LETHAL DOSE

Blitt, Dennis Bernstein and Connie

BY DENNIS BERNSTEIN AND CONNIE BLITT The first Saturday of the new year brought a crisp, nearly cloudless morning to Gore, Oklahoma, with a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind moving from the north. The...

...The only other way to get rid of the substance is to vacuum it out, says Clyde Wisner of the NRC, but "it's a very, very, very slow process...
...Several other workers assisted her and put Harrison in a car...
...They had left their children with a sitter...
...Charles Roark, who has been raising hunting dogs for more than fifty years, lives next to one of Kerr-McGee's fields...
...Parks, who has not been trained in chemical or radiological medicine, asserts that even the workers in the plant who were engulfed in the toxic fog and breathed in substantial amounts of uranium have very little to worry about...
...Reactors and processing plants stand like inactive volcanoes amid a population that views them as just part of the landscape...
...It's not so that all the particles settle out at the plant boundary," says radio-ecologist Bernd Franke, who recently completed a study of environmental monitoring at Three Mile Island...
...They [Kerr-McGee] used to burn hay there when they couldn't sell it...
...They didn't even know where the front door was, they were so disoriented...
...Carter tells a reporter she "could make me a long list" of people who have died of cancer and "strange" tumors since Kerr-McGee set up shop in Gore sixteen years ago...
...The NRC points to this order as proof that it was concerned about the hazardous conditions at the plant...
...They were all hanging on the fence, and there was no way for them to get out because there's barbed wire on top...
...Richard Pereles, director of corporate communications for Kerr-McGee, declared at a press briefing that the procedure being used by the workers at the time of the lethal release was contrary to company guidelines...
...Kerr-McGee also announced "that the cloud had completely cleared and there was no further danger...
...But such philanthropy wears thin in Gore...
...It's irrelevant whether the person died because he breathed in toxic gas or acid or received radiological poisoning," says Ken Bossong, director of the Critical Mass Energy Project in Washington, D.C., a branch of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen...
...But Harrison didn't know that...
...The urgency you can quibble over," says Richard Cunningham, the NRC's director of fuel cycle and material safety, "but it was one in which we gave the licensee [Kerr-McGee] time to do an adequate job...
...As a condition for granting renewal on September 20, the NRC stipulated that the company must submit within six months detailed reports on the handling of cylinders containing uranium hexafluoride and institute measures that could mitigate—inside and outside the plant—the effects of a potential cylinder rupture...
...Several hours later, a company official called him, suggesting that he take his children to the hospital to get them checked...
...It was chaos," recalls Dearl Anderson, a maintenance mechanic who was in the lunchroom when the accident occurred...
...Let me talk to so and so.' They went to search for somebody, and all we got was 'I don't know.'" Not knowing what to do next, the angry pharmacist waited for his children, gathered the family in the car, and drove to the front gates of the plant...
...The company had been operating for almost three years on a legal loophole that allows plants to continue production if they have applied for license renewal...
...But no one in Gore, Oklahoma, perceives them that way any more...
...The company sprays its fields with a special experimental fertilizer made of waste containing heavy metals and nuclear elements left over from uranium hexafluoride production...
...A week after the accident, his temperature was still high and he felt a burning sensation in his right lung...
...This used to be a wonderful place," she says on the verge of tears...
...You have this '6' [uranium hexafluoride] that they're manufacturing out there...
...Kerr-McGee officials at the plant and in the company's Oklahoma City headquarters have been falling over one another to deny ultimate responsibility for the accident and shift the blame to workers at the Sequoyah plant...
...I thought maybe they had been burning some hay...
...Here they were dealing with radiation, uranium inhalation, hydrofluoric acid inhalation, skin and eye burns, and they had to repeatedly call Kerr-McGee and ask them what they were dealing with," Young says...
...The weekend had begun like any other in the tourist town of 600, as visitors and locals stocked up with fresh bait at the Lucky Seven and set out for a big day of trout fishing at nearby Lake Tenkiller or one of the many well-stocked streams fed by the Illinois and Arkansas rivers...
...I don't know...
...Kerr-McGee had a great deal to gain financially by violating its own and the NRC's guidelines and heating the cylinders to remove excess uranium hexafluoride...
...Several rancorous school board meetings resulted in a decision to close the school...
...Randy Naylor, an emergency medical technician for Ales Ambulance Service, tried to keep Harrison alive during the journey to Fort Smith...
...We have our own facilities to take care of anything that goes wrong...
...But James Neil ("Chief) Harrison, a favorite of the workers, was not among them...
...At about 11:30, while lunch was still in progress at the plant, the cylinder burst, spewing the chemo-nuclear compound in Harrison's direction...
...It looked like fog from the ground up to about two or three hundred feet high in the air...
