Full Body Burden (6 page)

“Who else is going in?” Bill asks.

“We’re waiting for backup,” the guard says. “Everyone’s out. No one’s here.”

Stan demands, “So who else is going in?”

“No one. We’re calling people in. We can’t even get ahold of people. It’s a holiday, remember?”

“You’re calling off-duty guys?” Stan asks.

“Yeah. And we’re trying to get more Survive-Air tanks from other districts. We need equipment.”

“Are you joking?” another guard asks. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

Bill and Stan glance at each other. They have no special training other than the basic fire training that all guards receive—essentially, how to use a fire extinguisher.

“I guess that means us,” Stan says. Bill nods. They suit up in full bibs, taping the bottoms of their coveralls to their booties with duct tape, and grab a couple of masks and air tanks.

Bill’s mind is racing. He knows what can happen with this kind of fire. He saw it back on September 11, 1957, when the first big fire at Rocky Flats occurred. It’s all still vivid in his mind.

B
ACK THEN
he was only twenty-five, and it was his fourth year as a guard at Rocky Flats. On that day, too, he arrived at the gate as usual, ready to walk his route in Building 91. “Bill, wait,” the guard said. “Don’t go to 91. They need you in Building 771 [then called Building 71].” The plutonium processing building.

“What’s up?”

“Fire.”

Bill suited up with one of the firefighters. His coveralls weren’t the right size, and he used so much duct tape across the bottom of his pants that later it ripped all the hair off his legs. They got to the building. Everything looked fine from the outside.

“Where do we go?” Bill asked.

“Down that hatch.” A supervisor pointed. “Just follow that fire hose down into the building. Two guys already went down, but we don’t know what happened to them.”

Bill and his partner climbed down into the passageway. They followed the hose to where the tunnel branched off in a Y. On instinct they followed the path to the right, opened a door, and walked into a wall of fire.

They closed the door.

“You scared?” his partner asked.

“No.” Bill shook his head. He was good at keeping his emotions in check.

The men backtracked to the Y-point, where they met the other two men. “It’s out!” the men cried. “We got it.”

But they didn’t get it. It was like a fire in a haystack, cool on the outside but a furnace within. This fire, too, had started in a glove box, in a plutonium skull, a thin casing left over from the mold for the molten metal. As with the later fire, there had been no alarm—heat-detecting sensory equipment was disabled when it slowed production.

The fire couldn’t be stopped. Firefighters turned on the exhaust fans—an inadvertent mistake—which fanned the flames and carried hot gases into the main air exhaust system. The fire raged through the first bank of filters and then, suddenly, threatened all the filters that stretched
across the roof, called the plenum. The roof and the entire complex were at risk.

The men knew not to use water on a plutonium fire. The risk of the blue flash of a criticality, or nuclear chain reaction, was too great. There would likely be no explosion—simply the blue flash signaling a surge of neutron radiation fatal to everyone in the immediate vicinity. But they were desperate. They began using water. For a moment it seemed to work. Then suddenly the air pressure dropped. There was silence, and then a deafening blast. Bill was rocked by the explosion. The force twisted the plenum’s steel frame, destroying most of the filters, and blew the lead cap off the 152-foot smokestack. Flames shot more than two hundred feet above the rim. And the fire continued. For thirteen hours, unfiltered radioactive smoke poured out of the 771 smokestack—smoke filled with plutonium, americium, beryllium, acids, cleaning solvents, and other toxic contaminants. Bill was coated head to foot with plutonium—“crapped up,” the workers called it—and one ear in particular required a vigorous scrubbing, even though he’d been wearing a mask and respirator. But he received the most contamination during the subsequent cleanup. Months and months of cleanup.

How much radioactive and toxic material escaped into the environment? No one knew, or will ever know, for sure. The 1957 fire was so hot it melted the top of the ten-story exhaust stack and destroyed the radiation sensors. The explosion blew out more than six hundred industrial filters and a four-year accumulation of uranium and plutonium nitrate and oxide.
The filters had not been replaced since Rocky Flats began operation in 1953.

The blast was thunderous, but the radioactive plume it produced was silent as it floated over the cities of Arvada, Golden, and Wheat Ridge, and then passed on to the north side of Denver and beyond.

There was one lucky break: the freak explosion from the volatile combination of water and plutonium cut off the power and shut down the fans that were fueling and driving the fire. A potentially apocalyptic event for the Denver metro area was avoided.

Official estimates of how much plutonium was burned or released
in the 1957 fire varied widely, from 500 grams to as much as 92 pounds of plutonium or more. By comparison, Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, used fewer than 14 pounds of plutonium. Beginning in a production area, the fire had spread through the venting system, destroying most of the filters—flammable filters that were supposed to protect the public. The explosion and resulting plume were caused by volatile gases mixing with plutonium dust caught in the filters. The plume exposed countless people in and around Denver to plutonium.

The government adamantly maintained that residents were not at risk, and that a criticality did not occur.

The day after the fire, a small notice appeared in the newspapers.
A spokesman from the AEC stated that “spontaneous combustion” had occurred in a processing line, although he declined to describe exactly what had happened. There was no mention of the destroyed filters and sensors or the deadly plume of smoke. It was the Cold War. No one asked questions.

The AEC repeatedly told the press there was no danger of a nuclear explosion at Rocky Flats. There was no danger to surrounding areas, populations, crops, or livestock from the Rocky Flats plant operations.
When pressed for more information by reporters, the AEC said, “Further information regarding the function of the plant would be of value to unfriendly nations, and cannot be disclosed under security regulations.”

Elements such as strontium-90 and cesium-135 never occur except in the case of a nuclear chain reaction.
Based on soil and water testing completed decades later that detects the presence of these elements, some experts—despite the government’s insistence that there has never been a criticality at Rocky Flats—believe that a criticality accident producing various fission products may have occurred on September 11, 1957.

