Reeling from yet another defeat, former Rocky Flats workers and their families left a federal advisory panel’s vote Tuesday disappointed, angry – and determined to keep fighting for benefits.
On a 6-4 vote the panel decided not to fast-track the claims for about 3,000 workers from the former nuclear bomb-trigger factory near Golden.
“Actually, I’m not at all surprised,” said Mary Ann Rupp, whose husband, Martin, died of lung cancer in 1995. “I have doubts about this whole program. I think the intentions initially were good, but now it’s just too much government bureaucracy.”
The Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health – after two days of hearings at the Denver West Sheraton – rejected “special exposure” status for any of about 16,000 Rocky Flats workers who have or get any of 22 cancers. The status would have enabled each to receive $150,000 compensation, plus medical help.
So far, only 802 payments have been made to Rocky Flats workers out of 6,140 claims filed.
The focus now shifts back to Congress, where Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., is seeking a Senate hearing on the handling of the Rocky Flats cases.
“The Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health on Special Exposure Cohort Status has failed the former Rocky Flats workers once again,” Salazar said in a statement.
Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers union, which represented many Rocky Flats workers, promised more appeals of the decision.
“It will take leadership from members of Congress to resolve this lack of compensation and medical care for sick nuclear workers,” Gerard said.
The union had asked the federal government for special exposure status for about 3,000 workers.
The advisory board’s chairman, Paul Zeimer, also called on Congress to fix what he called the “convoluted process” it created.
“Unfortunately the burden has been passed to a group like this to correct what Congress did,” Zeimer said. “This process could have been set up better at the front end.”
31 claims in four years
In October 2004, the Labor Department took over administration of the nuclear workers’ compensation programs after Congress lost patience with the Department of Energy, which had managed to pay only 31 claims in four years.
Labor inherited more than 35,000 cases at federal facilities from the Energy Department and paid some of the easiest claims to process. In cases where there were insufficient records to determine worker exposure, special status was provided.
In the Rocky Flats case, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health concluded that there was enough data to reconstruct workers’ radiation doses for the period between Jan. 1, 1967 and 2005.
In two days of presentations before the board, filled with emotion and weighed down by scientific minutiae, that NIOSH conclusion was challenged by former workers, technical experts and union officials, who called it “insufficient and incomplete.”
That, however, was the only question the board was entitled to answer, said board member Wanda Munn.
“We’ve heard no information that there isn’t enough information,” Munn said.
Board member Michael Gibson said he felt the board’s scope went beyond that.
“To do our duty correctly, we need to consider the experiences of people who were there,” he said.
On an 8-1 vote, with one abstention, the board did agree to expedite the claims of a small category of workers – those exposed to neutron radiation at the plant from 1959 to 1966.
The board’s recommendations now go to Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services.
The former workers and their families said that the federal government still isn’t fulfilling its obligations.
“You’ve listened to a whole lot of people who have pedigrees, but they weren’t on the shop floor,” Jerry Harden, a former worker and union leader at the munitions plant, told the board. “Please help the sick Rocky Flats workers.”
When the meeting ended, some workers and their families cried, some walked off in anger and most, like Rupp, vowed to continue fighting to get compensation – soon.
“We’re not giving up,” Rupp said.
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
