Ben Ortiz had not heard it in ages when a government doctor asked him
if he knew what it meant. Ortiz, who was seeing the doctor at the top
secret Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab because he believed that toxic
exposures there had made him sick, knew exactly what it meant:
"It means keep your mouth shut," Ortiz said.
But Ortiz has not.
For 20 years, he has spoken out about sickness that he and fellow Los
Alamos workers suffer. Sitting in the home he built at the foothills of
the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, he looks out across the valley toward
the mesa top where the giant lab still operates.
Ortiz was one of the first workers to speak publicly about the ill
workers' plight, testifying to Congress about the need for a
compensation program because he thought it was the right thing to do.
And he was one of the first to file for compensation after the program
was created in 2000.
But Ortiz still has not been fully compensated, even though the
federal government has acknowledged that some of his many health
problems are work-related.
Ortiz said he believes that speaking out and getting his elected
representatives involved has cost him. He said an official at the
federal resource center set up to help workers with their claims told
him that every time his senator or congressman inquires on his behalf
about the delay, it only delays his case further.
Officials at the Denver office of the U.S. Department of Labor, which
runs the compensation program, told him that the massive three-ring
binder of evidence he had compiled with help from the office of his
congressman, Tom Udall, had been lost.
Ortiz, 70, is one of several leading advocates for the ill workers
nationwide who have experienced unexplained delays and unexplained
mistakes in their compensation claims.
"I don't think it's a coincidence," he said.
Not that Ortiz expected the road to be easy. He had long tried to
sound the alarm that toxic exposures at the weapons lab in New Mexico
had ruined his health and that of others.
Ortiz had endured humiliation when the Los Alamos doctor and two
others blamed his debilitating health problems on age (he was 50 at the
time) or his imagination. One even questioned if Ortiz was making
himself sick by practicing witchcraft.
"I wasn't going to let those people tell me I was imagining this," he
said.
Turns out he wasn't.
Three experts on the health effects of chemical exposure have said
that Ortiz's work at the atomic bomb laboratory caused his health
problems, which include liver damage, brain damage and blackouts.
Ortiz is losing control of his right hand. His speech and his senses
of smell and taste are damaged. He cannot identify the smell of coffee
or tell the difference between salt and sugar. Inhaling any chemicals —
even auto exhaust — sends him into migraine-like headaches.
Neurotoxicologist Raymond Singer, who has consulted with the Justice
Department and FBI, wrote in a report 15 years ago that "Mr. Ortiz was
poisoned by solvents and related substances at Los Alamos National
Laboratories, causing enduring neurotoxicity and neuropsychological
deficits."
Even that was not enough to qualify him for full compensation.
"I was a good employee," Ortiz said of his work as a mechanical
technician. He soldered silver and cadmium and worked bare-handed,
nearly elbow deep, in vats of chemical solvents. "They shouldn't do this
to employees."
Javier Manzano © The Rocky
Deadly Denial: 3-day special report
Photo by Javier Manzano
Richard Anderson gives his wife Janine
Anderson one of the 32 medications she has to take daily.
She lives with Richard in their home in Tennessee, 40 miles
from Oak Ridge, the nuclear weapons plant where both of them
worked for years.
MARYVILLE, Tenn. — Janine Anderson spent seven years as a
secretary at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation, one of the nation's
premier nuclear weapons development and production complexes.
But that safe-sounding office position didn't protect her from
the toxic exposure that has ravaged her body. Her lungs are scarred
with deadly beryllium, a key ingredient in atomic bombs. Her immune
system is attacking her body, which harbors an array of heavy metals
in toxic quantities. Her liver is so enlarged that it is threatening
to burst through her abdominal wall.
She states matter-of-factly that her prognosis is grim.
"Eventually my liver will crowd out my heart, my lungs,
everything," she said. "I don't know how much longer I have." She is
finding it harder to eat and to breathe.
Anderson helped found the Alliance of Nuclear Workers Advocacy
Groups. So far, she has personally helped fellow workers receive
more than $2.5 million in compensation from a federal program to aid
sick weapons workers.
Many are former co-workers from her administration building.
Anderson lists them by disease: brain tumor, leukemia, asbestosis,
breast cancer and lung cancer.
