Full Body Burden (45 page)

Some of the grass fires are intentional. In April 2000, Rocky Flats wants to do a “prescribed burn” of five hundred acres. Since the 1950s, the DOE has used mowers to control vegetation at and around its nuclear facilities. But in 1999 there is a policy change. The DOE plans to conduct prescribed burns of large areas of land not only at Rocky Flats but at other DOE nuclear facilities, including Hanford and Los Alamos, to keep down vegetation. Local residents and independent scientists protest
that burning contaminated grass and plants will release radioactive smoke, easily inhaled, that will expose people living in the area to plutonium and other contaminants.
Dr. Harvey Nichols and others suggest a less-than-perfect solution: allowing goats to graze on the land and keep the vegetation in check. Unfortunately the goats—like the cattle and the deer—would likely ingest contaminants, but at least the contamination would be contained and not floating over the Denver area. The DOE rejects the idea.

After pressure from local citizens and the press, the DOE reduces the burn from five hundred acres to a “test burn” of fifty acres on April 6, 2000. The fire creates a large cloud of smoke.
Paula Elofson-Gardine, a local resident and executive director of the Environmental Information Network, alerts the media and has a KMGH Channel 7 news crew at her home. Paula has a Radalert Geiger counter, a real-time handheld radiation monitor that measures alpha and beta particles as well as gamma and X-rays, and she and the news team track the cloud and its effect. In less than forty minutes the cloud travels fourteen miles around the metro Denver area, and is visible from Paula’s second-floor window. She and the news crew can smell the metallic odor of the smoke. Before the burn, Paula measures background radiation at 8 to 15 counts per minute. During the burn, the radiation readings quickly reach the highest standard of detection on the Radalert, 19,999 counts per minute, an extraordinarily high level by any standard. The next day the reading goes down to 1,147 counts per minute, and the rate slowly declines over the next few weeks. It stays at about 10 counts per minute above background level for a full year.

“There is no official evidence of what exactly was in that smoke,” Paula says to the press. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. But few people in the Denver area seem to be paying much attention. They’ve been told that Rocky Flats is being cleaned up, and they believe everything is fine.

Randy knows that everything is not fine at Rocky Flats. Over the years he’s responded to all sorts of situations on and off the plant site. But not much in the plutonium department. He’s been lucky.

But on this May morning in 2003, he’s not so lucky.

It’s not quite Mother’s Day, but spring is in the air. Randy reports for work. He’s captain and his buddy Paul Kuhn is shift commander, and they both are hungry. Because the plant is in the process of shutting down, many of the cafeterias are closed and employees now depend on roach coaches that drive around selling honey buns, sandwiches, and soda. The one that stops at the fire station sells pretty good burritos.

“I’ll buy breakfast,” Paul says, and hands Randy five bucks. Paul is a stocky guy, solid, originally from Czechoslovakia. Both men are in their forties; they’ve worked together for years.

Randy takes the money, tucks it in his wallet, and steps out into the sunlight. He’s wearing his dress blues. It’s a fine morning. He reaches for a burrito, and just then his radio goes off.

“Fire response,” the voice says. A “pyrophoric incident,” as Kaiser-Hill and the DOE like to call it. “Building 371.”

Randy’s heart jumps. “What do you do when you hear something’s happened in 371?” the men often joke. “You pucker.”

At this point, Building 371 is the most active plutonium building on-site. That’s where they try to stabilize plutonium before shipping it off to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina for storage. All the weapons-grade plutonium on-site ends up at Building 371 sooner or later. And the building is huge, a maze of corridors and underground levels and stairwells. There are many steps, and it takes firefighters a long time to get into the building and then get out again, especially with all their cumbersome equipment.

Breakfast is forgotten. Randy sprints back inside. He and Paul gear up, jump in the fire truck, and head down to the Zone. The radio crackles again. “Fire confirmed.” No word on how big it is, but Randy knows the size doesn’t really matter. If it’s a plutonium fire, big or small, it’s bad.

