Tools at Flats junked

Company defends rush to dump, says gear possibly tainted

Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 22, 2006 at midnight

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As contractor Kaiser-Hill raced to demolish the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant to collect a $170 million bonus for speedy, cost-saving work, managers ordered untold stores of often brand new equipment and tools thrown away, former workers say.

But a Kaiser-Hill spokesman said the company couldn't take the chance that the material was contaminated and argued that in the big picture, the speed and efficiency of the cleanup saved taxpayer money.

"We safely delivered a very thorough cleanup significantly under budget and ahead of schedule, saving the U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars," said John Corsi, Kaiser-Hill's spokesman.

Ex-workers say the company also wasted uncounted dollars.

The motors, drills, jackhammers, hand tools, paint sprayers, hydraulic pumps, plumbing supplies and myriad additional items thrown away were worth, collectively, millions of dollars, workers estimate. One described the level of waste as "the ugliest thing I'd ever seen."

Barb Smith, a former waste inspector for Kaiser-Hill, said she personally saw her employer throw out "thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff that had never been used."

"Everybody was shocked," said Smith, who worked at Rocky Flats for 30 years. "All they wanted to do was throw it away. They never took any time to give it to anybody."

Tons of materials were sealed in waste bins and buried in pits at dump sites in Nevada and Utah, despite the fact they came from uncontaminated areas of the former weapons plant, workers said.

One worker, Steven Weber, took his complaints to the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Energy. That office later told Weber its review "did not reveal waste." But the OIG has so far provided no documents to the Rocky Mountain News about its investigation. Nor, according to Weber, did it ever interview him about his concerns.

For years, excess materials from Rocky Flats were sold at public auctions. But workers said that in the push to get the cleanup finished early and under budget - an accomplishment that netted $170 million worth of bonuses from the Department of Energy - Kaiser-Hill managers pulled out all the stops and began throwing more materials in the trash.

"I don't think anybody can realize, unless you were there, the rush, the sense of urgency to get that bonus," said Doug Woodard, a 23-year employee at Rocky Flats who was laid off in September, as the closure wound down.

Kaiser-Hill's Corsi acknowledged that there was a "massive amount of equipment disposed of," but he attributed the decision to the difficulty of proving the materials were not contaminated.

"It was just a difficult process to prove this equipment wasn't contaminated in any way, and there's very strict guidelines," Corsi said. "We took conservative measures, and if there was even a question, the equipment was disposed of as waste."

Waste inquiries rebuffed

Opened in the early 1950s, Rocky Flats was a critical part of the country's nuclear weapons manufacturing network for more than three decades. But accumulating environmental hazards at the 6,200-acre site 16 miles west of Denver, combined with an end to the Cold War, led to its shutdown in the late 1980s.

In 1995, the federal government hired Kaiser Hill - a joint venture of CH2M Hill and Kaiser Group Holdings - to begin the monumental task of dismantling Rocky Flats. The perilous work was concentrated in a 385-acre core area of the bomb factory, where radioactive waste had contaminated a number of the 800 buildings.

The DOE entered into a second cleanup contract with Kaiser-Hill in 2000, and to encourage speed and efficiency, offered to reward the company based on how much its costs came in under the target budget of $3.96 billion, and for beating a March 2006 deadline.

The company did both, coming in more than $400 million under budget and beating the deadline by more than five months.

Workers said that in the rush toward completion, managers didn't want to take the time to evaluate leftover materials. When questioned, managers had little interest in debating the matter, workers said.

"We'd say, 'You're throwing all this away?' " Smith said. "They'd just get mad and say get the job done."

The former president of United Steelworkers Local 8031, the union representing many of the workers at Rocky Flats, said he took workers' concerns to management, but he was rebuffed. "Basically, it was cheaper to throw it away than survey (for radioactivity) and release it," Tony DeMaiori said. "That was the bottom line - no more, no less."

Former worker Weber said Kaiser-Hill didn't have to survey everything for radioactivity. In past years, Weber said, the company often moved material to auction without conducting the laborious contamination surveys because officials knew the material wasn't contaminated.

But as the cleanup grew closer to finishing, the same kind of material was simply thrown away instead of being auctioned off or set aside for some other use, Weber said.

Corsi responded by saying it was largely up to the company that ran the public auctions to decide whether it wanted to sell the uncontaminated materials or dispose of them.

Frazier Lockhart, who oversaw the cleanup for the Department of Energy, said it's possible there were "isolated incidents" of throwaway practices, but "it isn't the behavior I observed."

Lockhart said Kaiser-Hill had "a bias toward recycling" and it's likely the complaining workers didn't always understand the situation, perhaps confusing material that needed to be disposed of with usable materials.

"We saw just hundreds and thousands of items going out through auctions," he said. "Even up to the end, the last auction was the last week of August or the first week of September (2005), when we closed the site a month later."

Lockhart said workers were moved around a lot in the late stages of cleanup, often to new areas.

Workers' "misconception"

Department of Energy officials noted that most of the $170 million in bonus money paid to Kaiser-Hill came because the company came in under budget, not simply by beating cleanup deadlines.

But officials also said the speedy cleanup helped greatly in beating the budget, since payroll could be cut quickly as workers were let go.

"It's not very conceivable that any company could have reduced costs in any other fashion than finishing early, so the two are very closely linked," said Charlie Dan, a contracting officer for the Department of Energy familiar with the Kaiser-Hill contract.

For years, many items at Rocky Flats were sold at auction, a point with which the workers agree.

According to Kaiser Hill's Corsi, about 1 million pieces of excess equipment were sold at more than 130 public auctions. The sales returned more than $6 million to the Department of Energy, money used to pay for cleanup at Rocky Flats.

