Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  Despite the dangers, Randy enjoyed his job. He liked the camaraderie with the other firefighters and the guards. Each year they had a volleyball tournament at the site, the “hose draggers” versus the “pistol monkeys.” Despite the intense competition, the guards and firefighters were like brothers. They looked out for one another on the job. At the firehouse, the firefighters cooked meals together. They had a garden just outside the firehouse, with roses that “nothing can kill,” but they didn’t bother growing tomatoes—who knew if it was safe to eat them?

  The mood at the plant could be prickly. During the Gulf War in 1991, it could take as long as an hour and a half to get through the security gate while the guards conducted car searches. Randy didn’t mind—he knew it was necessary. And not everyone supported the mission of Rocky Flats. Once when they drove the fire truck through a residential area in Boulder, people threw eggs.

  On the other side of the situation were the employees who weren’t happy when it became clear that the plant would not resume production of plutonium triggers. Randy had started work two years after the FBI raid shut down most production at the plant. Hiring, ironically, was at an all-time high. Then the news came down that the military mission had been canceled and Rocky Flats might be torn down. There was talk about trying to clean up the site. After all he’d learned, and all he’d heard, Randy didn’t think it was possible. He and his fellow firefighters thought it would be somewhere between thirty and fifty years before any serious cleanup could occur. There was no way they could close the entire place down, clean up all the buildings, and tear ’em down and make it prairie again, he said. His buddies agreed.

  But despite all the complaining, most people did the same work, kept the same salary, got the same benefits. It was the same job. Just a different mission.

  And things were looking up for Randy. He was promoted. Now he was a captain like his father, just a different kind of captain. He was proud of the work he did. He knew all those buildings like the back of his hand.

  ONE DAY Diane asks me to lunch.

  She’s been planning it for days. “Let’s go to Boulder,” she says, and I’m surprised. I didn’t know she had off-site lunch privileges. But she’s my supervisor, so I agree, and we drive to a Mexican restaurant. She orders a small margarita for each of us—“Just one!” she says, laughing—and we talk about our kids. It feels odd to be suddenly so familiar with her. She’s treating me like an old friend. I’m not quite sure what to think of it. She’s tough, almost harsh, and yet fiercely loyal to her family and even to Rocky Flats. When she speaks of her daughter, her voice is tender.

  Our enchiladas arrive, and the margaritas start to take effect. “You know,” she says, leaning forward, “I might not be here in a year.”

  “Really?”

  “I need to get a different job.” She waves her fingers in the air. “It’s my husband. He’s taking voluntary separation from the plant.” Diane’s husband works in one of the more dangerous areas at Rocky Flats. “He wants to leave. He wants us both to leave.” She sighs. “But it’s different for me on the outside. I’ll never be able to get a job like this.” It’s not just the pay but the benefits. Once you’ve worked at Rocky Flats, it’s not uncommon for other companies to consider you a health risk.

  “I don’t believe that,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll find something.”

  The waiter fills our water glasses and brings extra sour cream. I’ve ordered blue corn enchiladas with black bean relish and sopapillas, my favorite. Diane’s plate, too, is filled to overflowing. It will be hard to go back to work.

  “I’ll end up being a secretary in a real estate office or something. At what? Five bucks an hour?” She shakes her head and laughs in disbelief. When she leans toward me again, her eyes are friendly but intense.

  “Listen,” she says. “There’s a lot of unethical stuff going on down in 771.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Bad stuff. Immoral stuff.”

  I think, Do I really want to know this?

  “There’s no responsibility,” she continues.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Covering things up. CYA stuff.”

  “For what? Accidents?”

  “They cover things up and make them look better than they are,” she says. Her face is flushed. “The whole plant. You know what I mean? I’m not supposed to talk. My husband’s not supposed to talk, either.”

  I look down at my plate.

  “It’s all about money,” she says. “No one wants truth.”

  I nod. I’m there for the money, too.