"Every single person I worked with except my boss got sick," she
said.
But for seven years, the government repeatedly denied most of
Anderson's own claim, citing her advocacy work on behalf of others
as evidence that she must not be too sick.
Anderson is among several advocates interviewed by the Rocky
Mountain News whose claims for compensation have been derailed by
the government. The advocates believe that their problems are
related to their criticism of the troubled program.
Anderson wonders how and why the program case managers sought out
information about her advocacy work, while they failed for so long
to take note of the evidence that eventually proved her claim.
In the last few months, the U.S. Labor Department suddenly began
approving parts of her claim — a total of 32 medical conditions that
they say she suffers because of her job at the bomb factory. They
have not explained why those same conditions had been repeatedly
rejected for compensation in previous years.
But program officials may have waited too late for Anderson. Her
physicians have told her that her liver now weighs more than 25
pounds — a healthy human liver weighs about three pounds.
A series of experts have told her that this condition is
inoperable.
Anderson's finances are in a shambles. She and her husband,
Richard, have refinanced their home three times in an attempt to
meet staggering medical bills.
She worries about how the end will come and what will happen to
her husband.
"I'm just trying to get realistic, so it's not such a shock when
they tell me they can't do anything," she said. "I want to know if I
only have six months or a year to live."
Javier Manzano © The Rocky
George Barrie leans over to turn off the light
before going to sleep. Barrie has a lot of trouble sleeping, because
he has to wear an oxygen mask at night, combined with several pain
medications.
Deadly Denial: 3-day special report
CRAIG — The pain drives George Barrie from his bed about 3 a.m. —
a nightly occurrence.
He leaves his sleeping wife and stumbles to his recliner in the
living room. He sits down heavily, shifting his weight, trying to
make the pain bearable.
The house is silent except for his labored breathing.
On the opposite wall are family photos that show him in healthier
days. Once when a visitor asked about them, Barrie broke down and
cried at his own image.
"How dare they do this to me?" was all he could say.
Barrie is an ex-bomb maker, a highly-skilled machinist who shaped
toxic beryllium and plutonium metal to top-secret tolerances within
a fraction of the width of a human hair.
Among his myriad illnesses, doctors have confirmed that at least
his pre-cancerous stomach condition is the result of his work with
dangerous materials at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons complex.
His wife, Terrie, is a former waitress who was so angered by the
government's treatment of her husband and others like him that she
became a leading advocate for sick nuclear workers nationwide.
Barrie filed seven years ago for the federal benefits available
to sick nuclear weapons workers or their survivors, but the
government repeatedly has denied him full compensation.
Terrie Barrie helped found a national organization for sick
workers, and now has the ear of powerful leaders in Congress. But
when the couple recently discovered that copies of advocacy letters
Terrie wrote to government officials were contained in George's
official government case file — even though they were not related to
his case — they began to fear that her advocacy work has derailed
George's chances for full compensation.
"Why would they have put those letters in his file?" Terrie said.
"I think it was a way to intimidate me, pure and simple. It's like,
'We know what you do and we're not paying George.'"
She said she is haunted by the thought that doctors might have
prevented her husband's precipitous physical decline if the
government program had approved coverage without delay.
"They're letting him die," she said, anger rising in her voice.
"They murdered him at Rocky Flats. His own government murdered him
and they are still murdering him."
George Barrie's government file, his claim for compensation, runs
4,000 pages. That his wife's letters were in there is not the only
disturbing experience the two have had.
On a clear night in Denver, April 25, 2006, the Barries arrived
at the Sheraton Hotel on Colorado Boulevard. Inside, a panel
appointed by President Bush would hear concerns from sick workers
such as Barrie about the failings of the compensation program.
But the Barries were going to complain about much more than that.
"We uncovered something that was important," Terrie Barrie said.
"It was huge."
She and George were going to explain how they believed that the
entire compensation process for former Rocky Flats workers had been
undermined, and that agency officials knew about the problem but had
ignored it.
The very same scientist who'd once been in charge of the Rocky
Flats program to protect workers from radiation had just recently
been hired by the government to review the quality of his own
program.
