Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  Be prepared? I’m living paycheck to paycheck.

  On November 4, a memo from the EG&G manager of Rocky Flats warns that if negotiations between the private company that provides security services for the plant and the union do not come to a mutually agreeable conclusion, “a guard force work stoppage could occur.” There’s no mutual agreement. The guards go on strike. People work on staggered schedules and double shifts. Some guards are in favor of the strike; some are against it. No one knows if they’ll get hired back.

  All of us are nervous about our jobs in one way or another. I read in the company newsletter that four hundred to seven hundred people will “voluntarily or involuntarily” leave their jobs by the end of 1995. The blow is softened somewhat for some permanent employees by severance packages and educational and training benefits, including a two-and-a-half-hour seminar addressing the phenomenon of LCS, or “layoff casualty syndrome.”

  In the women’s bathroom, someone’s taped to the mirror a newspaper ad for the Denver Rescue Mission that says, “Give the Gift of Food This Christmas: Buy a Hot Meal for a Homeless Person.” Over the photo of a man with a plate of food, the words “Rocky Flats Employee Picture Here” are written in large black letters.

  I look at myself in the mirror. My hair is pulled back and my face looks harsh in the white light. There are deep circles under my eyes. My mother often tells me how tired I look.

  The guard strike ends, but no one seems happy about it.

  There’s some good news, however. The plant is buzzing with a report that Hazel O’Leary, the first woman and first African American to serve as secretary of energy, will visit the facility. I hope to see her; under her directorship, the Clinton administration has released millions of previously classified documents related to the Cold War—a move that’s been met with skepticism by my co-workers. Outside the plant, though, she’s a folk hero of sorts, famous for saying, “This is not your father’s DOE.” But on the day she visits, although most of the managerial and engineering staff get to hear her speech, I’m left behind to handle the phones.

  “Hey, don’t sweat it,” my turkey-sandwich lunch friend says in consolation. “She says all the right things, but she’s still administration. Do you think she’ll pay a visit to the hot zone and see how things really are? No. The managers, the administration, they never go down there. They don’t go down in the bowels of the plant. They keep their hands clean.”

  I’m never sure what’s truth and what’s hearsay.

  November turns into December. At the end of a long day I drive home and pick up Sean and Nathan from the babysitter’s. Her name is Jennifer and she’s in high school; I pay her to watch the boys for a couple of hours after school. Today she’s frazzled. The boys are tired and fussy and a little wild; it’s been a long afternoon. She hands them over to me with no small sense of exasperation.

  They fuss and wiggle and refuse to get in their car seats. I’m tired, too. I lay down the law. “Sean and Nathan! If you don’t settle down, I’m going to take you to the zoo to live with the wild animals!”

  They get in their seats. But nothing will settle them down until we arrive home and have plates of spaghetti with meatballs and chocolate milk, and their eyes grow big and sleepy. Sean does his arithmetic problems and I help Nathan practice his spelling while he takes his bubble bath. He soaps his hair up into a spiky Mohawk as I sit on the floor and read him his words.

  I tuck them into bed. They’re too sleepy for a story, and I’m too tired to read to them.

  “Mom?” Sean asks as I turn off the light. “Did it take you this long to grow up when you were my age?”

  I pause. He’s five years old.

  He doesn’t wait for an answer. He has another question. “You’re not really going to send us to the zoo to live with the wild animals, are you?” He looks like he’s given this some serious thought.

  “No, sweetie,” I say. I feel a catch in my throat, and I kiss his forehead. “We’re all staying right here.”

  I go downstairs and take off my shoes. I make a cup of tea, stretch out on the couch, and turn on the television. I’ll give myself a few minutes before I go to bed.

  Suddenly I sit bolt upright. Rocky Flats is on television.