In addition, Corsi noted, more than 7 million tons of metals from the demolished plant were recycled and more than 3,000 computers were provided to a program that refurbishes them and distributes them to Colorado schools.

Eric "Rick" Dahlin, the president of the company that ran the auctions, called the notion that usable materials were thrown away a "misconception" driven by workers who were getting laid off as the facility approached closure.

"We went through a very methodical process," said Dahlin, a former DOE employee who has built a 25-year career working on federal sites.

Dahlin acknowledged his staff wasn't in a position to see any alleged waste. "We can't speak from the experience of actually watching it happen," he said. "We weren't physically (on site)."

Dahlin's company, Integrated Logistics Services Inc., or ILSI, recently entered into a new contract with the Department of Energy, this one related to cleanup of the former nuclear weapons Hanford Site in eastern Washington state.

DeMaiori, the former union president, says officials at ILSI "always complained" to him that material was being thrown away that the company could have auctioned.

Dahlin denied that.

"No, I don't recall us ever making a stink about that," he said.

Many workers, including some interviewed by the Rocky Mountain News for this story, are bitter at their treatment by Kaiser-Hill and the DOE.

It wasn't losing their jobs that angered them as much as losing out on lifetime health and pension benefits because they were laid off months - in some case weeks and days - before they would have hit a date that qualified them for the benefits package.

Those workers fell short of meeting the so-called Rule of 70 requirement, which required that a worker's age and years of service at Rocky Flats total 70 to qualify for the benefits.

In all, 50 to 70 workers narrowly missed out on benefits. The matter found its way to the floor of the U.S. Senate, where extending benefits was voted down despite pleas from Colorado's senators, Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar.

Weber was laid off nine months short of qualifying.

"Pretty soon it was getting to the point where we were working ourselves out of a job," he said. "But I kept figuring they'd take care of people like us."

'Millions dumped in trash'

Weber, a 21-year employee at the plant, said he complained repeatedly about what he saw as the waste. Sometimes, Weber said, managers ordered equipment thrown away, then reordered more when the need arose.

Weber said he even found subcontractors sawing fiberglass ladders so they could fit them inside waste containers.

Weber said managers grew irritated with him for continually raising questions. Weber was planning on starting an electrical business after leaving Rocky Flats, which he has since done, and said much of the material would have given him a helpful start.

Weber began writing Allard in fall 2004, focusing on the loss of benefits for longtime workers at Rocky Flats. He also mentioned the disposal of "perfectly good" equipment and supplies, arguing that the millions being "thrown away" could help pay for benefits.

Later, Weber wrote to an official at the Office of Inspector General of DOE, complaining Kaiser-Hill was being awarded with a cleanup bonus for "wasteful practices." In an April 2005 letter to an OIG official, which Weber provided to the News, he wrote:

"Instead of taking this equipment to be auctioned they had these waste teams who would show up and clear everything out of these rooms and throw it away in either big waste roll-offs or put (the material) in big waste containers that would be then sent to Nevada as waste."

Weber provided a detailed list of items he said he knew first-hand were thrown away to the OIG investigator.

"During this time (early 2005), I tried to save some items and would move (them) to another hideout or cargo containers," Weber wrote. "But in the end these teams were instructed by management to clean them out."

In closing, Weber wrote that he was pursuing the issue "to help bring to light the troubles that have hurt the workers who gave to the mission and watched as millions was dumped in the trash, while watching the people responsible receive millions in bonuses and new assignments elsewhere."

A spokeswoman for Allard, Angela de Rocha, said Weber's concerns about waste were forwarded to the DOE.

"Senator Allard takes any concern of any waste, fraud and abuse very seriously and spends a lot of time and goes to a lot of trouble to get them explored and addressed," she said.

As for the OIG, it's not clear what officials at the agency did after Weber's complaints. A spokesman refused to discuss the issue.

The Rocky Mountain News has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for any documents relating to an investigation, but officials have not provided anything in the three months since the News requested documents.

Weber, who submitted complaints to OIG, said he was never interviewed by OIG on the matter. Nor were any other workers interviewed by the News.

Corsi, the Kaiser-Hill spokesman, said OIG never opened an investigation into allegations of waste: "As far as I know, there was no investigation on that," he said.

While Lockhart - the DOE manager who oversaw the project -- said he was aware of "several" OIG examinations of how Kaiser-Hill dealt with excess equipment, including instances when workers complained, he said he couldn't recall specifics.

"In all cases that I had any awareness of, (the complaint) turned out to be unfounded," Lockhart said. "When (OIG looked into) specifics, there was a very good reason why the action was taken, and . . . the inquiry was closed."

What was discarded

A sampling of items listed by former Rocky Flats worker Steven Weber of new and used equipment thrown away during the demolition of the former nuclear weapons plant:

• "Brand new, still in the boxes" 10-horsepower electric motors, valued at $1,551 each.

• Brand new "high-voltage suits," including hoods, valued at $6,000 to $8,000.

• Twelve to 15 eight-drawer tool chests, some with tools still in them, as well as 12-drawer chests. Value ranged from $487 to $909.

• "Brand new" insulated high-voltage tools still in boxes. Many boxes of tools, with each tool ranging in value from $40 to $45.

• "Brand new" boxes of Hubbell cord caps and locking plugs and connectors, $48.60 each.

• Several trolley hoists, 5-ton and 2 1/2-ton. Estimated at $2,500 each.

• "Brand new," still in the cases Makita drills and sanders. Approximate value, $600 each.

Rocky Flats cleanup

CHRONOLOGY

• 1995: Site cleanup begins

• March 2006: Target date for completion

• Oct. 13, 2005: Cleanup officially complete