  “Listen,” she says again. “You’ve got options. I don’t. You’re in school, you’ll get your degree.” She pushes back her empty margarita glass. “If I were you, I’d get out of here,” she says. “Understand?”

  The check arrives, and Diane pays. We rise, and by the time we reach the door, it’s as if the conversation has never happened. She turns to me and smiles her professional Rocky Flats smile. “Thanks so much for having lunch with me today, Kristen.”

  I thank her, too, and we go back to the office.

  Later that night, I record everything in my journal. I hate it at Rocky Flats so badly I can hardly stand it. I have applied for part-time teaching jobs—I won’t graduate until the spring—but nothing has turned up. And I still don’t feel well. Normally a night owl, I’ve been going to bed at eight, right after I tuck the boys in. I take vitamins and protein powder and do my yoga exercises. Nothing seems to help. I see yet another doctor, and they can’t figure out what’s wrong. My glands hurt. My lymph nodes are swollen. I’m always tired.

  Life feels like a treadmill.

  TAMARA SMITH, the girl who grew up near our house in Bridledale, is several years younger than I, but our lives have followed similar paths. She rode with the same local riding club, and graduated from the same high school, Pomona High. She’d always dreamed of being a teacher, and she attended Brigham Young University in Utah. In addition to getting her degree, she met her future husband, David Meza.

  As a child and a teenager, she was plagued with severe allergies, but her health seemed to improve slightly when she was in college. In 2000 that changes. She’s always had headaches, off and on, but these seem different. She’s just started teaching, and she thinks the headaches might be from fatigue. She makes light of them with her friends. “Do you have the medicine that will take this headache away?” she asks. Nothing ever seems to work. There’s also something odd about her hands, which are covered with some kind of eczema, like a burn. When she’s teaching a class, sometimes people come up to her afterward and ask, “What happened to you?”

  Nothing has happened to her.

  Tamara comes from a family that doesn’t go to doctors. They still live off the land on Standley Lake, grow their own vegetables, raise their own beef cattle, and like to do things their own way according to their faith.

  But after a long period of health problems and intensifying headaches, Tamara goes to see a doctor in 2000. Soon she’s going every month. At first she’s told it’s just asthma. They tell her it’s stress, it’s fatigue, it’s her imagination. It’s pneumonia, then bronchitis, then mono. But the tests all come back negative.

  There are several frantic trips to the emergency room when Tamara can’t breathe or faints repeatedly. She’s diagnosed with a thyroid problem. After another trip to the emergency room, her husband insists on a CT scan of her brain.

  They find a tumor in Tamara’s brain the size of a large lemon.

  PETER NORDBERG began his new job as a young attorney in Philadelphia in 1990. He was thirty-four years old, just a few years out of law school. Little did he know that he was going to spend nearly every waking hour of the rest of his life on the Rocky Flats class-action lawsuit.

  Following the FBI raid on Rocky Flats, in the summer of 1989, a group of deeply concerned residents from Arvada and the surrounding area gathered to discuss whether it might be feasible to sue Rockwell and Do
w Chemical over the migration of plutonium onto their properties. They narrowed their concerns to two issues: a request for medical monitoring for people who lived near the plant, which was the higher priority, and the nuisance or trespass issue regarding the effects on the properties of local homeowners due to plutonium and other contaminants that have escaped from the plant. Property values in surrounding neighborhoods have decreased substantially because of their proximity to Rocky Flats. Of the class representatives, Merilyn Cook is the one to lend her name to the case. Cook v. Rockwell International Corporation is filed in January 1990.