  ABC Nightline is interviewing people I know. The narrator, Dave Marash, talks about years of contamination at Rocky Flats, and how production was halted after the 1989 FBI raid. Since then, Rocky Flats has been in a state of limbo, wanting to resume building nuclear weapons while trying to deal with environmental regulations the plant had been able to avoid in the past. Rocky Flats has five of the nation’s top ten most dangerous buildings in the country, Marash says. Building 771 is number one. Building 776 is number two.

  Marash reports that an internal memo shows that as much as 13.2 metric tons (or 14.5 U.S. tons) of plutonium may be stockpiled around the plant, including more than five thousand sealed containers of waste, many containing a buildup of hydrogen gas that can cause a container to rupture and scatter plutonium. Cans that were not supposed to be stored for more than a year have been stored for five. Mark Silverman, the DOE manager at Rocky Flats, appears onscreen. I know his voice well from the PA system at work. “We know, for example, it’s in the vents. It’s in the ductwork. We know it’s in the glove boxes, in the lathes. We know it’s in the walls and ceilings. We just can’t tell you exactly how much is at any given location in a lot of places.” Silverman adds that there was very poor record-keeping at Rocky Flats, and “we do not have as-built drawings. So a building was built, and then added onto, and we literally don’t know where every pipe is or every line is.”

  Have a nice day, I think. I grab my journal and start scribbling their words.

  “This may look,” Marash says, “like an anonymous stretch of asphalt.” My heart jumps. That’s the 903 Pad that I walk by on my lunch hour. “From here,” he continues, “contaminated groundwater leaked down the ridge towards the plain and the northern and western suburbs of Denver. Some of the barrels rusted and started leaking … and the migration of toxic waste can be traced on a map of drainage patterns in the Rocky Flats area. Walnut Creek drains down and dumps into Great Western Reservoir, and then Woman Creek comes down and feeds the Standley Lake reservoir. Samples from the bottoms of both reservoirs show deposits of plutonium. The plutonium traveled through the water and through the air.” Dr. Gale Biggs appears on screen, noting that, according to the findings of Dr. Harvey Nichols in a report to the Department of Energy, “the plutonium levels do not drop off as you go farther away from the plant.”

  Marash interviews Jim Kelly—the longtime worker at Rocky Flats who was on the roof during the Mother’s Day fire—who shakes his head. “It was production, production, production,” Kelly says. “Safety was a word. It wasn’t really practiced. The job was to get the product out the door, and if you got it done safely, okay, and if you didn’t, they’d turn their head.”

  Marash then talks about the grand jury investigation that began in 1989 after the FBI raid. He interviews Ryan Ross (also known as Bryan Abas), the journalist who broke the story of the runaway grand jury to the press. “The jurors thought that anybody who’d committed a crime should be held accountable for it,” Ross says. “They didn’t care whether they worked in the federal government, or in the private sector, or how high up in the government they were.” He notes that a dozen sections were taken out of the jury report. “Almost all of them had to do with the conclusions of the jury that the illegal conduct they found that Rockwell was engaged in was continuing to be done under the successor contractor [EG&G].”

  One of the grand jurors appears onscreen. “I had nightmares, you know. I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about what I had heard for a whole week in that jury room.”

  Paula Elofson-Gardine, a resident who’s lived downwind from the plant since 1964, notes that housing development around Rocky Flats continues to grow as home developers lobby the county planning commission. “The greed of developers,” she says
, “is matched only by their customers, homeowners who are kept ignorant thanks to the sealed grand jury report.”

  I pace the dark living room for an hour before putting on my nightgown. So many of the things I feared, or were afraid to even think about, are true. It’s real, and it’s still going on. I take up my journal again. I just saw Rocky Flats on ABC Nightline. Oh my God. I can’t sleep.

  I turn off the light and wait for the morning.

  THE NEXT morning I drive into work expecting the world to have changed somehow, and it has not. Deer are grazing close to the road and I glimpse the orange tags on their ears. A light dusting of snow covers the grass, pink in contrast, and the clouds overhead are dark in the morning sky. The mountains are deep blue, almost black. On days like this the beauty of the land, of what is now the buffer zone, is stunning.

