Stricken Ammo Plant Worker Seeks Answers

Robert Anderson says he never liked it when a shipment of raw nuclear materials arrived and he had to take inventory before the guys with the protective suits and Geiger counters were sent in.

“I always questioned them about that. ‘How come you guys don’t go first?’ ” Anderson recalls from his days at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant.

“We’d kind of laugh about it. We were always told that ‘it’ll be all right. There’s no risk. It’s all protected,” he says.

So Anderson put his trust in the government--in the U.S. Army, which owned the facility, and the Atomic Energy Commission, which controlled the nuclear weapons program there--and went about his job as a shift commander for the plant’s security department. He worked there from 1968 to 1973.

Several times a week, Anderson says, he and others on the security detail climbed aboard the trains and trucks arriving at the plant, about 10 miles west of Burlington in southeast Iowa. Their job was to record the serial numbers of the nuclear material.

Anderson said they wore only military police uniforms with steel-toed shoes. No masks. No lead-lined suits.

In 1988, 15 years after leaving the plant, Anderson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma--a cancer of the lymphatic system, the network of lymph nodes and vessels that works to fight infection in the body.

According to the American Cancer Society, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is the fifth most common cancer in the United States. About 25,700 Americans died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last year.

But Anderson wondered whether it was connected to his work at the plant, where nuclear bombs and conventional weapons were produced.

He learned that three others on the security force were later diagnosed with the same type of cancer: Edmund “Sonny” Rider, Ken Fairchild and Paul Cross. Rider and Fairchild died.

Anderson, now 59, has no idea whether his health was being monitored on the job. After years of wondering, he decided to make his questions public, as part of an assignment for a community college course on “Man and the Environment.”

In a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Anderson explained his work at the plant and his observations, including “the disposal of retired weapons which were frozen, cracked apart and burned in open-field burning methods.”

“If any radioactive material leaked from the core into the explosives, they were certainly placed into the atmosphere by burning. I know of three dairy herds within five miles of the burning,” his letter stated.

The letter prompted Harkin to visit the 19,000-acre Middletown site in September, meeting with about 75 former employees.

From 1949, when the plant opened its nuclear weapons assembly line, until 1951, the Middletown factory was the only nuclear weapons assembly plant in the nation. It employed about 8,000 people at the peak of production.

The nuclear weapons line shut down in 1975, leaving just under 1,000 employees making ammunition for mortars and tanks and warheads for high-precision Patriot, Stinger, Dragon, Hellfire and Hawk missiles.

Questions now arise whether workers were properly monitored when the nuclear weapons assembly line was in operation, whether their health might have been affected and how they could be monitored in the future.

National energy officials say health records do indeed exist for workers from the Iowa plant, but they’re scattered in two weapons plants--at Middletown and its sister plant in Amarillo, Texas--and there is no master list of employees to help isolate records for those who worked with nuclear material.

The U.S. Department of Energy says it is trying to cobble together such a list from the health records, once it has them all in one place.

Nuclear weapons work at the Iowa plant employed about 1,000 people each year, says Robert Griswold of the DOE’s nuclear operations office in Albuquerque.

Although the Army owned the plant, the nuclear weapons program was controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1974 the commission’s functions were moved to a new agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency under the DOE.

Since that change, dozens of boxes filled with records of the plant’s nuclear history have been unaccounted for, Griswold says.

About 100 boxes of records-- many involving health data and weapons technology that remains classified--turned up at the Pantex nuclear facility in Amarillo.

The DOE, in addition to creating a master list of employees who did nuclear work, is trying to determine if any health monitoring was done along the same lines as that done at other nuclear plants, Griswold says.

Mike Garcia, a health protection team leader for the DOE’s nuclear operations office in Albuquerque, says nuclear plant employees around the country at the time generally were given annual exams, including X-rays, and blood and lung tests.

But Garcia says he does not know if such monitoring was done for employees involved in nuclear work at Middletown.

Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md., says monitoring decades ago at all nuclear facilities was “generally bad.”

“I have not come across a single plant where either environmental releases or worker exposure were properly monitored. Not one,” Makhijani says.

The company that runs the Army plant provides few details.

“Exactly what type of monitoring was done, I don’t know,” says Peter Richardson, facilities manager for American Ordnance LLC.

American Ordnance is a subsidiary of Mason & Hanger, a Lexington, Ky.-based company that has operated the Iowa Army Ammunition plant since 1951 and has designed, built and operated military installations since 1827.

“It would be nice to know what we were involved with at the time,” Anderson says. “What was, what is, the risk to myself and others? I certainly would not have assigned my people to go down there and stand guard over these things if I knew they might be damaged by it.”

Discerning cancer rates among former Iowa Army Ammunition plant employees, or even Des Moines County residents in general, would be difficult, says Dr. Michele M. West, a cancer epidemiologist for the State Health Registry of Iowa. The registry has charted cancer rates and types of cancer since 1973.

West says that if the state health registry could get a list of all former plant workers’ names, it could determine different kinds of cancer rates among the plant workers, then compare those rates with those of the general population of Des Moines County and the state.

Griswold says it will probably be several more months before such a list is complete.

Radiation is not the only concern at Middletown. The soil and ground water there were contaminated over the years by toxins such as acetone, benzene, barium, lead and mercury, putting the plant on the national Superfund cleanup list in 1990. The cleanup is expected to be completed in about 10 years.

The DOE also plans to enroll Middletown’s nuclear-weapons workers in a comprehensive health study on exposure to beryllium, a metal used as a strengthening alloy in nuclear weapons. The same study is being done at other facilities, including ones in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Los Alamos, N.M.; Rocky Flats, Colo.; and Hanford, Wash.

Beryllium disease, which affects the lungs and is caused by inhaling dust, fumes or particles of beryllium, has afflicted about 115 of the 20,000 nuclear-plant workers nationwide known to have been exposed to beryllium, Griswold says.

The study will not look at illnesses caused by radiation, though Griswold says the government is considering expanding the scope of the study.

Anderson says he appreciates the DOE’s efforts, but he wants the government to do more to help former Middletown workers.

“I’m more upset that my people, the people I was responsible for, may have been hurt,” he says.