  The lead trial counsel will be Merrill Davidoff and Peter Nordberg from the Berger & Montague firm in Philadelphia, with Davidoff as the Berger lead attorney, and Louise Rosell of Waite, Schneider, Bayless & Chesley in Cincinnati. Local counsel Silver & DeBoskey of Denver also provide trial assistance. The defense immediately begins filing a wave of motions to dismiss and for summary judgment. Much of the information needed for the case is classified, and the DOE controls most of the millions of pages of documents relevant to operations at Rocky Flats as well as to the litigation. After a year of published decisions, opinions, and orders, the judge denies the defendants’ motions in most significant respects, including Rockwell’s position that there are a number of statute-of-limitations issues that vary with each defendant. He rules that because there is ongoing contamination and an ongoing threat of future contamination, the statute of limitations does not apply. In 1991, however, the court disallows the medical monitoring issue, so the only issue at stake is property values.

  It’s the kind of case Peter has been waiting for all his life.

  Peter’s family is Scandinavian, his father a professor, his mother a second-grade schoolteacher. He was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a Milwaukee suburb. He attended Catholic parochial school and then Shorewood High, a public high school, where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. He liked to imagine himself as the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, a fantasy bolstered by an AP award for best editorial in a Wisconsin high school newspaper.

  Peter earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, and then a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985. One of his many awards was for the highest grade in a criminal procedure class. His first work as an attorney was at the Hanford site, where he worked with people who believed that their diseases or health conditions might have resulted from Hanford exposures. He and the other attorneys met with local residents to hear their stories. One story in particular stuck in his mind. He interviewed a man with a tumor in his stomach, his belly so distended that it looked like he’d swallowed two basketballs. The man worked on a local farm near the Hanford site, shearing sheep. When a Geiger counter was placed next to the sheep’s wool after he’d just sheared it, the Geiger counter “went crazy.”

  From that job, Peter took the position with Berger & Montague in Philadelphia in 1990. His first day of work was the very day they filed Cook v. Rockwell International Corporation.

  Peter is put on the case. The first year is consumed by motions to dismiss and, due to the high level of secrecy and the sealed records related to the FBI raid and grand jury investigation that began in 1989, factual information is hard to come by.

  Soon Peter is working eighteen hours a day on the case. There are no vacations, and not much time for a social life. His Philadelphia apartment is on the same block as the law firm, and he can see the door of the law firm from his window. It doesn’t matter if he’s at home or at work. He’s always working on Rocky Flats.

  The months drag on. To Peter, it feels like a cat-and-mouse game with the defendants. The delays are endless, and it’s always one step forward, two steps back. The DOE is not very cooperative. They don’t seem concerned about time or money. The Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies private contractors from potential damages, also protects them from legal fees and expenses. Dow and Rockwell are the defendants in this case, but their legal costs—which will eventually exceed $60 million—are paid by the DOE (in other words, the taxpayer). At one point, Colorado U.S. district judge John Kane finds the entire DOE in contempt of court for delays in turning over documents to the plaintiffs. And there are problems with the documents that have been released: thousands of pages have information blacked out—or simply blanked out—for what the government says are national security reasons. Documentation from the FBI raid and grand jury testimony is completely sealed.

  Peter is particularly mystified by the DOE’s approach to MUF. More than a ton of plutonium is apparently missing. The defendants claim that the plutonium is not actually missing—that there are errors on paper, accounting miscalculations, plutonium caught in ducts and vents, and so on—but Peter finds this preposterous. The DOE wants citizens to trust their measurements of plutonium, and its risks, down to the tiniest fraction of a gram, yet they can’t account for thousands of pounds of this same material? It would be funny if the circumstances weren’t so dire.

  On the night of January 29, 1997—Peter’s forty-first birthday—his life takes an unexpected turn. As usual, he’s alone in his apartment, working on Rocky Flats. Mykaila, an employee of America Online, is working as a late-night Internet monitor and sends him a happy-birthday message. Every night at midnight, as part of her job, she sets her computer so she can’t receive any return messages and then she sends an instant message to the thousands of customers who have a birthday that day. She enjoys being the first person to wish them a happy birthday, compliments of America Online.

  This night, for some reason, she forgets to turn off the instant messaging program. Peter is working on the web. He gets the birthday wish. What a nice surprise, he thinks. He texts back. Thank you, he says.