The government also had based its opposition to automatic aid for
Flats workers on the information from that man, Roger Falk. The
Barries believed that if public faith in Falk were lost, the
government's position would not hold.
As George Barrie got settled in the meeting room, a top program
official approached him.
Kate Kimpan had a long history with the program. As a senior
policy advisory at the U.S. Department of Energy, she had been key
in the program's early going.
The energy department's handling of that launch was deemed such a
failure that Congress took it away in 2004 and gave it to the
Department of Labor.
Kimpan also had been the key liaison among DOE and the
departments of health and labor. Now, Kimpan was working for DOL
contractor Dade Moeller & Associates, overseeing radiation exposure
estimates for the program.
Kimpan had first met the Barries before the compensation program
was established. But they had spoken only once since Kimpan left
DOE. Terrie Barrie said Kimpan had called her at home earlier in the
week, trying to persuade them to meet with her in Denver.
"She said to me, 'I can help George,'" Terrie recounted. "My
first thought was, if she can help George, why didn't she (already)?
I thought she was implying that if I didn't say anything (about the
Falk allegations), she'd help George get paid.
"I didn't like being intimidated, or bribed, or whatever you want
to call it. They were trying to make me or him not say stuff by
dangling that hope out there. I resented it."
Kimpan said she does not remember calling the Barries.
That night at the Sheraton, Terrie Barrie had begun talking to
other claimants when Kimpan approached George Barrie.
"She said 'George, don't do this,'" he said. "If you don't do
this, I can help you."
Kimpan said she does remember speaking to him in the hotel.
However, she did not try to stop him from talking, she said.
"The only thing I can think of is they really must be confused,"
Kimpan told the Rocky. "There's no logic in it."
Kimpan said she would not have offered to help because in her job
overseeing radiation estimates, she had no role in the part of the
program handling George's claim.
But that's what made the call and encounter stand out, Terrie
Barrie said.
"I knew she shouldn't have been able to have any effect," she
said. "That's why it shocked me so much."
In addition to problems that the Barries believe are associated
with Terrie's advocacy, they have encountered the same kinds of
perplexing roadblocks that other ill nuclear workers complain about.
Government officials originally said records showed that George
worked in only two buildings on the sprawling Rocky Flats complex.
But George happened to keep some of his own records, which show he
worked in other buildings as well. Proving specifically where an
employee worked can be vital to proving they deserve compensation
because it becomes evidence of what toxic exposures they faced.
Rockwell International, the contractor that ran Rocky Flats while
George worked there, previously had reimbursed some of George's
medical bills based on his successful state workers' compensation
claim. But after Rockwell left the site in the 1990s, it wanted to
close out the claim and gave George a $17,000 settlement.
DOL now argues that the same amount must be deducted from
George's federal compensation, even though its own rules say that
deductions for previous settlements do not include medical
reimbursements.
One of George's conditions — nephritis of the kidneys — is
covered automatically under a different federal compensation program
for which his job doesn't qualify.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act assumes that this illness
was caused by radiation and automatically compensates uranium miners
and those who lived downwind of atomic tests. But the program that
covers bomb builders such as George, the Energy Employees
Occupational Illness Compensation Program, does not.
Like many other sick nuclear workers across the country, George
Barrie said he is less concerned about the lump sum he might receive
from the program. What he really needs is medical care.
"I need help," he said.
On a recent routine medical visit to replace the breathing mask
he wears at night, George discovered that the oxygen level in his
blood had dropped to 88 percent. Anything less than 90 percent can
signal lung disease.
Barrie fears that his former work as a machinist is now causing
him to develop chronic beryllium disease, which has plagued
thousands of other beryllium workers.
The government will reimburse him for lung tests only if the
results show he has beryllium disease. But George knows that the
tests — which involve inflating each lung with saline solution,
giving patients the sensation that they are drowning — notoriously
produce false negative results.
George doesn't want to risk wasting any money right now, so he
will wait awhile longer because the more severe this incurable
disease is, the easier it is to diagnose.
"The best place I ever worked got me sick," he said. "I'm dying.
It's not like I did anything to deserve this."
