Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  “He died with nothing more than the clothes on his back and the love of his family and friends,” says his son Bob Stone. “I know if he had it to do all over again, even knowing how it turned out, he would have done it just the same.”

  IN THE spring of 2010, four years after the decision in Cook v. Rockwell International Corporation, the appeal finally goes before a three-judge panel at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. The award, now at $926 million including damages and accrued interest, to more than twelve thousand Colorado homeowners is at stake. The case has been in litigation for nearly twenty years.

  Peter Nordberg and his colleagues present their case—again—before the judges. Peter returns home to Mykaila, once again exhausted, but confident that they’ve done a good job.

  My siblings and I tensely wait to hear the judges’ decision. No matter what happens, there will be no compensation for us. Even so, not just our troubled years but our best years as a family were in Bridledale, and we loved it. We loved the land and we loved the house. We want some sense of justice.

  I am hopeful that the decision will stand. The evidence seems overwhelming. My brother, Kurt—who’s always teased me about wearing rose-colored glasses—is cynical. “Are you kidding, Kris?” he asks.

  He’s right. On September 2, 2010, the decision is overturned. The three-judge panel rules that under the law, the presence of plutonium on properties south and east of the plant at best shows only a risk and not actual damage to residents’ health or properties. “ ‘DNA damage and cell death’ do not constitute a bodily injury in the absence of the manifestation of an actual disease or injury,” the panel writes, later adding, “Plaintiffs must necessarily establish that plutonium particles released from Rocky Flats caused a detectable level of actual damage.” Decreased property values cannot, the panel further states, be counted as damage.

  The court also rules that the jury reached its decision based on faulty instructions that incorrectly stated the law.

  I am stunned.

  Peter Nordberg never hears the verdict.

  In April 2010, just after returning from the appeals court in Colorado, Peter buys tickets for Mykaila and their two daughters to see Garth Brooks in Las Vegas. He isn’t a fan himself, and as always he has plenty of work to do, but he wants them to have a good time. When Mykaila and the girls return from their trip, Peter is sick. It isn’t unusual for him to come back from Colorado tired after a stressful court proceeding; sometimes the altitude bothers him, though mostly he just needs to unwind. This time, though, it seems worse. Mykaila is worried. “I’m fine,” he tells her. He doesn’t want to go to the doctor; he hates doctors. In all their years of marriage, he’s only been to the doctor three times. Mykaila thinks, Okay, well, he’s just tired. He’s run a marathon of a case. He just needs rest.

  But on the third day he’s ill, Mykaila insists he go to the emergency room. He seems to worsen even as they drive, and by the time they get there, he can’t get out of the car and asks for a wheelchair. In the emergency room, Peter’s heart rate is above 250 and he can barely breathe.

  The doctors stabilize him and get him upstairs to a hospital room. He’s told he’ll be in the hospital for a day or two of observation. When Peter starts pestering the staff with lots of questions, Mykaila knows he’s back to his old self. “I feel a hundred percent better,” he says. From his bed, he makes a video for their son Brinkley. “I’m going to have dinner now. I will see you in a couple of days,” he says into the camera. “I love you. Good-bye.” Mykaila sits with him as he finishes dinner and starts to fall asleep.

  Suddenly all his vital signs go critical. His kidneys stop working. His lungs fill with fluid. “I’m drowning!” he cries. He loses consciousness. His heart quits. Doctors perform CPR and get his heart rate back. Over the next twelve hours, they lose him and bring him back six times. On the seventh time, they can’t resuscitate him.

  Mykaila, who’s never left his side, loses him as quickly as she found him.

  It turns out that Peter had a heart problem, a birth defect. His heart is four times the size it should be.

  Peter was fifty-four years old, and he and Mykaila had been married thirteen years. He left behind four children: Brinkley, age eleven; another son, age twenty-three; and twin eighteen-year-old stepdaughters. He died on his older son’s birthday, two weeks before the girls graduated from high school.

