of his eleven-year-old daughter, Kristen. “
The plutonium that went out with that fire must’ve carried right into her sandbox,” he says. “It just tears me up to think about it now. We were right downwind.”

The rumors, the film, the findings of Dr. Carl Johnson and Dr. Edward Martell, even the protesters who made headlines in the newspapers, had never been enough to provoke anyone to take action in my neighborhood. There were no protests or petitions. Anyone who criticized Rocky Flats—or even spoke of it—was ridiculed or ignored. Suddenly the atmosphere has changed.

Many families who bought houses around Rocky Flats, homes with “a million-dollar view,” begin to doubt the government’s assurances that Rocky Flats isn’t a threat. Property values plummet. People stop gardening and stay indoors. Some people attend community meetings. But not everyone is galvanized by the news.
Billy Chisolm built his home near Rocky Flats seventeen years ago. When asked about the plant, he just smiles and shrugs. David Weatherspoon bought his house two months before the raid and can see the lights of Rocky Flats from his driveway. “We’ve kind of looked the other way, because we didn’t want to face it,” he tells a reporter.

There’s a new surge of activism. The director of the group Colorado Freeze Voter (part of the Nuclear Freeze movement) plans a second
encirclement of the plant to take place on August 6, 1989. LeRoy Moore, one of the founders of the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center, begins a thirty-five-day water-only fast in front of Denver’s capital.

On the second day of the raid, however, FBI agent Jon Lipsky feels like the rug has been pulled from under his feet.
U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh—who had been governor of Pennsylvania at the time of the Three-Mile Island accident—instructs the Justice Department to unseal the affidavit and application for the search warrant for the raid. The affidavit outlines Lipsky’s game plan. It lays out almost the entire investigation, as well as the evidence the FBI has already collected. It describes a pattern of illegal dumping, burning, and polluting by Rocky Flats as well as cover-ups and instances of false statements and concealment by Rockwell International and the DOE.
It reveals that the flyover established probable cause that the Building 771 incinerator was in fact operating in December 1988, and that a supposedly closed solar evaporation pond was “thermally active.” The affidavit notes the millions of dollars Rockwell has received in bonuses for high production and safety over the previous fourteen years. Only two years before the raid, in May 1987, Rockwell had been awarded a performance bonus of $8.6 million for its excellent management of Rocky Flats.

Only one plant employee is named in the affidavit: Rockwell’s top manager at Rocky Flats, Dominic Sanchini, who is accused of lying about Building 771. Suspicions about Sanchini seem to be playing out. On the fourth day of the raid, FBI agent Edward Sutcliff looks into a cabinet in Sanchini’s office and discovers a large box of steno pads. Sanchini says they’re just notes from when he worked at NASA, and he intends to use them to write a book. Fine, the agent thinks. No problem. But he digs around a little more and finds more steno pads. This time they appear to be Sanchini’s diary of his experiences at Rocky Flats.
Some of these entries will end up as evidence and show up in the newspapers. “Environment becoming a big deal,” says one entry from July 1, 1986. “The EPA can destroy us.” On May 6, 1987, Sanchini had written, “DOE doesn’t follow the law.”

By the time Lipsky knows the affidavit has been unsealed, it’s already
in the hands of Rockwell attorneys and high-level officials at Rocky Flats. Attorney General Thornburgh explains that he authorized disclosure of the affidavit to reassure the public that “this investigation does not signal any major new environmental or safety concerns.”

Lipsky’s been worried all along that high-level officials would be given advance notice of the raid. With enough warning, it would be possible to hide things.
Lipsky suspects that the Criminal Division at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, aware of the investigation, informed the DOE of the details of the planned raid, even though high-level DOE officials are suspected of criminal acts. Two months before the raid, the highest-level DOE official on-site at Rocky Flats was transferred to Washington, D.C.

Lipsky presses on. The investigation continues until 5:00 p.m. on June 23 and involves more than ninety FBI agents and EPA investigators, who seize thousands of documents and hundreds of samples of waste. Evidence indicates that for more than thirty years, spills, leaks, and waste disposal practices have contaminated dozens of sites around the plant. The most significant public health issue is groundwater pollution. Groundwater at Rocky Flats is relatively shallow, just twenty-five feet below the surface.
The most seriously contaminated sites include the 881 Hillside, the Mound area, and the East Trenches.
One of the most shocking discoveries is that there is a great deal of material unaccounted for (MUF): more than 2,640 pounds of plutonium is missing.
And despite the fact that Rocky Flats officials have always insisted that there has never been a criticality at Rocky Flats or an incident of uncontrolled fission, a memo reports an average of two “nuclear criticality infractions” each month.

Lipsky’s partner, William Smith, handles the pondcrete investigation. He’s astonished that no one has really taken much notice of the huge blocks that have been sitting out in the open for years. “
It was on the main road.… People had been driving by this forever, even EPA people, and never knew it was something that wasn’t legal,” he tells the press. “I think it was incompetence, to be honest. How could you not get permits for pondcrete? You couldn’t hide it.”

The FBI and EPA’s final allegations against Rocky Flats include concealment of environmental contamination, false certification of federal environmental reports, improper storage and disposal of hazardous and radioactive waste, and illegal discharge of pollutants into creeks that flow to drinking water supplies.
They cite an internal memo written in 1987 by a DOE manager working out of the Albuquerque office that instructed a DOE official in Washington to send “a message to EPA that DOE and its management contractors are willing to ‘go to the mat’ in opposing enforcement activities at DOE facilities.”

Rockwell officials have no comment regarding specific federal allegations at Rocky Flats.
On the day of the raid, Albuquerque is removed from the chain of command and Rocky Flats will now report directly to Washington.

F
OR THE
first two weeks of the raid, Jacque keeps a low profile. She gets most of her information from the newspapers, because the managers at Rocky Flats don’t tell the workers anything specific. One day she and a few of her co-workers decide to find things out for themselves. A worker tiptoes into a manager’s office and discovers a copy of the affidavit. Much of it is written in legalese and is hard to decipher. But some things are clear, like the section about the flyover, in which the FBI alleges that there was “illegal midnight incineration” going on.