George Barrie is dying. His wife's advocacy work may have become a weapon against him

By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 20, 2008 at midnight

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Javier Manzano © The Rocky

George Barrie leans over to turn off the light before going to sleep. Barrie has a lot of trouble sleeping, because he has to wear an oxygen mask at night, combined with several pain medications.

Deadly Denial: 3-day special report

Visit the special report index of our Deadly Denial investigative series about the failure of the U.S. Department of Labor to adequately compensate former nuclear weapons workers suffering from illnesses. Read more stories, watch videos, download documents and weigh in on the discussion.

CRAIG — The pain drives George Barrie from his bed about 3 a.m. — a nightly occurrence.

He leaves his sleeping wife and stumbles to his recliner in the living room. He sits down heavily, shifting his weight, trying to make the pain bearable.

The house is silent except for his labored breathing.

On the opposite wall are family photos that show him in healthier days. Once when a visitor asked about them, Barrie broke down and cried at his own image.

"How dare they do this to me?" was all he could say.

Barrie is an ex-bomb maker, a highly-skilled machinist who shaped toxic beryllium and plutonium metal to top-secret tolerances within a fraction of the width of a human hair.

Among his myriad illnesses, doctors have confirmed that at least his pre-cancerous stomach condition is the result of his work with dangerous materials at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons complex.

His wife, Terrie, is a former waitress who was so angered by the government's treatment of her husband and others like him that she became a leading advocate for sick nuclear workers nationwide.

Barrie filed seven years ago for the federal benefits available to sick nuclear weapons workers or their survivors, but the government repeatedly has denied him full compensation.

Terrie Barrie helped found a national organization for sick workers, and now has the ear of powerful leaders in Congress. But when the couple recently discovered that copies of advocacy letters Terrie wrote to government officials were contained in George's official government case file — even though they were not related to his case — they began to fear that her advocacy work has derailed George's chances for full compensation.

"Why would they have put those letters in his file?" Terrie said. "I think it was a way to intimidate me, pure and simple. It's like, 'We know what you do and we're not paying George.'"

She said she is haunted by the thought that doctors might have prevented her husband's precipitous physical decline if the government program had approved coverage without delay.

"They're letting him die," she said, anger rising in her voice. "They murdered him at Rocky Flats. His own government murdered him and they are still murdering him."

George Barrie's government file, his claim for compensation, runs 4,000 pages. That his wife's letters were in there is not the only disturbing experience the two have had.

On a clear night in Denver, April 25, 2006, the Barries arrived at the Sheraton Hotel on Colorado Boulevard. Inside, a panel appointed by President Bush would hear concerns from sick workers such as Barrie about the failings of the compensation program.

But the Barries were going to complain about much more than that.

"We uncovered something that was important," Terrie Barrie said. "It was huge."

She and George were going to explain how they believed that the entire compensation process for former Rocky Flats workers had been undermined, and that agency officials knew about the problem but had ignored it.

The very same scientist who'd once been in charge of the Rocky Flats program to protect workers from radiation had just recently been hired by the government to review the quality of his own program.

The government also had based its opposition to automatic aid for Flats workers on the information from that man, Roger Falk. The Barries believed that if public faith in Falk were lost, the government's position would not hold.

As George Barrie got settled in the meeting room, a top program official approached him.

Kate Kimpan had a long history with the program. As a senior policy advisory at the U.S. Department of Energy, she had been key in the program's early going.

The energy department's handling of that launch was deemed such a failure that Congress took it away in 2004 and gave it to the Department of Labor.

Kimpan also had been the key liaison among DOE and the departments of health and labor. Now, Kimpan was working for DOL contractor Dade Moeller & Associates, overseeing radiation exposure estimates for the program.

Kimpan had first met the Barries before the compensation program was established. But they had spoken only once since Kimpan left DOE. Terrie Barrie said Kimpan had called her at home earlier in the week, trying to persuade them to meet with her in Denver.

"She said to me, 'I can help George,'" Terrie recounted. "My first thought was, if she can help George, why didn't she (already)? I thought she was implying that if I didn't say anything (about the Falk allegations), she'd help George get paid.

"I didn't like being intimidated, or bribed, or whatever you want to call it. They were trying to make me or him not say stuff by dangling that hope out there. I resented it."

Kimpan said she does not remember calling the Barries.

That night at the Sheraton, Terrie Barrie had begun talking to other claimants when Kimpan approached George Barrie.

"She said 'George, don't do this,'" he said. "If you don't do this, I can help you."

Kimpan said she does remember speaking to him in the hotel. However, she did not try to stop him from talking, she said.

"The only thing I can think of is they really must be confused," Kimpan told the Rocky. "There's no logic in it."

Kimpan said she would not have offered to help because in her job overseeing radiation estimates, she had no role in the part of the program handling George's claim.

But that's what made the call and encounter stand out, Terrie Barrie said.

"I knew she shouldn't have been able to have any effect," she said. "That's why it shocked me so much."

In addition to problems that the Barries believe are associated with Terrie's advocacy, they have encountered the same kinds of perplexing roadblocks that other ill nuclear workers complain about.

Government officials originally said records showed that George worked in only two buildings on the sprawling Rocky Flats complex. But George happened to keep some of his own records, which show he worked in other buildings as well. Proving specifically where an employee worked can be vital to proving they deserve compensation because it becomes evidence of what toxic exposures they faced.

Rockwell International, the contractor that ran Rocky Flats while George worked there, previously had reimbursed some of George's medical bills based on his successful state workers' compensation claim. But after Rockwell left the site in the 1990s, it wanted to close out the claim and gave George a $17,000 settlement.

DOL now argues that the same amount must be deducted from George's federal compensation, even though its own rules say that deductions for previous settlements do not include medical reimbursements.

One of George's conditions — nephritis of the kidneys — is covered automatically under a different federal compensation program for which his job doesn't qualify.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act assumes that this illness was caused by radiation and automatically compensates uranium miners and those who lived downwind of atomic tests. But the program that covers bomb builders such as George, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, does not.

Like many other sick nuclear workers across the country, George Barrie said he is less concerned about the lump sum he might receive from the program. What he really needs is medical care.

"I need help," he said.

On a recent routine medical visit to replace the breathing mask he wears at night, George discovered that the oxygen level in his blood had dropped to 88 percent. Anything less than 90 percent can signal lung disease.

Barrie fears that his former work as a machinist is now causing him to develop chronic beryllium disease, which has plagued thousands of other beryllium workers.

The government will reimburse him for lung tests only if the results show he has beryllium disease. But George knows that the tests — which involve inflating each lung with saline solution, giving patients the sensation that they are drowning — notoriously produce false negative results.

George doesn't want to risk wasting any money right now, so he will wait awhile longer because the more severe this incurable disease is, the easier it is to diagnose.

"The best place I ever worked got me sick," he said. "I'm dying. It's not like I did anything to deserve this."

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