  People are quiet at work. There’s the comforting click-clack of fingers on keyboards, a slight scent of nail polish in the air. A box of doughnuts stands open on one desk and a copy of People magazine peeks out from a stack of papers on another. The managers’ doors are predictably closed.

  But later that afternoon, when many of the managers are out of the building, people gather around Anne’s desk. Her desk occupies a semineutral zone, where people are freer with their comments. It also has a straight-line view of the front door, so we can scatter quickly if needed. Everyone has seen the Nightline report.

  “It’s true that 771 is a mess,” says one of the project engineers. “It’s an old building, and a dangerous building. You have to be real careful down there in the hot zone. The hourly workers get some compensation, but what’s the point? Those guys take a lot of that stuff home with them, whether they know it or not.”

  “If someone’s afraid to be plantside, or afraid to go down to the 700 area, then they shouldn’t be working here,” a secretary snorts. “It’s more dangerous working at a Federal Express office than here. We have strict safety rules—”

  “The media?” someone interrupts. “You believe them? Oh right. Some bubble-headed bleached blonde, airing everyone’s laundry. I don’t believe a word of the media.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” Anne says. She pauses. “How is the public supposed to know what to believe?”

  “There is a lot of waste at Rocky Flats,” adds an older woman with beehive hair. “A lot of time and energy wasted, too. As a Christian, that’s hard for me to deal with. It’s the taxpayers’ money, after all. But someone’s got to have this job and these benefits. Someone’s got to do it. Why not me?”

  Another guy thinks that the whole thing has been orchestrated. “They manipulate the press to get more money out here,” he says. “Now there will be fewer layoffs and more money from Washington. It’s good for us in the long run.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m afraid to open my mouth. Inside I am shaking with anger and fear.

  “Well,” Anne says, “I guess the only certain and eternal things in life are taxes, death, and Rocky Flats.” Everyone laughs. It’s a saying that’s often repeated at the plant.

  LATER THAT afternoon, just before I leave for the day, Debra catches me in the hallway. “I have something for you!” she whispers. Her eyes are dancing. “It’s in my car. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

  For once there’s no wind. The air is sharp with the slightly metallic scent of snow.

  “Here!” Debra announces. From her backseat she extracts a large platter, black faux-marble plastic, wrapped in cellophane. It’s stacked with Christmas goodies: jam cookies, peanut butter thumbprints, sugar cookies with brightly colored frosting, braided bread, and six or seven other things, all tied with crimson ribbon. “I made them all myself!” she declares.

  I am overcome. It must have taken her weeks to do all that baking. “Thank you, Debra.” I feel bad. I hadn’t thought of anything for her.

  “I want you and your boys to have a nice Christmas,” she trills. She jumps in her car and waves out the window.

  I pick Sean and Nathan up from Jennifer’s and they jump with delight at the tray that takes up the entire front seat. We get home and I set it on the kitchen counter. I let Heathcliff in from the backyard and take the boys upstairs to wash up for dinner.

  I come back downstairs and the tray has vanished.

  “What’s this?” I exclaim. It’s disappeared into thin air. I walk into the living room, where Heathcliff is sprawled on the couch, half asleep. He’s no longer a puppy; his basset hound barrel of a body takes up half the sofa. One paw drops languidly off the edge.

  It takes me a moment to realize that the tray—with not one crumb remaining—is on the floor next to him.

  The next day I see Debra at her desk. “How did they like it?” she asks. “Did the boys like the cookies?”

  I can’t bear to tell her the truth, or even think about what the boys’ faces looked like when they came downstairs for their dinner.

  “They were—are—delicious,” I say. “Everyone in my household just loved them!”