  You’re welcome, she replies.

  Thousands of miles separate them, but there’s an instant intuitive bond in the flurry of messages that follows. They text again the next night, and the night after that. It’s an almost uncanny connection. For months Peter and Mykaila carry on an Internet and telephone relationship, talking for hours each night. They finally meet for the first time in person in April, and marry in May. At the wedding Peter says, “It took half my life to find you,” and Mykaila feels the same way.

  But there is no honeymoon. Peter had been working on the Rocky Flats case for six years before he met Mykaila, and she’s heard all about it. She’s just as passionate about the Rocky Flats case as Peter is. She moves to Philadelphia from Texas with her two daughters, and soon she’s working side by side with Peter.

  After their marriage, Peter works mostly from home, and one entire wing of the house becomes his office. Mykaila and the children—her two daughters and Peter’s son from an earlier marriage—spread out a picnic dinner on the office floor while Peter eats at his desk. Soon the children are almost as conversant with levels of plutonium and contamination and criminal trespass as Peter is.

  Peter is an engaged but somewhat unconventional parent. The rest of the household adjusts, more or less, to his round-the-clock schedule. Mykaila finds him in the kitchen with the girls, teaching them to do the twist to Chubby Checker, or playing basketball in the driveway in the middle of the night with his son. And then he goes back to work.

  Eventually he adopts the girls, and Mykaila and Peter have another son, a special-needs child named Brinkley.

  The Rocky Flats class-action lawsuit, and the more than twelve thousand people it represents, is the center of the household. Peter works on birthdays and Christmas Eve, and even on Christmas Day if Mykaila lets him get away with it. But Mykaila’s never had a single regret. She understands what drives his work, and she feels he’s dealing with attorneys who don’t have the same moral code that he does. He cares about Hanford and Rocky Flats, and the people whose properties were devalued and health was threatened. “If one person dies because of Rocky Flats,” he tells her, “we can’t let that person die in vain. I want to make sure their kids and their grandkids know that once upon a time, someone put up one hell of a f
ight.”

  After years of marriage, her heart is still in her throat every single time she sees him.

  One evening, in the midst of pretrial preparation, Peter picks up the book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr, the story of a dramatic lawsuit by a group of citizens in a Boston suburb against two corporate giants that had secretly polluted the local water, causing leukemia in children. He reads page after page in horror. In many ways the story mirrors the Rocky Flats saga, and it’s a strong parallel to his own situation. He thinks about the plant and its history and all the people, all the stories, everything that’s happened, the broad range of characters and the scope of human tragedy. It’s Dickensian, he thinks.

  I THINK about the orange-tagged deer grazing in the buffer zone and the beef cattle on the other side of the fence. The rabbits with their radioactive feet and the tiny Preble’s meadow jumping mouse—are his little feet radioactive, too? The birds who chirp in the trees where I sit outside to eat my lunch and the prairie dogs who pop their heads up from their burrows when I walk around the site with Debra. Animals don’t heed boundary signs. What do those birds carry with them when they fly off into the sky? How far down do prairie dogs go when they burrow underground? What about the rabbits in my old backyard? Were they hot?

  Three weeks after my lunch with Diane, I quit. I’m offered a part-time job at the Colorado School of Mines, an engineering college in Golden, teaching literature to freshmen. It will carry me through until I graduate in May. There’s no doubt in my mind. The money isn’t as good and I’m not sure how I’ll keep the bills paid, but my time at Rocky Flats is over.

  “So you’re going to be teaching Shakespeare and Dickens to engineering students?” Mr. K laughs when he stops by to say good-bye. “Good luck with that!”

  I’m going to miss the people I work with, including Mr. K; George, the turkey-sandwich guy; Patricia and her geeky tech-writer pal; even Debra and Diane. I’ll miss the early-morning drives out to the east gate with the sun above the dark blue mountains.