NRC Investigating Radioactive Spill in VA Hospital

Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigators checked the La Jolla VA Medical Center and the homes of about a dozen laboratory workers Saturday but found no evidence of dangerous radioactivity from a spill of radioactive materials in one of the labs.

The accident, which occurred Thursday night or early Friday morning in a sixth-floor research laboratory, “poses no threat to anyone who visited the hospital, patients there or workers in other areas of the facility,” said NRC spokesman Greg Cook.

“The only people we have concerns about are those who were working in the immediate area of the spill, and that concern exists because we do not have enough information as yet to say definitively that they have not been affected.”

Cook said that the NRC team arrived about midnight Friday and has surveyed the laboratory where the spill occurred, but has not had a chance to interview workers in the area to determine just what happened and when.

A check of public areas in the Veterans Administration hospital turned up no traces of the radioactive material, Phosphorus 32, which is usually used to trace the path of other materials in research projects.

Cook said that the San Diego Poison Control Center “was inundated with calls from concerned people” after the accident became public Saturday morning.

NRC investigators checked hallways and elevators and found only minute traces of the radioactive material, Cook said.

“This was after the hospital’s maintenance crew had done a cleanup of the area,” he explained, “and we were satisfied that there was no danger, that no danger exists or had existed” in areas outside the sixth floor research laboratories.

Checks of about 10 homes of researchers turned up only contamination on a pair of shoes, he said. He termed the contamination “very low level” and said that it was removed by simply washing off the shoes.

Hospital officials discovered the radioactive accident when they arrived for work about 8:30 Friday morning and found that the entrance to the sixth floor research lab where the spill occurred had been sealed with tape, signaling a radioactive accident.

“It got spread around the hospital quite a bit,” Cook said, “but we believe that, based on the kind of material they were using, there is no safety concern.”

Gayle Gray, spokeswoman for the VA Hospital, said that the hospital was “back to normal” Saturday following the cleanup. She said the material is not considered dangerous enough to require wearing masks, gowns or shoe covers, and said that harmful effects occur only from ingesting the material.

“It would be about the same level of radiation as if you flew from San Diego to New York on an airliner at 40,000 feet,” she said of the danger to hospital personnel, patients or visitors Saturday.

Cook said that because of the extensive interviews and other investigations, the NRC team may be at the La Jolla hospital “well into next week.”

The federal regulatory agency could take a number of actions against the hospital if it finds that there were improper procedures or lax safety standards at the facility, Cook said

The most severe penalty would be revocation of the hospital’s permit for use of radioactive materials, Cook said. Other, less severe penalties include fines, citations which require written answers and possible corrective action or orders requiring changes in hospital procedures, he said.

“We will have to look at the hospital’s procedures and see whether the actions which were taken in this case were appropriate before considering any sort of action,” Cook said. “Until we have a handle on what actually occurred, we have no way to assess whether the proper measures were taken.”