They pull the fire truck up to the front of the building. A shrill alarm fills the air. They begin strapping on their air tanks. Evacuation has begun. Workers pour through the doors and stand nervously outside in the sunlight. Randy races through his mental checklist: dosimeter, badge, regulator, mask, full tank of air. All good. Both men are tense, but they keep their emotions in check.

Suddenly the building manager emerges. “Wait,” he shouts. “Wait! There was a fire, but they put it out.”

“What?” Randy says. It’s hard to hear with all the noise. The manager repeats his words.

“It’s out. The fire is out.”

Paul and Randy exchange looks. It takes a moment to realize what he’s saying, and their relief is palpable.

Randy shifts gears, from fourth gear to second. “So, okay,” he says to Paul and the other fire personnel. “It’s not that big a deal now. But we still need to go in and investigate. We need to make sure that even though the fire is out, conditions are safe.”

Paul nods. Time is still critical. It’s agreed that Randy will go interior and Paul will stay exterior. They’ll keep in radio contact as best as they can. Many of the buildings at Rocky Flats are so deep underground and so complex that radio communication doesn’t always work.

Randy begins descending the steps with two more firefighters following behind. The fire has been reported in the sub-basement, and it’s a long way down. They’re halfway there when Randy’s radio crackles again.

The fire has rekindled.

Crap
, he thinks.
Guess I have to change gears again
. And now the stakes are back up. Randy knows that when you go in to fight an active plutonium fire, you’re going to get crapped up with radiation. You get hot.

He takes a deep breath from his tank, clambers down the rest of the stairway, and pushes open the door, not knowing what to expect.

Randy’s first thought is,
What the hell are all these people doing in this room?
There are people spilling out of the room into the hallway, some dressed only in common bib overalls. Everyone is panicked. It’s a confined space, and there is too much equipment and too many bodies. The air is filled with particulate from the fire extinguishers. He estimates visibility to be about six inches. He can barely make out anything in the chaos. A couple of workers are still trying to discharge a dry chemical fire extinguisher in the general direction of the flames.

The criticality alarm is going off and the noise is deafening.

“The fire’s in a glove box!” a worker shouts. Randy can’t see it.
Building 371 is in deconstruction and decontamination mode, and the glove box that’s supposedly on fire has been tented off. Workers have constructed a shroud around it to keep all the contamination inside while they take it apart and try to decontaminate it.
It figures
, Randy thinks. The fire department has discussed the fact that there is a greater chance of something going wrong when workers are tearing things down than when the plant is in actual production. The pressure is on to get the place shut down fast and under budget. People are pushing hard to finish the mission. Sometimes they take shortcuts. Sometimes they make mistakes.

This is a full-size glove box, as big as a refrigerator. And it’s a special glove box, called a “guillotine” box, designed with a spring-loaded trapdoor that’s set to slam down in the event of a fire or any unauthorized entry. Anyone or anything coming in through that trapdoor could be literally cut in half. A person could lose an arm or even be decapitated.

No one informs Randy or Paul that the glove box is an armed guillotine box.

The criticality alarm blares, red light throbbing, indicating that there is plutonium contamination in the air. Randy starts pulling people out of the room. “Get out of here now!” he yells. “Go! Go! Get out!”

When the room is clear he convenes briefly with the other two firefighters in the exterior hallway.
This time
, he thinks,
the shit has really hit the fan
. He calls Paul, who is still manning the outside of the building, and fills him in. “It’s bad. I need more CO
₂
cans. I need more dry chem extinguishers. Fast.” He instructs one firefighter to stay in the hallway and the second to follow closely behind him.

He goes back in. The room is a fog. He’s shocked that there are still workers in the room. “Get the hell out of here!” he shouts. But they seem to know where the fire is. “Here!” One points. “Here it is!”

“Where?” Randy shouts. His voice sounds like Darth Vader’s. All the firefighters sound like Darth Vader when they’re wearing their respirators. It’s almost impossible to communicate clearly.

