“Despite 20 years of study and multiple reports, the federal government has not implemented a lasting solution,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement, “and workers continue to get sick.”
Ailing, angry nuclear-weapons workers fight for compensation ‘Too often, workers die waiting’ for help, senator says, Center For Public Integrity, By Jim Morris
emailJamie Smith Hopkinsemail…. 11 Dec 15 “…….. After retiring, Brogdon and at least eight other former guards developed prostate cancer, which they blame on radiation exposures at Portsmouth. Fifteen years ago, Congress created a compensation program for people like them.
But they have not fared well. Brogdon and others who filed claims saw them denied by the U.S. Department of Labor, which has the authority to provide lump-sum payments and cover medical care for ex-employees of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex who fell ill after working in environments where production trumped safety. Many other civilian veterans of the Cold War are similarly demoralized, having failed to navigate a Byzantine program, troubled from the start, that tries to estimate toxic exposures at secrecy-cloaked sites where records often were lost, destroyed, falsified — or simply didn’t exist.
“A lot of claimants have no confidence in the records,” said Malcolm D. Nelson, the Labor Department’s ombudsman for the program.
It’s not that the department never approves claims. Compared with state workers’ compensation programs, which have an abysmal record dealing with complex occupational illness, the payout is notable: $12 billion in more than 74,000 cases since 2000.
But nearly half the cases over that period have been turned down. The denial rate would be even higher if not for exemptions carved out for certain groups of workers.
Brogdon was undone by a dose reconstruction — an attempt by federal health officials to estimate his radiation dose over time. The results of this exercise, overseen by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, inform a “probability of causation” assigned by the Labor Department. If the department decides there is at least a 50 percent chance a claimant’s cancer was caused by radiation exposure, the claim is approved. Brogdon never came close to this threshold.
Nationwide, almost two-thirds of the cases involving dose reconstruction have been rejected by the Labor Department. For Portsmouth claimants, the denials are particularly objectionable given the plant’s history. Dubious recordkeeping practices and erratic radiation monitoring suggest assumptions made by NIOSH for dose reconstructions are way off, they say, leading to unwarranted denial of claims.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” said David Manuta, who was chief scientist at Portsmouth from 1990 to 2000 and now runs a safety consulting firm. “If your input variables are lousy, your output will be lousy.”……
“Over the years, [the program] has been plagued with delays and bureaucratic hurdles,” U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, told the Center in an emailed statement. The Labor Department frequently updates its rules, “often adding steps to the process and making it harder to prove a case,” he wrote. The agency proposed more rule changes just a few weeks ago.
“Too often, workers die waiting for compensation that they never receive,” Udall wrote. “Congress didn’t intend for the … process to be so burdensome.”……
What prompted the compensation program was a scandal decades in the making. At nuclear-weapons sites run by contractors for the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessors, home to some of the most dangerous substances on earth, officials routinely risked their employees’ health.
Workers were exposed “without their knowledge and consent,” Congress would later determine, “driven by fears of adverse publicity, liability, and employee demands for hazardous duty pay.”
In February 1989, retired admiral and energy secretary designee James Watkins told a Senate committee that the Energy Department was a “mess” and that “problems relating to safety, health and the environment have not only been backlogged to intolerable levels but, in effect, hidden from public view until recently. So we are now paying the price.”
Joy Stokes and Faye Stubbs, who worked as custodians and held other jobs at the Energy Department’s Mound plant near Dayton, Ohio, described episodes they say illustrate a cavalier attitude toward safety……
More than 600,000 people worked throughout the weapons complex during the Cold War. When sick employees filed for workers’ compensation with their state programs, the Energy Department directed its contractors to fight the claims. Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on that effort.
Bit by bit, suppression stopped working. Whistleblowers came forward. The Government Accountability Project and other groups dug into the issue. And elected officials were not happy to hear how the complex had treated the people who made it run.
The legislation that launched the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program passed with bipartisan support, but the use of dose reconstruction to make determinations in radiation cases was included over the objections of some House leaders. Cindy Blackston, who served on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee from 1980 to 2007 and closely monitored the program, said the panel expressed concerns during negotiations and “continually thereafter.”
“This is a program to address the fact that we put these people in harm’s way,” she said. “Our position was that dose reconstruction and all that was really just a way to keep from paying people.”……..
The toxicology reports consider exposure-disease links the program doesn’t already accept. They aren’t designed to be a roadblock, but they effectively are, according to a Center analysis of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Of the 113 reports Stokes wrote from 2013 to early October of this year, seven found a causal association between exposure and disease — good news for the claimant. All the rest were thumbs down…….
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson says cleanup workers at Hanford are exposed to noxious fumes and vapors even now. He sued over the matter in September.
“Despite 20 years of study and multiple reports, the federal government has not implemented a lasting solution,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement, “and workers continue to get sick.” http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/12/11/18936/ailing-angry-nuclear-weapons-workers-fight-compensation
