Ben Ortiz was warned that steps to help his case will backfire

By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Javier Manzano © The Rocky

Ben Ortiz, a former Los Alamos engineer, lays on a hospital bed as he waits to have a non-cancerous procedure done on his enlarged prostate.

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NAMBE, N.M. — There is a saying in Spanish: En boca cerrada, no entran moscas.

Ben Ortiz had not heard it in ages when a government doctor asked him if he knew what it meant. Ortiz, who was seeing the doctor at the top secret Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab because he believed that toxic exposures there had made him sick, knew exactly what it meant:

"It means keep your mouth shut," Ortiz said.

But Ortiz has not.

For 20 years, he has spoken out about sickness that he and fellow Los Alamos workers suffer. Sitting in the home he built at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, he looks out across the valley toward the mesa top where the giant lab still operates.

Ortiz was one of the first workers to speak publicly about the ill workers' plight, testifying to Congress about the need for a compensation program because he thought it was the right thing to do. And he was one of the first to file for compensation after the program was created in 2000.

But Ortiz still has not been fully compensated, even though the federal government has acknowledged that some of his many health problems are work-related.

Ortiz said he believes that speaking out and getting his elected representatives involved has cost him. He said an official at the federal resource center set up to help workers with their claims told him that every time his senator or congressman inquires on his behalf about the delay, it only delays his case further.

Officials at the Denver office of the U.S. Department of Labor, which runs the compensation program, told him that the massive three-ring binder of evidence he had compiled with help from the office of his congressman, Tom Udall, had been lost.

Ortiz, 70, is one of several leading advocates for the ill workers nationwide who have experienced unexplained delays and unexplained mistakes in their compensation claims.

"I don't think it's a coincidence," he said.

Not that Ortiz expected the road to be easy. He had long tried to sound the alarm that toxic exposures at the weapons lab in New Mexico had ruined his health and that of others.

Ortiz had endured humiliation when the Los Alamos doctor and two others blamed his debilitating health problems on age (he was 50 at the time) or his imagination. One even questioned if Ortiz was making himself sick by practicing witchcraft.

"I wasn't going to let those people tell me I was imagining this," he said.

Turns out he wasn't.

Three experts on the health effects of chemical exposure have said that Ortiz's work at the atomic bomb laboratory caused his health problems, which include liver damage, brain damage and blackouts.

Ortiz is losing control of his right hand. His speech and his senses of smell and taste are damaged. He cannot identify the smell of coffee or tell the difference between salt and sugar. Inhaling any chemicals — even auto exhaust — sends him into migraine-like headaches.

Neurotoxicologist Raymond Singer, who has consulted with the Justice Department and FBI, wrote in a report 15 years ago that "Mr. Ortiz was poisoned by solvents and related substances at Los Alamos National Laboratories, causing enduring neurotoxicity and neuropsychological deficits."

Even that was not enough to qualify him for full compensation.

"I was a good employee," Ortiz said of his work as a mechanical technician. He soldered silver and cadmium and worked bare-handed, nearly elbow deep, in vats of chemical solvents. "They shouldn't do this to employees."