“Over here!” the worker shouts again, his voice unimpeded by a respirator. Why isn’t he wearing a respirator? The workers are supposed to be familiar with the dangers of plutonium fires and the proper procedures
to follow when they occur. If a plutonium button starts to glow, the worker grabs a coffee can and sprinkles a little magnesium oxide powder or sand to smother it. Anything more than that, they’re supposed to call the fire department and get out of there.

The workers in this room, though, are scared. Something’s gone awry. And they haven’t evacuated like they’re supposed to.

Randy still can’t see the fire. His vision is distorted from all the chemical particulate in the air. He goes around to the back of the glove box. “No, up here!” the worker yells at the front. Randy follows his lead but still can’t see it. “Get out!” he yells. “You guys get out of here!”

He goes to the back of the glove box again. And there it is.

The flames reach as high as three or four feet. And they’re a funny color, a kind of metallic blue that he knows is not a good sign. Not good for his body. Not good for his lungs.

But he doesn’t have time to think about it. At any rate, he’s packed up and sealed about as tight as anyone could be.

He examines the glove box. This particular one is a trash glove box, used to collect radioactive refuse from all the other glove boxes. Chemical wipes and all sorts of junk end up here. There’s no way to tell how much plutonium might be in there. A cut has been made high on the side, and it looks like a piece of metal has fallen off, creating a spark and igniting the trash.

Randy still can’t find the source of the fire. His partner hands him a dry chemical fire extinguisher and he gets it in place and engages the flames.

It has no effect.

Randy glances down at the floor of the tent, and what he sees almost stops him in his tracks. There are eight empty fire extinguishers down there.
That’s ridiculous
, he thinks.
How can that be?
Workers are trained to use one fire extinguisher, maybe two at the most. If one doesn’t work, they’re supposed to back out and immediately call the fire squad.

He appreciates the fact that they tried to contain the fire. But eight canisters? What were they trying to do?
My God
, he thinks.
Everything has gone wrong with this fire
.

The criticality alarm blares so loudly he can’t hear his radio. He can barely see his hands in front of his face.

Go easy
, he tells himself.
Go easy
.

His partner hands him another can. This time Randy knocks the flames down slightly. He pollutes the air even more with dry chemical—visibility is almost zero—but it’s all he’s got to work with.

There’s no time to waste, but he decides to use a new technology the firefighters have just received—a thermal imaging camera clipped to his belt. Everything in the glove box is shrouded in a dry chemical fog. He leans deep inside the box and starts taking pictures. He pulls out, checks the camera, leans back in and shoots again. Finally he sees the genesis of the fire, deep at the back of the glove box and buried in trash. There are filters inside, encased in wood, and the wood is smoldering and burning. No matter how much dry chemical he uses, he’s not going to be able to put that out.

“The dry chem’s not making it!” he yells. He grabs a pipe pole and starts digging, trying to grab the material and pull it out of the box. It’s unbearably hot. The material is heavy. Randy leans into the glove box again and again, working as quickly as possible. He knows there’s plutonium in there. How much, he doesn’t know.

He thinks about using water. There’s no water line established, of course, because water isn’t supposed to be an option. Randy knows they used water on the Mother’s Day fire, but that was a last-ditch effort to save the plant—and the city—from an all-out nuclear holocaust. And he’s heard that there was a chain of unlikely events that made the situation come out a lot better than it probably should have. He’s heard stories that a fire engine hit a power line and knocked out the power, which helped the firefighters and kept the roof intact.

If that roof had melted, he thinks, Colorado Springs would now be the capital of Colorado.

Will he, too, get a lucky break?

He can’t get this fire under control. The dry chem isn’t working, and there’s no water line. His radio is silent. There’s no communication coming down from above.

It’s unclear what he should do. He’s running out of time.

Outside the building, where Paul is trying to monitor Randy’s actions, they’re setting up a full-scale decontamination station.

Randy checks his tank. His air is low. The two firefighters assisting him are also running low. They’re hot, the air is full of vapor from the dry chem, and they need fresh tanks of air.

“Paul!” Randy barks into his radio. “The dry chem isn’t working. Can we use water?” He says it again with more emphasis. “Can we use water, Paul?”