Full Body Burden (42 page)

Marash interviews Jim Kelly—the longtime worker at Rocky Flats who was on the roof during the Mother’s Day fire—who shakes his head. “It was production, production, production,” Kelly says. “Safety was a word. It wasn’t really practiced. The job was to get the product out the door, and if you got it done safely, okay, and if you didn’t, they’d turn their head.”

Marash then talks about the grand jury investigation that began in 1989 after the FBI raid. He interviews Ryan Ross (also known as Bryan Abas), the journalist who broke the story of the runaway grand jury to the press. “The jurors thought that anybody who’d committed a crime should be held accountable for it,” Ross says. “They didn’t care whether they worked in the federal government, or in the private sector, or how high up in the government they were.” He notes that a dozen sections were taken out of the jury report. “Almost all of them had to do with the conclusions of the jury that the illegal conduct they found that Rockwell was engaged in was continuing to be done under the successor contractor [EG&G].”

One of the grand jurors appears onscreen. “I had nightmares, you know. I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about what I had heard for a whole week in that jury room.”

Paula Elofson-Gardine, a resident who’s lived downwind from the plant since 1964, notes that housing development around Rocky Flats continues to grow as home developers lobby the county planning commission.
“The greed of developers,” she says, “is matched only by their customers, homeowners who are kept ignorant thanks to the sealed grand jury report.”

I pace the dark living room for an hour before putting on my nightgown. So many of the things I feared, or were afraid to even think about, are true. It’s real, and it’s still going on. I take up my journal again.
I just saw Rocky Flats on
ABC Nightline.
Oh my God. I can’t sleep
.

I turn off the light and wait for the morning.

T
HE NEXT
morning I drive into work expecting the world to have changed somehow, and it has not. Deer are grazing close to the road and I glimpse the orange tags on their ears. A light dusting of snow covers the grass, pink in contrast, and the clouds overhead are dark in the morning sky. The mountains are deep blue, almost black. On days like this the beauty of the land, of what is now the buffer zone, is stunning.

People are quiet at work. There’s the comforting click-clack of fingers on keyboards, a slight scent of nail polish in the air. A box of doughnuts stands open on one desk and a copy of
People
magazine peeks out from a stack of papers on another. The managers’ doors are predictably closed.

But later that afternoon, when many of the managers are out of the building, people gather around Anne’s desk. Her desk occupies a semineutral zone, where people are freer with their comments. It also has a straight-line view of the front door, so we can scatter quickly if needed. Everyone has seen the
Nightline
report.

“It’s true that 771 is a mess,” says one of the project engineers. “It’s an old building, and a dangerous building. You have to be real careful down there in the hot zone. The hourly workers get some compensation, but what’s the point? Those guys take a lot of that stuff home with them, whether they know it or not.”

“If someone’s afraid to be plantside, or afraid to go down to the 700 area, then they shouldn’t be working here,” a secretary snorts. “It’s more dangerous working at a Federal Express office than here. We have strict safety rules—”

“The media?” someone interrupts. “You believe them? Oh right.
Some bubble-headed bleached blonde, airing everyone’s laundry. I don’t believe a word of the media.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” Anne says. She pauses. “How is the public supposed to know what to believe?”

“There is a lot of waste at Rocky Flats,” adds an older woman with beehive hair. “A lot of time and energy wasted, too. As a Christian, that’s hard for me to deal with. It’s the taxpayers’ money, after all. But someone’s got to have this job and these benefits. Someone’s got to do it. Why not me?”

Another guy thinks that the whole thing has been orchestrated. “They manipulate the press to get more money out here,” he says. “Now there will be fewer layoffs and more money from Washington. It’s good for us in the long run.”

I don’t say anything. I’m afraid to open my mouth. Inside I am shaking with anger and fear.

“Well,” Anne says, “I guess the only certain and eternal things in life are taxes, death, and Rocky Flats.” Everyone laughs. It’s a saying that’s often repeated at the plant.

L
ATER THAT
afternoon, just before I leave for the day, Debra catches me in the hallway. “I have something for you!” she whispers. Her eyes are dancing. “It’s in my car. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

For once there’s no wind. The air is sharp with the slightly metallic scent of snow.

“Here!” Debra announces. From her backseat she extracts a large platter, black faux-marble plastic, wrapped in cellophane. It’s stacked with Christmas goodies: jam cookies, peanut butter thumbprints, sugar cookies with brightly colored frosting, braided bread, and six or seven other things, all tied with crimson ribbon. “I made them all myself!” she declares.

I am overcome. It must have taken her weeks to do all that baking. “Thank you, Debra.” I feel bad. I hadn’t thought of anything for her.

“I want you and your boys to have a nice Christmas,” she trills. She jumps in her car and waves out the window.

I pick Sean and Nathan up from Jennifer’s and they jump with delight at the tray that takes up the entire front seat. We get home and I set it on the kitchen counter. I let Heathcliff in from the backyard and take the boys upstairs to wash up for dinner.

I come back downstairs and the tray has vanished.

“What’s this?” I exclaim. It’s disappeared into thin air. I walk into the living room, where Heathcliff is sprawled on the couch, half asleep. He’s no longer a puppy; his basset hound barrel of a body takes up half the sofa. One paw drops languidly off the edge.

It takes me a moment to realize that the tray—with not one crumb remaining—is on the floor next to him.

The next day I see Debra at her desk. “How did they like it?” she asks. “Did the boys like the cookies?”

I can’t bear to tell her the truth, or even think about what the boys’ faces looked like when they came downstairs for their dinner.

