The nuclear bombs Charlie Wolf built helped win the Cold War. But his toughest battles came afterward, when he applied to a troubled federal compensation program intended for those whose top-secret work made them sick.
Wolf, who worked for a time overseeing the dismantling of the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons facility northwest of Denver, wound up battling a bureaucratic morass for more than six years while fighting brain cancer that was supposed to have killed him in six months, trying to prove that he qualified for financial and medical aid.
Earlier this year, the 50-year-old Wolf, of Highlands Ranch, lost his fight against cancer and the federal government. But Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., whose family has spent more than three decades trying to help stricken weapons workers, is planning to launch the next phase of the battle this week. He will introduce legislation to reform the program in Wolf’s name.
“Charlie Wolf was a hero,” Udall said. “He took on the government and the cancer. He didn’t give up. Charlie wasn’t just one individual. He represented all the workers.”
More than 175,000 of the nation’s Cold War-era nuclear bomb builders — or their survivors — have applied for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program since it was created in 2000. But only 50,000 have received compensation.
An investigation published in July by the now-shuttered Rocky Mountain News showed that officials at the compensation program had built an adversarial system that created more hurdles than help for the sick workers nationwide. Program officials kept information secret, constantly changed rules and even considered spying on some workers who filed claims.
Udall’s bill would give automatic compensation to workers with specific illnesses, releasing them from a controversial portion of the program called “dose reconstruction.” This highly debated process involves seeking out historical records to estimate the chance that a specific person’s disease is work-related.
$4.7 billion paid out
Officials at the U.S. Department of Labor, which administers the program, say it is operating smoothly and has paid more than $4.7 billion in compensation and medical bills.
Most of Colorado’s congressional delegation supports the Charlie Wolf Act, Udall said. But he will need much more to pass the measure, which is expected to cost taxpayers at least several billion dollars.
For help, he’s reaching out to other lawmakers from across the aisle and across the nation.
Such an alliance will be key to getting a new program approved, said Richard Miller, a former Government Accountability Project policy analyst who helped write the 2000 law and a reform law in 2004. Miller suggested that Udall and his group also might push for reforms in the current program, now that a new president is in office.
“The guy in the White House had 16 of these facilities in his state,” Miller said, referring to President Barack Obama, who as a senator from Illinois became personally involved in trying to help weapons workers who became sick. “It would be useful to try a two-pronged attack. One can be legislative, but the other needs to be administrative.”
Fighting the workers
For half a century, the federal government’s official policy toward weapons workers who complained of health problems was to fight them in court.
Finally, in 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act. In 2000, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program was created to help uranium miners, and workers who developed, built and tested the most powerful weapon on earth. Udall, joined by his cousin U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, is now trying to reform it.
The Udalls’ Charlie Wolf Act would make workers automatically eligible for medical coverage and $150,000 in compensation if they had one of 34 diseases recognized as linked to radiation and toxic exposure.
Congressional staff members estimate the bill would cost taxpayers at least $2 billion. Former congressional staffers who helped create the 2000 law estimate the cost could rise to $20 billion.
“Twenty billion dollars is just a fraction of what’s been spent bailing out Wall Street,” said Terrie Barrie, who helped found the Alliance for Nuclear Workers Advocacy Groups after her husband, George, a former bomb builder at Rocky Flats, fell ill. “And $20 billion is just a few months in Iraq.”
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