...Every worker at the plant on the day of the toxic release was hospitalized, along with sixty area residents...
...and D.B ther testing for their three children...
...No one was particularly responsible for regulating chemical hazards," said Commissioner Frederick J. Bernthal...
...Young went home...
...He said the general public's got nothing to be worried about...
...No respirator was within reach...
...Hydrofluoric acid, however, was not the only dangerous release from the accident, for the uranium in the uranium hexafluoride formed particles of ura-nyl fluoride, which was carried with the billowing cloud of gas...
...A little more than a mile south of town, the Sequoyah Fuels Corporation, Kerr-McGee's uranium processing plant, seemed to be operating as usual...
...The NRC, for its part, has emphasized the chemical aspect of the Gore accident...
...I don't know what went wrong, but they didn't take care of it," Naylor says...
...They're there for the bucks," he says of Kerr-McGee, "and a town of 600 is not a high price to pay...
...Three hours had passed since the accident had happened...
...The public was made aware of the shoddy safety conditions within the plant by a group called Native Americans for a Clean Environment (NACE...
...They had never been instructed by the company, and they had no emergency plan...
...Roark felt as if he had a sudden fever, and his nose, throat, and lungs started burning...
...quips pharmacist Young...
...But urine samples of residents in nearby towns showed significant traces of uranium...
...But physicians did find that the Youngs' six-year-old daughter Amber had a red throat...
...they couldn't even run away...
...Because the hydrofluoric acid kills faster than the uranium, they're going to call it a chemical accident," says Richard Phillips, geologist and author of a study on Kerr-McGee's radioactive waste management at the Gore facility...
...People are scared about what they don't know, and they don't know what's going on out there...
...Kerr-McGee said it was safe and that most all the stuff was contained to the grounds of the plant," he remembers...
...Kerr-McGee claimed that the radioactive uranyl fluoride, a fairly heavy material, fell on the plant and its immediate environs...
...Under the domed top of the chest, the cylinder was bulging with the internal pressure of the 29,500 pounds of uranium hexafluoride, now turning to gas...
...Carter tacked up one of her leaflets in the local post office, right next to the FBI poster of the ten most wanted criminals...
...Those people just don't tell anybody anything...
...It's not plutonium, it's not like a hydrogen bomb...
...As yet, the full story of the accident at Kerr-McGee has not come out...
...In fact, adds Franke, the presence of the chemical hydrofluoric acid increases the possible harm of the uranium particles...
...Before the Carlile School was shut down following the January 4 accident, school children would watch the company spray the fertilizer on nearby fields as they played at recess...
...it involved the release of uranium...
...The fluoride, once it reaches the lungs, also decreases the ability of the lungs to get rid of pollutants...
...he jokes...
...For Carter and a growing number of area residents, economic considerations are less important than a clean environment and a safe place to live...
...C.B...
...They don't want to admit that uranium processing is dangerous and that it can kill people...
...news of the accident was curiously missing...
...Many, like pharmacist Young, learned about other Kerr-McGee accidents at the Sequoyah plant and other facilities only after the cylinder burst on January 4 and James Harrison was killed...
...And some people were getting a little panicky...
...There isn't anything in there that would cause any concern," says Bill Tucker, an agronomist at Oklahoma State University, who assures the public that the rye, bermuda grass, and fescue is safe...
...The fifty-three-year-old Oklahoman, who barely survived an operation for a brain tumor in 1976, charges that local residents have been "bought off" by Kerr-McGee...
...11 Far from assisting in the evacuation, Kerr-McGee impeded speedy and effective treatment for exposed workers and residents...
...Last August, an enNuclear Farmer Kerr-McGee has become a farmer of late, making hay and buying up between 1,000 and 2,000 acres of land around its Sequoyah Fuels uranium conversion plant...
...The following facts have been unreported or buried by the media: H Workers were following business-as-usual procedure when they engaged in the extremely hazardous exercise of heating the overfilled cylinder...
...Late in the morning, most of the workers in the facility's thirty-two-person skeleton crew were having lunch...
...The frustrated parents insisted on furQuibble, Quibble Three months before the accident at Kerr-McGee's Sequoyah Fuels plant, the U.S...
...C.B...
...The highly toxic and caustic "soup," with the capacity to etch glass, was also filtered into the lunchroom through the plant's air conditioning and ventilation system...
...When he heard about the accident, he instructed the sitter to bring the children to his store...
...The people that we talked to, friends that work there, couldn't even find their way out of the building," says Gore pharmacist William Young...
...But Kerr-McGee's emergency plans for medical treatment and evacuation were virtually nonexistent...
...We've all got to wake up and smell the coffee," says Patricia Young, the pharmacist's wife...
...and D.B...