  Peter taught his children to be strong, and he taught them to be savvy. He told them that no one, not even the government, is above questioning. Ask respectfully, he said to them, but always question. You can’t sit and say nothing.

  Mykaila thinks about his writing, his research, the briefs that read almost like novels. One reason the trial was initially so successful was that Peter was able to take technical and complicated information and turn it into a story that helped the jurors understand Rocky Flats and all its implications. No one ever knew his health was at risk. For years, she says, “he’d been putting in twenty-hour days with a body that needed to be working three hours a day.”

  Mykaila is grateful for one thing: Peter will never know that the case he devoted his life to has been overturned, within the space of only a few minutes, by three judges on a sunny Colorado afternoon.

  THE DAMAGING effects of high doses of radiation are well documented. The effect of a high dose usually shows up shortly after a person is exposed, and the severity of the symptoms—including dysfunction or death of large numbers of cells, which can lead to cancer—increases with the dose.

  By contrast, the health effects of long-term, low-level radioactive contamination are not immediately obvious, and have been under debate ever since John Gofman’s 1969 recommendation that the AEC dramatically lower its threshold level. In 2000, however, scientists at Los Alamos wrote of low-level exposures, “Ionizing radiation of any kind can lead to alterations of a living cell’s genetic makeup, and sometimes those alterations trigger the uncontrolled growth and multiplication of that cell’s progeny, more commonly known as cancer.… Moreover, there is a substantial delay between the time of exposure and the appearance of the effect. If the effect is cancer, the delay ranges from several years for leukemia to decades for solid tumors.” A recent, three-nation study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) shows a relationship between external radiation and leukemia. And new studies by the DOE have found a relationship between external radiation dose and lung cancer at the Fernald site, and leukemia at the Savannah River site.

  Back in 1981, Dr. Carl Johnson reported a significantly higher rate of cancer in neighborhoods around Rocky Flats, data that was later confirmed by other studies. His research also showed a higher rate of thyroid cancer, particularly in females.

  Schoolmates Stacy and Curtis Bunce grew up down the road from us, in a historic house on Simms Avenue. Like us, they swam in the irrigation ditch. Like Tamara’s family, they had a garden in the backyard and their own well for water. The family lived in the house for thirty years.

  Stacy’s father died of cancer. Her mother has thyroid cancer. Curtis has cancer of the thyroid and neck lymph nodes as well as squamous cell carcinoma. Stacy has polycystic ovarian syndrome (an immune disorder that can cause infertility) and early chronic thyroiditis. “Nearly every family we know in the neighborhood has had some form of cancer or thyroid problem,” Curtis says.

  “We thought of Rocky Flats just as we thought about the grocery store down the road. It was just there,” Stacy adds. “We didn’t give it a second thought.”

  The Dunns’ story is similar. In 1984, John and Barbara Dunn moved to Colorado from South Carolina for John’s new job as a hotel manager in Boulder. They bought a home in a new housing development four miles downwind of Rocky Flats, not far from Bridledale. Each day when John drove to work, he passed the protesters and workers lining the road to the Rocky Flats entrance. He and Barbara knew little about Rocky Flats, and when Barbara asked people about it, she was told not to worry. When their daughter was b
orn, they named her Kristin after a Norwegian friend. Kristin played in the sandbox and swam in the shallow irrigation ditch that ran across the back of their property. The family had a vegetable garden.

  Eventually John was transferred and the family moved away. Years passed. In 2010, Kristin is a student at Michigan State when she comes home from college with what she thinks is a cold or virus. But there is a marble-sized swelling in her neck, and her symptoms worsen. When a biopsy comes back negative, the doctor suggests the mass be removed anyway. The surgeon is stitching her up when the lab calls the operating room with a diagnosis of advanced cancer. When Kristen awakens in the recovery room, her thyroid has been removed.

  When Kristin is first diagnosed, John jokes with a friend and co-worker, “I wonder if Rocky Flats has anything to do with it!” To his surprise he learns that another employee of the Boulder hotel, who lived in the very same neighborhood during that same time period, has a fifteen-year-old daughter with thyroid cancer. This girl has also just had her thyroid removed.