  CHRISTMAS ARRIVES, and with it—just days before—a paycheck big enough for me to buy gifts. The Sunnyside Temp Agency is raffling off holiday turkeys. I don’t win, but I get a coupon for ten dollars off a turkey at the local grocery store, and that helps. We have a real Christmas tree that takes up half the living room, and Sean and Nathan argue about whether or not the dove on the top of the tree is really a chicken. Jasmine shimmies up the tree trunk, hiding in the branches, and occasionally a paw shoots out to take a swipe at a Christmas ornament.

  All that negative stuff about Rocky Flats is just a bad dream.

  And then I have a real dream about Mark. I haven’t thought about him in a long time. The dream takes place on a dark, windy night, and for some reason I’m working late at Rocky Flats. The wind is intense, and I go out to crack the windows on my car, which I often have to do in real life at the plant to prevent the windows from blowing out. I see someone else in the dark parking lot, walking toward a white van. Is it another worker? The person turns, and I see it’s Mark.

  I’ve aged, and he hasn’t. He’s still in his early twenties. I look into his face, into his eyes. His face is the clearest I’ve ever seen it in a dream. I reach out and hug him, and it feels exactly as it always felt, with my hipbones just below his leather belt.

  He pushes back and looks at me. He wants to tell me something, but before he can speak, the dream ends.

  When Randy Sullivan began work at Rocky Flats in 1991, he discovered a world unto its own.

  For his first eighteen months, he worked in the fire prevention department, learning the layouts of the various buildings. It was confusing at first. The confusion was intentional, he learned; many of the plutonium buildings had been designed so as to slow down anyone—terrorists, for example—who didn’t belong there. It was like an old medieval village with twisting streets meant to prevent invaders from getting to the palace. But that made it difficult for employees and firefighters, too. Building 881 was a serpentine maze of curves and twists. Building 371 had three underground levels with multiple staircases that led to different points in the building. All the buildings were filled with large machinery in close quarters, which made it difficult to move around. The fire protection systems were all located at the top.

  There were fourteen firefighters and three officers on each shift. Randy’s schedule was exhausting: twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, twenty-four hours on, and then four days off. Like the guards, he and the other firefighters were expected to work out at the company gym and keep themselves in shape.

  Randy’s education in hazardous materials included special training in how to extinguish a fire in a glove box. Since water was off limits, he was taught to use a glove-box entry horn, a fire extinguisher with a special fitting, like a plastic bag, that tucked around the part of the box that held the arms of the lead-lined gloves. Randy learned to use a knife to cut out the lead gloves, push the horn inside the glove b
ox, and discharge the CO2 extinguisher.

  Randy was also trained as a fire medic, which meant he could respond to cardiac arrests and major traumas. Occasionally the Rocky Flats firefighters were called to handle car accidents on Highway 93, sometimes fatal, on the west side of the plant, even though it was offsite. Highway 93 was particularly treacherous due to the high winds and extreme weather conditions in the area. In the wintertime, the highway could turn into a skating rink of black ice, and winds of one hundred miles per hour were not uncommon. Employees’ cars parked in the parking lot often looked like they’d been sandblasted.

  Fires at the plant, though, were his main concern. There had been more than two hundred over the years, and he’d heard stories about the 1957 and 1969 fires and how close the plant came to a significant radioactive release. No one really seemed to know the facts. “Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d had a release in this kind of wind?” he said to a friend on a particularly windy day. “There’d be no one left from here to New Mexico!”

  There was a tendency to downplay the fires to the public, particularly in the late 1970s. When a reporter learned of a fire on a loading dock outside a plutonium waste-processing building, Rockwell’s director of information services, Felix Owen, told the press it hadn’t been reported because it was small and “people are scared of fires at Rocky Flats. I don’t need to upset them about a little trash fire on a dock.” Sometimes firefighters from other firehouses were brought in to fight fires as well. The Arvada and Fairmount fire districts responded repeatedly to fires when thousands of leaking drums stood out on a windswept field at the Rocky Flats Industrial Park, near the plant. Firefighters fought those fires not knowing what was inside the drums or even knowing if it was safe to use water. Acrid smoke from the fires rose into the sky and floated over nearby communities.