Family full of Flats workers deals with death and illness

Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 27, 2007 at midnight

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For Michelle Dobrovolny and her relatives, working at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant was a family affair.

Now, dying is.

Sixteen members of Dobrovolny’s extended family worked at the bomb factory northwest of Denver.

Seven are sick or dead.

Four of the seven have been denied medical care and compensation by a federal program meant to help nuclear weapons workers sickened by radiation or toxic chemicals on the job. They cannot prove Rocky Flats took their health.

The aid program paid a claim for one family member — but not until after he died. Two others have never applied.

This week, the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health meets in Denver to recommend whether exposure records at the now-demolished Rocky Flats are so poor that every former worker who comes down with one of 22 radiation-related cancers should automatically be granted compensation. The presidential advisory board's decision goes to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has generally followed the panel's recommendations.

Giving this "special exposure cohort" designation to all Rocky Flats workers could mean compensation for up to three more of Dobrovolny's relatives who've had cancer.

It could also help the healthy ones, if they later come down with one of the cancers named in the law.

Meanwhile, they watch what is happening to their family members and wonder if they are next.

"Everyone who worked out there wondered if they would get cancer," says Mark Dobrovolny. He's Michelle's former husband, a former Rocky Flats worker and son of a Rocky Flats worker who died of lung cancer.

Many whole families went to work at Rocky Flats during the Cold War, as workers spread the word about good jobs and great pay. Officials found it easier to do security clearances on relatives of employees who'd already been cleared.

Mark Dobrovolny painted walls and floors at Rocky Flats — fixing radioactive particles from spills under a coating so they could not float into the air they breathed.

"Your mind says you're safe," he recalls.

Mark still believes that. He has never requested his exposure records. "Actually, I don't want to know," he said. "And I don't know that I would believe the information that was there."

For Michelle Dobrovolny and one of her cousins, this week's vote won't offer any immediate help. Their immune systems are ruined, but they can't prove that Rocky Flats is the cause.

Michelle has a disease that she's been told can lead to liver failure or liver cancer. She's too sick to work, but the program won't help because she doesn't have cancer yet.

"Do you have to die before you get help?" asks her father, Enoch Samora.

Still, struggling with repeat bouts of pneumonia, brochitis and other infections is not the worst part of her life.

"The hardest thing is watching my family members around me die," she says.

An eighth family member is healthy but has warning signs his lungs eventually will be ruined by beryllium disease, from working with a rare material used at Rocky Flats. "They've told me it's not a matter of if, but when," said Levi Samora, Michelle's brother.

Samora is relieved that he has full health insurance as a Rocky Flats retiree. He made his 25 years just 15 days before he was laid off at the completion of demolition in September 2005. Without that insurance, he believes employers would not touch him.

He dismantled pipes and equipment in buildings contaminated with radiation and corrosive, toxic chemicals, including the so-called infinity room where the radiation was so high the meter went off the scale — into infinity. At times, the work was so dangerous that he wore a respirator inside a bubble suit.

He thought he was taking precautions, but he worries about what he didn't know.

"We were completely and totally misled" about the dangers of beryllium and other toxics at the plant, he said.

imsea@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5438

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