T
WELVE YEARS
have passed since that terrible, secret fire. Now, on May 11, 1969, it feels like it’s about to happen all over again.

“You ready?” Stan asks.

“You and me,” Bill says. “Let’s go.”

When they arrive on the east side of the plutonium processing building, it looks quiet and clean, at least from the outside. There’s a loading dock with doors on each side, and a set of double doors that leads into an interior hallway. The men pull on their masks and strap on their air tanks. “CO
₂
only,” Bill says. “No water.”

Stan nods. They open the door, move into the hallway, and enter the main production area.

“Holy cow.” Stan stops in his tracks. Usually as bright as a supermarket, the room is nearly pitch black. A few emergency lights glow dully. The only noise comes from the fans, feeding a fire he can feel more than see. “I can’t even see my hand in front of my face,” he mutters.

Smoke rolls toward them in waves. Bill sees the orange glow and moves closer. It looks like the flames are shooting up over the glove boxes. One, two, three glove boxes—no, all of them. He knows the look of this kind of fire. It reminds him of forest fires he’s seen in films—high, fast-moving flames—but the color is different. It’s the distinct, unearthly brilliance of burning metal.

“What is that?” Stan yells.

“Plutonium. Probably the magnesium carriers, too.”

The heat is intense. Stan feels it through his mask. “It’s not just plutonium,” he yells. “It’s the plastic. The shielding. It’s the Benelex around these glove boxes.”

“Benelex doesn’t burn.”

“It’s burning! Why is it burning?”

“The Plexiglas, too,” Bill shouts. “The Plexiglas is on fire.”

It takes a lot of radiant heat to make something like that flammable, Stan thinks. This fire has been going on for a while.

Burning globes crash from the ceiling. It’s hard to tell whether they’re just light fixtures or pendants, the baskets that carry plutonium nuggets down the production line. “Come on,” Stan says. Time is short. He knows this building. Both men have walked it hundreds of times, upstairs and down. The two buildings are connected. The 776 side has two floors; 777 has one. Protecting the roof of 777 is crucial. The plenums—the
filters—stretch across the entire roof area. Stan likes to compare a plenum to the air filter on a car. With a car, you clean the air before you pull it into the engine. In a plutonium processing building, you clean the air in the building before you blow it out into the atmosphere. The flow is reversed, from inside to outside.

If the fire burns through the plenums and the 777 roof, massive amounts of plutonium—as well as other contaminants and radioactive material—will spread over the Denver area and beyond.

Stan opens a cabinet and finds a stack of hard hats. He hands one to Bill and straps one on himself.
Where are the other firefighters?
he wonders. They’re unaware of the Jesser team. The men inch into the room until they find the buckets of sand set in corners for extinguishing small fires. They move toward the edge of the fire and throw sand on the flames. It’s like throwing grains of rice in the face of an oncoming locomotive. The fire continues to grow.

Bill grabs a CO
₂
canister and hands another to Stan. They fire them into the glove boxes. It has little effect. They empty another canister. The air in the room is unbearably hot and the men are breathing heavily—already they’re almost out of air. The fire gallops through the line.

“What now?” Stan yells. Bill yells something back, but Stan can’t hear it. What are they supposed to do? Who are they supposed to ask? They’re alone. The no-water rule is the only rule they’ve got, but it’s useless.

The men bolt out of the building, shaken and gasping. They change tanks and confer briefly, ignoring the radiation monitor who has carefully chalked off a square area. “Don’t step outside these lines,” he barks. “Keep the contamination inside these lines,” as if plutonium could possibly recognize a line of chalk.

“Water?” Bill looks to Stan for confirmation.

“Water.”
What the hell
, Stan thinks. He’s not a firefighter. He’s a guard. He’s lived in the country and nearly all he knows about firefighting is how to beat a prairie grass fire with a burlap sack. “You good with these things?” he asks Bill.

“More or less,” Bill replies. They wrestle with the nozzle. “Use the fine spray.”

“Got it.”

“Soft. Gentle-like,” Bill says. “Hit the gases from the melting plastic first. See what happens.”

“Okay.”

They reenter the building, this time with water hoses.

“We’ll take turns going forward,” Bill says. “I spray you, then you spray me. We need to keep each other cooled down.”

“Let’s head toward the center,” Stan says. “Get under the center beams and see how the plenum looks.”

“Okay.” Bill turns his hose on Stan, and Stan moves forward into the smoke, trying to follow the emergency lighting on the floor.

“Hey!” Bill yells. Stan looks back.

“Don’t blow any of those plutonium pieces together. Keep ’em separated.”

“I know.” Blue flash. He knows.

F
IGHTING THE
fire from the other side of the building—two football fields away—Captain Jesser reaches the same decision. Despite the risk, his men decide to use water, too.

Like Bill Dennison, Wayne Jesser fought the 1957 fire. He knows the danger of a criticality. Everyone fears that blue flash. And it’s not just about what could happen to him and his crew. If the fire burns through the roof, powdery plutonium ash—toxic radiation—will descend on people living in the Denver area and beyond.

At 2:34 p.m., just five minutes after entering the building with Sweet, Jesser orders his team to bring in fire hoses. They drive a tanker to the north end and hook up a hose to a hydrant.

W
ORKING IN
tandem, Bill and Stan move along the glove-box line, directing a spray of water around the flames and then on each other. They’ve gone only a few feet when they see where the real fire lies: in the foundry area, where plutonium is melted and cast into pieces that are
carried to the production line. The foundry line is one hundred feet long and contains eight furnaces, all held inside glove boxes. The entire line is ablaze.