  Is it Rocky Flats? Tamara Meza’s doctor believes her brain tumors are likely caused by Rocky Flats. In November 2011, her cancer returned and she underwent surgery for a fifth brain tumor. And doctors have told the Bunce family that their cancers are not genetic or coincidental; they believe the family was exposed to radiation. Curtis Bunce’s doctor recommends that he look into assistance for people who have lived near facilities like Rocky Flats, something similar to the Fernald Medical Monitoring Program in Ohio.

  But there is no public health monitoring or medical assistance for people who live or lived near Rocky Flats.

  In April 2010, a group of citizens sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center independently raise funds to hire a lab to sample and test soil in two locations off the Rocky Flats site, one indoors and one outdoors. The indoor sample is taken from a crawl space beneath a house built in 1960 about one mile southeast of the site, not far from my childhood home. The study finds plutonium in breathable form in the crawl-space sample, and possibly in the outdoor sample.

  The group sends letters to pertinent government officials with three recommendations: establish a program for sampling dust in surface soil at and around Rocky Flats for its plutonium content; maintain the wildlife refuge as open space that remains closed to the public; and establish a program to monitor the health of people living in the affected areas. The DOE responds indirectly to the first recommendation and not at all to the others; the Fish and Wildlife Service responds to none of them.

  In September 2011 the citizen group hires technical specialists to do another, more extensive sampling along a road next to the site, near where significant home construction is under way, as well as other nearby locations. Testing is done farther out from the site for comparison purposes. The Fish and Wildlife Service declines permission for the group to enter the refuge. As of this writing, results are pending and further analysis continues.

  Were we—are we—living under the protection of the bomb, or under its shadow?

  WE LIVE with the deadly legacy of nuclear weapons. The graphite bricks used by Enrico Fermi in the first “atomic pile” during the Manhattan Project are now buried in a Cook County forest preserve. The Hanford site in Washington holds the acid used to extract plutonium for the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. The manufacture of each container of enriched uranium, each reactor fuel element, and each gram of plutonium created a wide range of radioactive waste, all of which must be analyzed, categorized, handled, and stored differently. Much of it is so toxic that it has to be specially treated before it can be stored or disposed of, and it must be isolated for hundreds of centuries.

  The technical challenges of storing or dealing with radioactive waste are daunting, partly because radioactive waste can remain toxic for such vast lengths of time—from 10,000 to millions of years. The most problematic elements are neptunium-237, with a half-life of 2 million years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,000 years. It will be 240,000-plus years before the plutonium we made in the 1940s will approach the end of its radioactive life. Radioactive waste must be stored and managed in a stable place—safe from earthquakes, water, or other weather elements—and be under the constant watchful eye of stable human institutions or governments. Government agencies struggle with how to communicate to future generations how lethal these storage sites are. Signs in English will likely be inadequate, and perhaps are even today. Linguists are working to develop symbols or pictures that will warn of contamination and can last hundreds and thousands of years.

  The DOE and the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment continue to state that Rocky Flats and the surrounding areas are completely safe. In a 2009 promotional video, “From Weapons to Wildlife,” Carl Spreng of the Colorado Department of Health says he looks forward to Rocky Flats opening to the public. “That’s an exciting prospect. These lands have been essentially protected for many years because they were part of the buffer zone of Rocky Flats, and it’s an example of some pristine prairie areas that will be a valuable asset to the citizens in the area and the state of Colorado. The land is,” he emphasizes, “a jewel.”

  The land is not pristine. Some of the most hazardous materials known to mankind remain on the site. You can’t see, smell, or taste any of it. In September 2004, in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, 81 percent of the commenting public rejected public access to the refuge and felt that it should be permanently closed.

