Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  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 CO2 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.

  FIGHTING 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.

  WORKING 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.

  Bill curses. The men glance at each other. The production area is tight. There’s only one way to get to the foundry area: through the underpasses. Some glove boxes have steps beneath them, tiny stairs going down to a miniature basement with steps leading up the other side. This allows workers to get from one side of the production line to the other. The underpasses have no drains. Anything that spills under a glove box is contaminated and has to be cleaned up, not flushed out.

  There’s no place for the water to go, and the underpasses are filled with water. The water is rising.

  “It’s like a sheep dip,” Bill says, and laughs. He thinks back to all the ranches he worked on as a kid. “One hell of a sheep dip.”

  “There’s our criticality, Bill,” Stan says. “We’re looking right at it.”

  “Who’s going in?”

  Both men stand silent. Bill looks up and sees an elevator flipped upside down, the supporting metal scorched and twisted. People are going to get killed tonight, and he guesses it might be him and Stan. He thinks of his wife, who’s pregnant, and his two other kids. Both men were trained for the battlefield, but it didn’t prepare them for this. One thing it did teach them was to keep their feelings to themselves—and move.

  Bill wades in. The water is up to his knees. He thinks he’s moving fast, but it feels slow. He prays they haven’t knocked any plutonium pits or pieces into the water, which could lead to the criticality they fear. Then he’s up the other side and the foundry fire is so hot, so immediate, that his soaked coveralls dry instantly. His face feels scorched beneath his mask.

  Stan is right behind him. They spray the fire until their air runs low—a few short minutes. Then they drop their hoses, wade through the sheep dip again, and fight their way back to the door.

  A radiation monitor is waiting when they burst from the building and yank off their masks. He checks their hands.

  “You’re hot, man,” he barks. “Coated.” His sharpness can’t hide his fear. “You can’t go back in.”

  “We’re all right,” Bill says.

  “No. You’re off the chart.”

  “We gotta go back.”

  Stan reaches for a fresh tank. “The plenum’s about to go. You gonna keep us out here so we can all watch the roof melt?”

  “I’m serious. You guys are not going back in that building.”

  “Who else is there?” Bill asks.

  “We’re waiting on more guys,” another monitor yells. “We don’t have anyone else yet. We don’t even have enough gear. We’re waiting for Boulder and Broomfield to bring more tanks.” The only manager on duty that the men are aware of is the guard captain, who’s on the phone.

  “Is that you, George?” Stan peers into the man’s mask. He recognizes him from the lunchroom. They’re both model railroad hobbyists.

  “I can’t let you back in, Stan,” George says. “Come on. What the hell are you guys thinking?” He looks toward the road. A van is on the way to take workers to Building 559 for decontamination.

  “George,” Stan says, “we let the fire get into the plenums and Denver is screwed.”

  “Give us the tanks.” Bill’s voice is furious.

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Then we’ll just take ’em,” Stan says. They strap on the tanks and pull on their masks as George, arms folded, blocks their way. Bill shoves past him. Stan follows.

  The men duck back into the building. “I’ll go first this time,” Stan shouts. He runs, crouching, into the production line. He darts back and forth, spraying anything that doesn’t look like plutonium. That man is as q
uick as a monkey, Bill thinks. After a few minutes he sprays him down and they switch. Bill can’t move quite as quickly as Stan, but it feels like they’re making progress. They’re both thinking about the roof.

  “I’m out!” Bill shouts, and gestures toward his tank. Stan nods. He wonders if the heat and exertion are causing them to go through their air tanks more quickly than usual, or if the tanks are only partially filled.

  Abruptly Stan is knocked to the floor. Flat on his back, covered with debris, he can’t see anything. He doesn’t lose consciousness but it takes him a moment to realize that his body is covered with a heavy material. Ceiling material. His heart pounds. The roof. This is it, he thinks. The roof is gone. It’s over.

  But nothing happens. He looks up to see Bill still standing. He finds he can move his arms and legs, so he sits up and looks around. He’s covered with gunk—messy, sticky gunk—and he pulls a soggy piece off his arm. Bill points to a gap in the ceiling—a false ceiling made of fiber material in two-foot by three-foot sections. They’ve sprayed it repeatedly with their hoses and the tiles have collapsed from the weight of the water. Stan is covered with nothing more than soaked ceiling tiles. The roof is still intact.

