Full Body Burden (36 page)

Oh my gosh
, Jacque thinks.
That was one of my overtime days in Building 771. And oh, I think we did that
. She’s scared, and worries that she and her crew might end up in jail.

Jacque looks at her work journal but she’s still not sure of the exact days she worked the incinerator. She talks to her manager. “I think we did that,” she says, “and I’m concerned.” The response isn’t what she expects. Management holds a meeting with all of the chemical operators. “The FBI might be wanting to come to talk to some of you,” they say. A top-level manager is more direct.
“Whistle-blowers,” he says, “will be dealt with severely and completely.”

Supervisors ask Jacque to produce information from her notes and journals about when she worked the incinerator. Only later does it occur
to her that providing such material may, in the long run, make it easier for Rockwell to hide information and structure their case. She thinks about how talking to the FBI might affect her job, her life, and the life of her daughter. But after she confers with Karen Pitts, another woman who works in Building 771, both women decide to talk to the FBI.

Rockwell is cornered, and there’s a lot of money at stake. Although the annual fee that Rockwell receives to run Rocky Flats is not publicly disclosed, experts believe it to be in the range of $10 million, excluding bonuses. In 1987 alone, Rockwell received a bonus of $8.7 million from the DOE for management and safety excellence.

Rockwell decides to sue the Department of Justice, the DOE, and the EPA, claiming that they can’t meet government contract requirements if they have to also conform to environmental standards.
The company also takes out full-page ads in Denver’s two daily newspapers, the
Denver Post
and the
Rocky Mountain News
, claiming that they have been the victim of “turf battles, political disputes, and unfair news coverage,” and that they have managed Rocky Flats with “proper concern for public health, safety, and the environment.” They deny any criminal wrongdoing.

The day after Rockwell argues in court that it can’t fulfill its DOE contract without violating environmental law, Energy Secretary Watkins terminates Rockwell’s contract with Rocky Flats, effective December 31, 1989. The defense contractor EG&G will take over.
On September 28, 1989, the EPA adds Rocky Flats to its Superfund cleanup list.

I
N
J
ULY
1989 Wes McKinley, a forty-five-year-old rancher and math teacher in the southeastern corner of Colorado, receives a notice in the mail.

The grandson of homesteaders, Wes spent his first eight years of formal education in a one-room sod schoolhouse with no electricity or running water. He married his high school sweetheart, also a teacher, and they live with their four kids on the land his family has owned for generations. Wes spends a lot of time on the land and in the saddle. When he wears his dusty white cowboy hat and red bandanna, he isn’t acting.

The morning he reaches into his mailbox and pulls out the notice, at first he thinks it’s one of those computer-generated ads that say you’ve won a million dollars. Call with your credit card in hand. He almost throws it away. He tucks it into his pocket instead, and when he goes into town, he shows it to a friend. “Do you know what this is?”

“Sure,” the friend replies. “You’ve been summoned to serve on a grand jury.”

Wes isn’t sure what that means or what it involves. But he makes the long trip to Denver, where he learns that he’s been called to serve on Colorado Special Grand Jury 89-2, a federal jury specifically empaneled to determine whether there is enough evidence to go forward with a trial against the operators of Rocky Flats. As with any other grand jury, all of the proceedings will be kept secret. The names of all those summoned for jury duty are put in a drum and then drawn out one by one. Wes thinks to himself that when his name is called, he’ll ask to be excused. He has a ranch to run, a ranch that’s at the tail end of the state, over three hundred miles away.

But he’s intrigued. He’s never even heard of Rocky Flats. How could all this be going on, and he’s never even heard of it? When they call his name, he decides to say yes. He looks around the room. The other jurors include a bus driver, a hairstylist, a swim coach, a letter carrier, a repairman, a lawyer, and a retired police officer.

On August 1, 1989, the case begins, and after another juror resigns, Wes McKinley is named foreman for Special Grand Jury 89-2. He has no idea how complex and time-consuming—and even dangerous—the case will become.
U.S. district judge Sherman G. Finesilver takes a full hour to read the jury their instructions. “It is every person’s duty to conform his acts to the laws enacted by Congress,” he says. “All are equal under the law, and no one is above the law.… [I]f the members of a grand jury after deliberation believe that an indictment is warranted, then you will request the United States attorney to prepare a formal written indictment.”

For the next two and a half years, the jurors meet in Denver one
week out of every month to hear testimony from one hundred witnesses and sift through 760 boxes of evidence.

Wes leaves his old pickup at home and takes the bus to Denver each month. Some jurors don’t last and have to be replaced. Wes is always there, and always on time. “Attorneys must study how to be late,” he jokes. They’re supposed to start at 9:00 a.m., and things don’t seem to get going until 9:15. Wes is a rancher. He’d start things at 6:00 a.m. if he could. It’s just starting to dawn on him how important this case really is.

The first person to testify is FBI agent Jon Lipsky. He describes the raid, then focuses on the illegal operation of the incinerator that burns radioactive waste.

Jim Stone is eager to take the stand. Stone talks about the pondcrete, the incinerator, and the spray fields. He talks about the plutonium in the air duct pipes and how there is enough “lost” radioactive material in those pipe ducts to make several bombs.
There’s so much sandy material in the pipes, he says, that it looks like a windblown desert.

Dr. Edward Martell testifies, and later repeats his words to the press. “
It takes minuscule amounts of plutonium to cause cancer or promote cancer. We know there is an awful lot of plutonium out there. The soil-borne contamination has been progressively redistributed by wind in the direction of the heart of Denver. Plutonium-induced cancers in people may take twenty or thirty years to develop. In effect, everybody living within eight or ten miles east and southeast of Rocky Flats may be guinea pigs.”

