Salazar introduces bill to help ailing Rocky Flats workers

Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News

Published March 2, 2007 at midnight

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Colorado's Cold War bomb makers would have an easier time getting compensation for work-related illnesses under a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, who accused the government of "foot-dragging, obstruction and neglect" in the matter.

Salazar's legislation, which mirrors bills introduced by Congressmen Mark Udall and Ed Perlmutter, both Colorado Democrats, would essentially cut the red tape that has denied or delayed benefits to many workers at Rocky Flats.

"Across five decades, the patriotic men and women of Rocky Flats served their country producing plutonium, one of the most dangerous substances in the world, and crafting it into the triggers for America's nuclear arsenal," Salazar said in a written statement.

"Washington owes them an enormous debt of gratitude. But instead, it has shown them the back of its hand."

Both Salazar and Udall have introduced similar legislation in the past. Both bills died. But this year, Rocky Flats worker advocate Terrie Barrie hopes things might be different.

"It would be so wonderful" to have Congress take action, said Barrie, whose husband George, a former Flats mechanic, has documented plutonium exposure and suffers numerous ailments.

He and scores of other workers who have cancers and other ailments they believe are linked to on-the-job exposures have been trying to get medical and financial help for years.

In 2000, after decades of denial, the federal government for the first time acknowledged nuclear weapons workers across the nation had been harmed by contact with plutonium, chemicals and other toxic and radioactive substances.

Congress set up a compensation program for workers with certain ailments, agreeing to pay $150,000 plus medical costs to those who qualify.

But since then, many Rocky Flats workers have found their exposure records are missing or inaccurate. As a result, documenting their exposures - one requirement of the compensation program - has proved to be a nearly impossible hurdle.

Two years ago, the union representing the workers asked the federal government to declare the Rocky Flats workers part of a "special exposure cohort," which means they wouldn't have to prove their individual exposures. Instead, it would be assumed that any worker in a certain area at a certain time would have been dangerously exposed and therefore compensated.

A petition for such status is among 14 pending before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Ten other weapons sites have received that designation because their exposure records were not reliable enough.

Determining if the Rocky Flats records were reliable enough to reconstruct workers' toxic doses - a process that was supposed to take a matter of months - has dragged on for two years with no decision.

The legislation in both the House and Senate would grant that "special exposure cohort" status to Rocky Flats.

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