  He stands up and Bill cleans him off. He can’t read Bill’s face.

  Outside, they explode with laughter. “I hate to admit it,” Stan says, “but I think that’s the closest I’ve ever come to shitting my pants.” The statement strikes them both as hilarious and they switch to new tanks. George stands back, watching.

  MEANWHILE, JESSER orders several workers up on the roof where fluted steel sheets are fastened to steel ceiling girders and covered by three-quarter-inch Styrofoam, plywood, and a layer of thick rubber. One of the first men on the roof is Jim Kelly, who’s been called in for the emergency from a holiday brunch with his family. He doesn’t see smoke or detect radiation, and reports that the filters seem to be holding. I can get back to my family soon, he thinks. But twenty long hours will pass before he can go home. Soon firemen see smoke trailing along the roof’s fluted edge, and then suddenly it begins pouring from the exhaust vents.

  A few miles away, drivers on the Denver-Boulder turnpike can see the smoke, but no one understands its significance. The temperature is close to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The Styrofoam is melting. One area of the roof is soft and beginning to rise like a big bubble. If the bubble bursts, they’re in trouble. The entire city is in trouble.

  “Water,” Jesser shouts. It’s against his training, against everything he knows about fighting a plutonium fire. “Get up there with that water!” A couple of firemen climb up with hoses and begin to spray water, cautiously and then more vigorously, thousands of gallons, across the rubber material. It helps slightly. “Keep at it,” Jesser orders. He notes that the wind has picked up, not only making it more difficult to fight the fire but dispersing smoke and debris all over the place.

  A quick assessment determines that two of the three banks of filters are completely burned out. The third is on fire.

  BILL DENNISON’S arms and legs are heavy with exhaustion. Stan, too, is tired. A relief crew of firefighters has arrived at the west side of the building, where Jesser and his crew are working, but there’s no one to relieve the two guards. They both figure they had the last of their bad luck when the ceiling fell. They survived wading through the sheep dips. The fire, if not diminishing, at least is not growing. The worst is over—must be over—if they can just hang on a little longer.

  It’s Stan’s turn to go ahead. Their tanks are getting low and Bill is misting Stan, keeping him cool. Stan stoops down to pick up his hose. It looks like it’s charred on one side but still usable. He turns it on. But it’s too hard, too fast, and it shoots out on full stream. No good, he thinks. He wants to wet down the material, not blow it around. He tries to turn the valve and slow it down. But it’s still too much. He shuts it all the way off and the hose goes from full pressure to no pressure. Suddenly the backed-up water bursts through the side of the hose. It catches his mask and pulls it off. The burning air hits his face full force. The hose flails around him like a wild snake.

  Stan tries to think clearly. Get the mask back on, he thinks. Don’t breathe. Where is the strap? The strap catches on his nose. Everything is out of place. Thirty seconds pass and he’s still holding his breath. His fingers fumble through the heavy gloves. Another thirty seconds. He thinks of all the crud they use in there. Plastics, vinyl, rubber, paints. Carbon tetrachloride. Cleaning chemicals. Benelex and Plexiglas. Oh, and plutonium.

  He needs air. He can’t help it. He knows he shouldn’t breathe but he has to. He takes one big gulp and holds it. He keeps holding it, another minute at least, until he gets the mask pulled back on.

  Bill pulls him around. “You okay?”

  Stan exhales into his mask and nods. “I’m okay.”

  They go back for new tanks. One more run, they think. They can do at least one more. But Bill’s bad luck isn’t over yet, either. The men finish their air and head for the door. As they’re crossing the floor, a blazing fluorescent light fixture crashes from the ceiling, nearly knocking off Bill’s hard hat. He staggers, dazed. His oxygen tank is empty. He can’t breathe, and he’s lost Stan in the smoke and the dark.

  A man—another guard—appears. Bill recognizes him. Charlie Perrisi. He’s come off the roof to help relieve Stan and Bill. Charlie’s a small man, shorter than Bill, but he pulls Bill up on his shoulders and brings him out into the air.