  Even some workers express concern over the cleanup. Shirley Garcia worked at Rocky Flats for fifteen years, starting out in 1982 in Building 371. She was one of the few women who loaded salt and plutonium into huge furnaces, working in heavy lead-lined gloves and pulling the crucibles out of the furnaces. “It all comes down to cost,” she says. “There’s just not enough money to get it done. I’m afraid if we don’t have a good enough cleanup now, we’re not going to get another chance. This is our one and only chance. In the past, with the government, if you messed up, they would throw money at you, and you’d go do it again. This is not going to be the case this time. We’re going to have one shot and one shot only.”

  The DOE believes the cleanup is adequate and the site is safe. “Everybody’s allowed to have misconceptions,” notes the current DOE site manager at Rocky Flats. “I think that once [people] get out here and experience it, then it will be their decision as to whether or not they want to maintain those old preconceptions or not. I think what they’ll find out is that there’s nothing out here but great stuff.… I don’t see there being a risk here.”

  The DOE readily admits that groundwater at several areas below the Rocky Flats site is contaminated. However, current testing of wells along the Rocky Flats property line “suggest[s] that the groundwater contamination plumes remain on site.” John Rampe, a former Energy Department environmental scientist, believes the refuge is safe. “We find occasional plutonium or other contaminants that don’t meet the state standards,” he says. “When we find it, we remove it. We have removed dozens of miles of soil, scraped off the top layers and sent them to waste facilities.” A spokesman from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says, “There is absolutely no reason to warn people about this place. The refuge is safe; it would only scare people.”

  ON AN August morning in 2010, I return to Colorado to visit Karma and my father, who is now in an assisted-living home. The flight into Denver International Airport is rough; a summer thunderstorm that threatens to turn into a tornado tosses the small plane like a cat tosses a mouse, and all the passengers look a little green. It’s a relief to touch ground.

  Karma and I decide to take Dad to his favorite pizza place for lunch. He grows tired of cafeteria food. It’s a beautiful afternoon with the brisk, clear air of Colorado that’s like nowhere else. We sit out on the patio, overlooking a mountain stream. My father’s health has declined in recent years, but his mind is sharp. He reads all the books I send him and he wants to ta
lk about them. He pays attention to politics. He asks us both about our work and our lives and seems genuinely interested. We order pizza and a couple of beers. My dad has a Coke.

  Ordinarily, we never talk about the past. This time, though, I have a question. I’ve carried it in my mind for more than thirty years. It’s the one question my mother said I must never ask.

  “Dad,” I ask between bites, “do you remember that car accident we had so long ago?”

  He pauses and considers for a moment. “Yes.” No wariness. A straight answer.

  “Did you know I broke my neck in that accident?”

  “Oh.” He looks surprised, then his face drops. “Oh, no.” He puts down his slice of pizza and looks down for a long moment. I’m not sure how to read the silence. He furrows his brow.

  Then he looks up. “No, I didn’t know.” His eyes behind his glasses are moist but direct. “I’m sorry, Kris.”

  I find it hard to speak.

  We break the silence by each reaching for another slice. “I broke my back in that accident,” he adds as a kind of afterthought. “Still gives me trouble.”

  Karma suggests dessert, and we move on to happier subjects. When we get up to leave, Dad quickly wraps the last three pieces of pizza in a napkin and buttons them inside his shirt.

  “Why don’t we get a box for that?” I ask.

  “No, no,” he says, shaking his head and grinning. “It’s better this way. I feel like I’m getting away with something.”

  THE NEXT day, I rent a car and drive the sixteen miles from Denver out to what used to be Rocky Flats. There are new roads where no roads were before, houses and strip malls and office buildings where once there were fields. I drive down Indiana Street, to the spot where I used to wait at the east gate in a long early-morning line of cars. There’s nothing here now. The land is empty and still except for a number of unmarked monitoring devices and several No Trespassing signs. Legislation that would have required additional signage informing visitors of what happened here, and why it might still be dangerous, has twice been defeated. The wide paved road leading to the guard checkpoint is gone, the asphalt dug up and covered with soil and low grasses that sway slightly in the wind.