...No accident reported in the company for five years.'" "What makes everybody so nervous about this plant," says Gore Police Chief Jerry Fields, "is that they're so secretive...
...Shortly before the January 4 accident, he was transferred from Gore but has since returned to help with cleanup and retraining, the company says...
...Dennis Bernstein and Connie Blitt are freelance writers based in Middletown, New York...
...After the recent accident, many parents demanded the shutting down of Carlile School, less than a mile from the plant...
...No emergency sirens had been sounded, Roark said, and he had received no warning from officials at the plant...
...NACE's petition had charged that plant supervisors lacked educational qualifications...
...Almost seven years after the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island and eleven years after Karen Silk-wood died in mysterious circumstances following the disclosures she made about Kerr-McGee, the hazards of nuclear energy have faded from public consciousness...
...Now they die of cancer...
...Oxygen, which would have been essential for Harrison's survival, was not readily available...
...Sequoyah Fuels routinely discharges 11,000 pounds of uranium per year into a natural drainage ditch emptying into the Illinois River...
...I called out there and talked to three or four people," Young recalls...
...Well, my beagles run rampant," he says, "and they get on in there and I have four litters of pups deformed since they be spraying that waste...
...Since the opening of the plant in 1969, "numerous spills and leaks of radioactive materials have contaminated the groundwater and surface water, eventually discharging into the Illinois and Arkansas rivers," according to an environmental study submitted to the NRC which was compiled from Kerr-McGee's own records on public file...
...But according to officials of the company and the U.S...
...Kerr-McGee had established no prior emergency plans with Memorial...
...The day after Dearl Anderson and another worker were badly burned on the job in a previous accident, the company contributed $ 1,000 to the Gore school system...
...H The accident was not just a chemical leak...
...Jim Carr, the plant manager, for instance, was supervising the plant without an engineering degree...
...The workers drove eight miles away to pick up a canister of oxygen at a nursing home in Vian before taking Harrison to the Sequoyah Memorial Hospital some eleven miles away in Sallisaw...
...William Young, proprietor of Green Country Drug, was at the pharmacy with his wife when the accident occurred...
...Pharmacist Young, for one, is no longer persuaded that Gore is the place to raise his three children...
...He knows his property has depreciated because of accidents at the plant...
...They said, 'We don't know...
...The facility processes uranium hexafluoride from milled uranium—"yellowcake"—and ships it to U.S...
...After I stay in the house all night," says Roark, "I feel a little bit better, until I go outside and it comes right back on me...
...At the hospital in Sallisaw, Young was again informed that his children had not been dangerously exposed because they were a mile away from the accident, and there would probably be no ill effects...
...I had an instructor's course with one of these people down at the plant...
...Blinded and barely able to breathe, Harrison stumbled about as hydrofluoric acid—created when the cylinder burst open and the uranium hexafluoride interacted with the moisture in the air—began to eat away at his lungs...
...He arrived just in time for the first press briefing by Kerr-McGee officials...
...Carter's daughter, Shelia, single mother of three, grew up on Velma's small farm...
...Lethal Dose 'No one was particularly responsible9 for the latest mishap at Kerr-McGee Virginia Callison, a co-worker and friend of Harrison, managed to wade through the lethal smog, found Harrison, and helped him out of the plant...
...The person who could tell us most, unfortunately, is the person that died," said Pereles...
...the family was not particularly reassured...
...Velma Carter seems resigned to the worst...
...Just because it's a good location for Kerr-McGee doesn't mean we should lay down and die," says Jessie Deer in Water...
...They were teary-eyed, gagging, and coughing," he recalls...
...Harrison was sent off to a larger hospital, Sparks Regional Medical Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas, twenty-one miles away, where he was pronounced dead soon after arrival...
...The twenty-six-year-old Harrison stood on a small three-story structure some twenty feet above and to the side of the steam chest, where a cylinder overfilled with uranium hexafluoride was being heated...
...To block the new facility, NACE and other grass-roots groups demanded that the NRC hold a public hearing on Kerr-McGee's request...
...Mike Kingsbury was driving by the plant with his mother about twenty minutes after the accident occurred...
...So that increases the relative uptake of uranium and other pollutants...
...Garland Parks, a consulting physician for Kerr-McGee who rushed to the plant after word of the accident got out, says the whole incident has been blown out of proportion...
...To say we are responsible when we don't have the in-house expertise doesn't cut it...
...People are worried that if Kerr-McGee leaves, property taxes will go up," she says...
...It later said the overfilled cylinder was improperly weighed...
...See sidebar, Page 23.] I began to sniff and smell, and I sucked a whole lot of it down in my lungs, and I found out quick it wasn't hay burning...
...I been living here fifty years, and I didn't see no one starving before Kerr-McGee came...