  They’re all contaminated. Charlie has kept his mask on, but he smells smoke. The same smoke Stan experienced, but somehow it’s gotten inside his mask.

  The fire isn’t out, but it’s more or less under control, and the men stagger to the van that will take them to decon.

  FOR THE citizens of Colorado, luck plays a big role on the afternoon of Mother’s Day, May 11, 1969. There are three lucky breaks, all largely the result of human error.

  The first stroke of luck occurred earlier in the week, when workers accidentally left behind a metal plate that blocks the north glove-box line. This plate forces the racing fire to turn from Building 777—a single-story building with an extremely vulnerable roof that probably would have collapsed immediately—to Building 776. Building 776 has a second story and is a little less susceptible. This buys time.

  The second lucky break occurs when a member of Jesser’s team tries to hose a burning pile of plutonium into a corner. Burning plutonium turns into a heavy sludge of plutonium oxide ash, as heavy as wet cement. The pile won’t move. Later an AEC fire investigator will report that if the fireman had been successful in moving the sludge—in pushing pieces of plutonium together—a criticality would have been the inevitable result.

  The third piece of luck is the most important, and it is nothing short of déjà vu for Bill Dennison. A flustered fireman inadvertently backs a fire truck into a power pole adjacent to the building. Just as in 1957, an accidental power cutoff occurs—and just in the nick of time. The fans, which have been sucking the fire into the filter bank, feeding it and causing the roof to melt, stop spinning.

  The fire still burns, but more slowly. The roof holds.

  AFTER FOUR hours of firefighting, Stan and Bill arrive at detox. Both men are crapped up. They strip off their clothes. Everything is contaminated. A radiation monitor begins to check Stan’s body. “You’ll need to give me that wedding ring,” he says.

  “That’s the one thing you’re not getting,” Stan says. “No way.”

  “It’s hot.”

  “It’s gold,” Stan growls. “You can clean it. I want it back.”

  The men go to the shower room and scrub themselves with hard brushes, soap, and a sodium hypochlorite solution, or bleach. They scrub and scrub, get measured to see where the plutonium remains, and then scrub again. The goal is to take off the top epidermal layer but not break the skin and let the contamination get in. Their skin feels raw. Stan has no chest hair left. Most of his body hair is scrubbed off. He goes through it again a
nd again. His left leg is still hot. Finally they tape the leg off from the rest of his body with plastic.

  He wants to go home. He wants to see his wife. They keep him on site for another sixteen hours, and when they do let him go home, it’s with an order not to remove the plastic bag and to come back the next day for another round of detox. Two days later he gets his wedding ring back. Bill scrubs clean, but as in the 1957 fire, most of his contamination will occur in the months of cleanup that follow.

  Meanwhile, radioactive smoke continues to billow from the roof and vents, with most of the plutonium release occurring after 4:10 p.m. After burning for nearly six hours, the fire is considered more or less extinguished by eight o’clock.

  NEVER MIND that no one is warned. Few people even know the fire happened. A small number of people in Denver notice the smoke on the horizon. I’m home with my siblings. We’re having our baths, putting on our pajamas, and getting ready for our Sunday-evening television ritual: The Wonderful World of Disney.

  The day after the fire, the Rocky Mountain News runs a small story on page 28. A plant spokesman states that the fire “released a small amount of radioactive plutonium contamination,” all contained on site. The article appears just below a photo of the Pet of the Week.

  No one pays much attention. My father skims the paper each day. If he sees the article, he doesn’t mention it. My mother, who prefers paperback novels to newspapers, misses it completely. Nothing is mentioned on the five o’clock news, and there is no follow-up in the Sunday paper, which is the only day she bothers to pick it up. None of the neighbor kids say anything.

  There are many things to be done for our new house. My mother picks out carpet and orders draperies. The Welcome Wagon ladies pay a visit with a gift basket of cookies and discount coupons from the local bakery and dry cleaner. My father talks to insurance agents and fence companies. He wants to drill a well for our water, but it proves so difficult and expensive that he decides to wait.