Javier Manzano © The Rocky
Quest for aid: George Tutt, 75, a former
uranium miner who suffers from a severe lung condition,
discusses his battle for government compensation, at his house
in Shiprock, N.M., as his son Davis, 28, listens.
More News Columns & Blogs
They built the nuclear weapons that helped win World War II and
the Cold War.
When the nation's future depended on them, they stood firm.
Now where is their government when they need its help?
I believe in the goodness and generosity of the American people.
If more of them knew the story of suffering we're going to share
beginning Monday, I don't believe they would feel comfortable with
what's being done in their name.
It hurts to read "Deadly Denial," a three-day series by reporter
Laura Frank and photographer Javier Manzano.
It's almost unbelievable what some of these cold warriors have
been put through. How about receiving a denial of your medical claim
on the same day you receive an acceptance? How about having your
1,600-page medical file lost until after your death? How about being
told that it would be better not to speak up about your situation if
you know what's best for you?
But then we at the Rocky have run into our own stonewall from the
U.S. Department of Labor.
Silence is the response to questions about its administration of
a program to compensate sick workers or their survivors. A silence
eerily reminiscent of the silence thousands of workers have heard.
As I write this column, it's been 64 days since the Rocky
requested an interview with the labor department executive who runs
the program, Shelby Hallmark. It's been 36 days since we sent him a
three-page memo detailing the findings of an investigation that
began in January and builds on years of reporting by Laura.
We never received a response to our request for an interview. We
didn't get a response to questions as basic as the date for a
meeting we'd heard was scheduled in Denver.
This column is not about the difficulties of doing our job. But
the response our journalists have received — as of today, a single
paragraph defending the outlay of nearly $4 billion to "energy
worker claimants" — reinforces for me why sick workers and their
families would reasonably wonder whose side the government is on.
It seems officials are more interested in debating whether the
Bush administration did more than the Clinton administration ever
projected doing to help nuclear workers. As opposed to carrying out
a clear directive from Congress in 2000 and again in 2004 to run a
program that is "compassionate, fair and timely."
When you read our investigation and watch Javier's videos on our
Web site, I find it hard to believe you will think that the program
has been any of those things.
Yes, the government has compensated thousands of workers. But the
majority have been denied financial compensation or help with their
medical bills.
I didn't enter this story outraged.
As editor, I just believed it was important to examine whether
the program was living up to its promise — or whether it was hollow.
The answer we found is disturbing.
It's disturbing when 33 percent of taxpayer money is eaten up by
administrative expenses, when a comparable program, such as Social
Security Disability, spends 2.5 percent.
It's disturbing when rules are changed midstream, with the result
being that fewer workers are compensated.
It's disturbing when decade-old evidence that toxic exposure had
made people sick is denied.
It's disturbing when a government agency takes its "no-pay list"
and hides it in a secret database, citing national security in
refusing to release the database.
It's disturbing when a bureaucracy seems inept.
But what's most troubling is that it appears that a government
agency is working against the interests of the people it's ordered
to serve — the only fathomable reason being that it saves taxpayers
money by doing so.
"Deadly Denial" got its start in 2006 and 2007, when at public
hearings we heard what claimants said they had to go through to get
benefits. It seemed they were trying so hard to do what was asked of
them, and then one hurdle after another was thrown in their path.
Laura has been covering the plight of nuclear workers since 1998.
She was in Washington, D.C., when then-Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson announced the original effort. Until then, that
department had denied workers had been hurt by exposure. Reporters
were criticized for writing about the issue.
When the program was created in 2000, it marked an amazing about-
face.
By 2004, the program had become a scandal. The Energy Department
had spent $90 million administering its part of the effort and
compensated only 32 people.
So the labor department got the job, with explicit instructions
to be, as I told you before, "compassionate, fair and timely."
I believe I understand the meaning of those words. But today they
sound cruelly ironic.
But you be the judge.
That's why I'm asking you to take the time to read the story
Monday. Learn what has happened to your neighbors here and across
the country involved in every step of fabricating our nuclear
weapons.
Government agencies still are supposed to work for the people.
After reading our series, will you be satisfied with the way the
Department of Labor is treating these men and women who stood up in
our name?
I can't believe the answer will be yes.
And then the question becomes: What can we do about it?
