Thousands of Nuclear Arms Workers See Cancer Claims Denied or Delayed

So far, groups of workers from 18 sites have been added to the special exposure cohort, and petitions are pending for workers from a dozen other sites. The process can be difficult, as people who worked at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant who applied for that status have learned.

On the rugged foothills outside Denver, there's little sign now of the sprawling plutonium facility that once employed as many as 7,000 people. The site was dismantled in a $7 billion, 10-year effort that ended in 2005 and is being turned into a wildlife refuge.

With the plant gone, many workers are struggling to re-create what happened in the 800-building complex that manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. Thousands of fires were recorded in the plants' 40-year history, including one on Mother's Day 1969 that burned for several hours and released massive amounts of radioactive material.

Of the more than 5,100 Rocky Flats claims filed, about 1,400 have been approved. Many applicants who were denied blame missing or inadequate records and petitioned two years ago for special cohort status.

NIOSH officials recommended against the special status for Rocky Flats, reasoning that they could account for missing records by altering their models and overestimating exposures. Then, earlier this month, the radiation advisory board recommended the special cohort for a small number of workers -- those employed from 1952 to 1958, when gaps in the recordkeeping apparently were the largest.

Advocates for the Rocky Flats workers point to multiple cases to illustrate the difficulty of meeting the government's standard for compensation without being part of the special cohort.

One worker, Donald Gabel, contracted a rare form of brain cancer at age 29, after nearly 10 years at the plant, and died in 1980. Months before his death, he testified that his job required him to climb several times a day to the top of a furnace, his head inches from a pipe expelling radioactive exhaust. Government contractors said they could not find his records and could not take new measurements because the pipe had been removed.

After Gabel died, his wife requested tests of plutonium levels in his brain, but she says government scientists told her they had lost most of the tissue and could not take an accurate sample.

Despite the problems, Gabel's widow, Kae Williams, won a rare victory in a traditional workers' compensation lawsuit, getting about $15,000 for her three children. But when she applied for additional benefits under the new program in 2001, the claim took four years to process and was ultimately denied. A government computer program found only a 41.73 percent chance that her husband's brain cancer was work-related.

"They make it sound like they are doing the right thing," Williams said. "For a glimpse, you think they are. And they are not."

Ill and Unaided

At South Carolina's Savannah River plant, workers may face longer odds than most. They lack the organization and lobbying advantages found at some larger sites where workers tended to be white and represented by strong unions.

"Black workers in these plants were put in high-exposure areas without proper protection or monitoring," said Robert W. Warren, a lawyer who represents dozens of Savannah River workers. "They worked in some of the most dangerous places, but there are no records today to show that."

When it opened in 1951, the Savannah River nuclear complex was one of the first employers in South Carolina's rural midlands to offer African Americans a shot at relatively good wages and benefits. But not all jobs at the plant were created equal.

The jobs offered to black workers in those days were often menial ones: cleaning spills, scraping paint, removing waste, sometimes in the most dangerous parts of the plant, said Wayne Knox, a radiation-safety expert who was a contractor at the Savannah River plant for nearly two decades. In the '50s and '60s, he said, workers often were kept in the dark about risks.

"Not just blacks, but also [white] people from poorer neighborhoods were put in a position where they had a lot of unnecessary exposures," said Knox, who now advises some families filing claims.

The sprawling, 300-square-mile site still contains one of the highest concentrations of radioactive waste of any weapons plant in the country, most of it in swimming-pool-size tanks. Special exposure cohort status has not been granted for the plant's workers; in a region that remains very poor, there are few advocates available to argue the workers' case in Washington.

McKenzie, the Savannah River laborer, was angered when government officials calculated the probability that his work caused his bladder cancer at only 28 percent. He became even angrier when he learned that the plant had been unable to locate many of his files -- including records for the day he became so contaminated his clothes had to be destroyed. "There were whole months where the data is missing," he said.

McKenzie has asked a Labor Department appeals panel to reconsider the decision, while he struggles to pay hefty medical expenses that include regular visits to the urologist to see whether his cancer has returned. Having mostly given up hope for a government check, he now works a second job, cleaning up spills and leaks in private homes a few miles from the weapons plant.

"At first it looked like I had a good claim, but it didn't go anywhere," McKenzie said wearily. "A person doing it by himself has no wind."