“They were—are—delicious,” I say. “Everyone in my household just loved them!”

C
HRISTMAS ARRIVES
, and with it—just days before—a paycheck big enough for me to buy gifts. The Sunnyside Temp Agency is raffling off holiday turkeys. I don’t win, but I get a coupon for ten dollars off a turkey at the local grocery store, and that helps. We have a real Christmas tree that takes up half the living room, and Sean and Nathan argue about whether or not the dove on the top of the tree is really a chicken. Jasmine shimmies up the tree trunk, hiding in the branches, and occasionally a paw shoots out to take a swipe at a Christmas ornament.

All that negative stuff about Rocky Flats is just a bad dream.

And then I have a real dream about Mark. I haven’t thought about him in a long time. The dream takes place on a dark, windy night, and for some reason I’m working late at Rocky Flats. The wind is intense, and I go out to crack the windows on my car, which I often have to do in real life at the plant to prevent the windows from blowing out. I see someone else in the dark parking lot, walking toward a white van. Is it another worker? The person turns, and I see it’s Mark.

I’ve aged, and he hasn’t. He’s still in his early twenties. I look into his face, into his eyes. His face is the clearest I’ve ever seen it in a dream. I reach out and hug him, and it feels exactly as it always felt, with my hipbones just below his leather belt.

He pushes back and looks at me. He wants to tell me something, but before he can speak, the dream ends.

When Randy Sullivan began work at Rocky Flats in 1991, he discovered a world unto its own.

For his first eighteen months, he worked in the fire prevention department, learning the layouts of the various buildings. It was confusing at first. The confusion was intentional, he learned; many of the plutonium buildings had been designed so as to slow down anyone—terrorists, for example—who didn’t belong there. It was like an old medieval village with twisting streets meant to prevent invaders from getting to the palace. But that made it difficult for employees and firefighters, too. Building 881 was a serpentine maze of curves and twists. Building 371 had three underground levels with multiple staircases that led to different points in the building. All the buildings were filled with large machinery in close quarters, which made it difficult to move around. The fire protection systems were all located at the top.

There were fourteen firefighters and three officers on each shift. Randy’s schedule was exhausting: twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, twenty-four
hours on, and then four days off. Like the guards, he and the other firefighters were expected to work out at the company gym and keep themselves in shape.

Randy’s education in hazardous materials included special training in how to extinguish a fire in a glove box. Since water was off limits, he was taught to use a glove-box entry horn, a fire extinguisher with a special fitting, like a plastic bag, that tucked around the part of the box that held the arms of the lead-lined gloves. Randy learned to use a knife to cut out the lead gloves, push the horn inside the glove box, and discharge the CO
₂
extinguisher.

Randy was also trained as a fire medic, which meant he could respond to cardiac arrests and major traumas. Occasionally the Rocky Flats firefighters were called to handle car accidents on Highway 93, sometimes fatal, on the west side of the plant, even though it was offsite. Highway 93 was particularly treacherous due to the high winds and extreme weather conditions in the area. In the wintertime, the highway could turn into a skating rink of black ice, and winds of one hundred miles per hour were not uncommon. Employees’ cars parked in the parking lot often looked like they’d been sandblasted.

Fires at the plant, though, were his main concern. There had been more than two hundred over the years, and he’d heard stories about the 1957 and 1969 fires and how close the plant came to a significant radioactive release. No one really seemed to know the facts. “Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d had a release in this kind of wind?” he said to a friend on a particularly windy day. “There’d be no one left from here to New Mexico!”

There was a tendency to downplay the fires to the public, particularly in the late 1970s. When a reporter learned of a fire on a loading dock outside a plutonium waste-processing building, Rockwell’s director of information services, Felix Owen, told the press it hadn’t been reported because it was small and “
people are scared of fires at Rocky Flats. I don’t need to upset them about a little trash fire on a dock.” Sometimes firefighters from other firehouses were brought in to fight fires as well.
The Arvada and Fairmount fire districts responded repeatedly to fires when
thousands of leaking drums stood out on a windswept field at the Rocky Flats Industrial Park, near the plant. Firefighters fought those fires not knowing what was inside the drums or even knowing if it was safe to use water. Acrid smoke from the fires rose into the sky and floated over nearby communities.

Despite the dangers, Randy enjoyed his job. He liked the camaraderie with the other firefighters and the guards. Each year they had a volleyball tournament at the site, the “hose draggers” versus the “pistol monkeys.” Despite the intense competition, the guards and firefighters were like brothers. They looked out for one another on the job. At the firehouse, the firefighters cooked meals together. They had a garden just outside the firehouse, with roses that “nothing can kill,” but they didn’t bother growing tomatoes—who knew if it was safe to eat them?

The mood at the plant could be prickly. During the Gulf War in 1991, it could take as long as an hour and a half to get through the security gate while the guards conducted car searches. Randy didn’t mind—he knew it was necessary. And not everyone supported the mission of Rocky Flats. Once when they drove the fire truck through a residential area in Boulder, people threw eggs.

On the other side of the situation were the employees who weren’t happy when it became clear that the plant would not resume production of plutonium triggers. Randy had started work two years after the FBI raid shut down most production at the plant. Hiring, ironically, was at an all-time high. Then the news came down that the military mission had been canceled and Rocky Flats might be torn down. There was talk about trying to clean up the site. After all he’d learned, and all he’d heard, Randy didn’t think it was possible. He and his fellow firefighters thought it would be somewhere between thirty and fifty years before any serious cleanup could occur. There was no way they could close the entire place down, clean up all the buildings, and tear ’em down and make it prairie again, he said. His buddies agreed.