John Cobb, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Medical School, presents to the jury the data from his EPA-sponsored study of plutonium in tissue from autopsies of people who lived around Rocky Flats. He discusses the leaking barrels and the radioactive contamination that has seeped into the soil and water, and escaped into the air.

One fact that emerges in the testimony is how Rockwell manager Dominic Sanchini responded to pondcrete problems.
When DOE inspector Joseph Krupar warned Sanchini that the pondcrete blocks were
splitting and leaking, Sanchini “defined his access” at the plant and surrounded the blocks with a barbed-wire fence and a sign that read
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT
.

Approximately fifty Rockwell employees receive grand-jury subpoenas and they negotiate immunity agreements with the prosecutors. The first Rockwell employee to testify before the grand jury—right after Jon Lipsky—is Jacque Brever. She talks in detail about her work and the near-constant operation of the incinerator. Work she has done herself.

Employees at Rocky Flats are well aware that Brever is going to testify. Her co-workers are already talking about how she’s going to shut down the plant and make them all lose their jobs. Officials send out a plant-wide memo announcing the day that grand jury testimony will begin. Shortly before the court date, Brever discovers that someone has poked a hole in one of the lead-lined gloves she wears when she puts her hands into the glove box. She’s exposed to plutonium and americium. Several workers confront her afterwards. “That’s what you get for making waves,” they say.

She testifies anyway, despite continuing threats at work and at home. Another employee, a manager named Ron Avery, also testifies that he operated the 771 incinerator when it was supposed to be shut down. Still, the threats continue. Brever tries to keep her job at Rocky Flats and reluctantly resigns in April 1991. With co-worker Karen Pitts, who has had a similar experience, Jacque files a lawsuit saying she was threatened, harassed, and forced out of her job after talking to the FBI about problems at Rocky Flats.
The case is dismissed when the judge decides it is “not detailed enough” to continue.

Shortly thereafter, Jacque and her daughter go into hiding. She is diagnosed with thyroid cancer, one of the more treatable types of cancer, and reactive airway disease. Years later she returns to Colorado to pursue a master’s degree in environmental policy and management. “
The best thing I can do,” she tells an interviewer, “is what my conscience tells me to do while I’m here. I’m not afraid of dying, but at least I can do something to clean up the mess we made. I’m really ashamed that we’re leaving this mess for people like my daughter and her generation.”

T
ESTIMONY BEFORE
the grand jury continues. The 771 incinerator charge is fiercely contested by Rockwell and DOE general counsels. Yes, they admit, they’ve been storing and burning hazardous waste in the incinerator for years without a permit. But is it a type of waste that is subject to RCRA and EPA jurisdiction? Rockwell argues that emerging environmental law is filled with ambiguity, and that the Atomic Energy Act exempts nuclear weapons facilities from laws such as RCRA and Superfund.

Other charges are more difficult to defend. Waste in a series of holding ponds continued to contaminate groundwater even after regulators had closed the ponds.
The “spray irrigation” was done to reduce levels of waste and to allegedly avoid the scrutiny of regulatory agencies and the public.

But is it fair to single out Rocky Flats? Plenty of other DOE facilities, including Hanford in Washington State, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, the Savannah River site, and the Fernald plant in Ohio have severe problems with radioactive and toxic waste and storage. Some are worse than Rocky Flats.

The issue of “permits” is particularly troublesome. RCRA and Superfund gave the EPA responsibility for regulating hazardous waste “from cradle to grave,” and the EPA has at times issued permits that allowed for some pollution. But the 771 incinerator does not have an EPA permit at all, which is why the Sierra Club was able to sue and get it temporarily shut down in 1989.
The year after the shutdown, the Sierra Club scored another victory when the lawsuit was decided in their favor. The ruling directed Rocky Flats to manage plutonium residues as hazardous waste and said the residues were subject to RCRA regulation.

Jim Stone is right about more than pondcrete. In the fall of 1989, following the raid, an independent study finds that there is, indeed, enough “lost” plutonium in the exhaust ducts at Rocky Flats to create the possibility of an accidental nuclear reaction. The experts who conduct the study estimate that approximately 12 kilograms of plutonium could be
caught in the piping. Energy Department officials justify it by saying that the plutonium is not harmful to workers within the buildings, and that filters prevent the plutonium from getting into the air outside the buildings. Nonetheless, the DOE agrees to conduct its own study.

Six months later, in a meeting with plant officials, Melinda Kassen, a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund in Boulder and a member of the Rocky Flats Monitoring Council, asks point-blank if the study promised by the DOE the previous October has been completed.

Kassen is told that the study is done, but results are being “withheld.”

Under pressure, the DOE reveals to Kassen the next day that the quantity of plutonium in the air ducts is 28 kilograms, or about 62 pounds—more than twice what they had expected to find, and enough for seven nuclear bombs. Spread over six thousand feet of pipe, the plutonium got stuck in the ducts partly because, as the filters became clogged and automatically closed down operations, frustrated workers punched holes in the filters so that air could pass through the system. Never mind that the air was contaminated with plutonium.

Leo Duffy, director of Waste Management and Environmental Restoration at the DOE in Washington, defends the government. He notes that the plutonium in the ducts at Rocky Flats is the residue of thirty-eight years of operation and is only a “very small fraction” of the amount of plutonium that has been handled by the facility. Nonetheless, “none of this,” he admits, “is a satisfactory way of running an operation.”

Meanwhile, in an appearance before a House armed services subcommittee on nuclear weapons production, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins strongly implies that the problems at Rocky Flats could delay the deployment of Trident II ballistic missiles. The weapons production complex needs to get back to full operation. “
I can guarantee if we don’t move aggressively,” he says, “there will be severe ramifications.”