...Kerr-McGee, which boasts the corporate slogan, "People Helping People," takes an interest in the community only when distrust and dissent begin to arise...
...vironmental assessment of the plant predicted that a major release of uranium hexafluoride, though highly unlikely, could cause fatalities among nearby residents...
...And it makes me terribly upset when I think there's not much chance of doing it because of Kerr-McGee...
...Young, himself a fishing buff, says "a lot of times we get fish with cancers and growths all over them...
...The next morning, cleanup crews in protective coveralls were scrubbing the highway near the plant and ripping up the earth on which the press briefing had been held the day before...
...The contribution made headlines in the Sequoyah County Times...
...But nothing that should cause any health hazard...
...They ran to the fence that surrounds the compound, and that's as far as they could go because they had closed it all up...
...Young feels "trapped between a rock and a hard place," he says...
...The company initially claimed the cylinder was overfilled because a gauge stuck...
...Department of Energy uranium enrichment plants, which manufacture it into fuel for nuclear reactors...
...When I heard about them, my mouth dropped open because we were told for years that it was safe," says Young...
...But the NRC was aware of the hazards of such an accident...
...After the January 4 accident, Shelia decided to hand out leaflets that called for Kerr-McGee to pack up its operations and move it some place else, "preferably to another planet...
...Farmers graze their cattle on company land, and Kerr-McGee is raising herds of its own...
...I went out there and boy, it was just all over this county," says Roark, who has lived in the area for almost eighty years...
...The company assured residents that there was no reason to fear radioactive contamination...
...The paper got around to covering the accident only after Jessie Deer in Water, a forty-two-year-old member of the Cherokee Nation and founder of Native Americans for a Clean Environment (NACE), confronted the editor, she recalls...
...I would have liked to die knowing that my children and grandchildren could live out their lives here on this farm and go ahead raising cattle...
...Kerr-McGee wanted to build a second plant on its Gore premises that would convert depleted uranium hexafluoride into a form that could be used by the Department of Defense in lining bullet tips...
...Kerr-McGee agreed to rent the school building for five years and pay $250,000 up front—the total rent for the period—so that new classrooms could be added to an existing school in town...
...Ninety-year-old Charles Roark, who lives just southeast of the plant, was out in the barn feeding his beagles when he got a telephone call from his daughter, Monnie Davis, who asked him if he saw any smoke coming from the direction of the plant...
...And I asked him two years ago, what if something happens...
...H Chemical and uranium contamination did occur off-site...
...The workers were lined up against the fence trying to breathe, but they couldn't go any further...
...Harrison was almost instantly engulfed in the flood of uranium hexafluoride...
...Several days later, they were notified that urine samples for all three contained uranium...
...They had a big write-up in the Sallisaw paper: 'Kerr-McGee gets a special award for safety...
...Yeah, some of them got some of that," he acknowledges...
...It's just sleight-of-hand...
...You wanna buy my house...
...Both the NRC and Kerr-McGee place the blame on a chemical, not a nuclear, component...
...You want me to send you a one-eyed catfish...
...It's a really nice place and really pretty country—as long as you have your gas mask on...
...Ed Henshaw, a former employee at Sequoyah Fuels, says "it's standard procedure to overfill the cylinders...
...That came as a shock, since Richard Cunningham, director of fuel cycle and material safety for the NRC, had assured the public that the radiation content of the escaped gas was "very minimal, in fact, nonexistent off-site...
...You don't even have to cook it...
...It used to be that people died of old age around here," says Velma Carter, who works a small farm three miles north of the Sequoyah plant with her husband Ralph...
...Once in the food chain, Franke says, the radium and other residues from the uranium processing will produce "long-term cumulative effects to all the people in the future who would receive radiation from that spraying...
...The fact of the matter is, an accident occurred because the Federal agency responsible for supervising nuclear power is not doing its job...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the workers had permission from shift supervisor Bill Bradley to heat the overfilled cylinder...
...I don't believe that this is harmless," says radioecologist Bernd Franke...
...He then phoned the plant to find out whether there was imminent danger, for no one in the town had been notified yet...
...Yes, not every day," says Anderson, "but it's not uncommon, or how else you gonna get it out...
...Kerr-McGee has not received permission from the NRC to operate its second plant, though the company began construction over the summer...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) renewed the company's operating license, which had expired in October 1982...
...Instead, the renewal indicates that the NRC was fully aware that it was licensing a plant with a poor safety record...
...They had some positive urine...
...Dearl Anderson, the maintenance mechanic, who has worked at the uranium processing plant for the last eleven years, says the heating procedure to remove an overload of uranium hexafluoride was frequently used at the plant...

Vol. 50 • March 1986 • No. 3


 
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