Ross Williams is too weak for the tests he needs to receive compensation

By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 23, 2008 at midnight

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Ross Williams, shown at the home he built, says he thought his heart was going to stop during a recent lung test. A nurse wanted the 86-year-old to blow into a machine as hard as he could for six seconds, but he couldn't do it.

To prove he is sick enough to deserve the federal compensation promised to former uranium miners such as himself, 86-year-old Ross Williams must take a lung-function test.

The problem is, Williams and some others like him are too sick to complete the required test. With measured breath, he explains in his native Navajo language what has happened each time he has tried to take it.

Williams' daughter drove him from his four-room home on the windswept desert near the southern rim of the Grand Canyon to the medical clinic an hour away. The nurse wanted him to blow into the testing machine as hard as he could for six seconds. His heart pounded and he was afraid it would stop. He could barely blow for half that time.

Without completed test results, Williams has been unable to prove he deserves compensation.

"It's particularly ironic," said Dr. Douglas Zang, who directs the Navajo Area Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, N.M. "The people who are potentially the sickest and have the worst lung disease are the least able to perform the test. And if they're unable, their claims can be rejected."

Williams was one of more than 10,000 Navajo men who dug radioactive uranium without any protective gear to help the U.S. make atomic bombs during the Cold War. In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act for those miners, millers and transporters, along with citizens who were downwind of the above-ground atomic bomb tests whose health was harmed.

When the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act was passed a decade later, Congress decided that to be fair, the uranium workers should receive an additional sum, so that their total compensation would equal that of other weapons workers.

"They're pretty much automatically eligible," Zang said. "But to be compensated for impairment, they have to have an impairment rating."

And since there are no physicians on the reservation — or anywhere near it — who are certified in impairment ratings, the Navajo uranium workers must go to Zang, who is required to give them a full pulmonary function test and send the results to DOL.

"It's a difficult test for anyone to take," Zang said. "These are old guys with lung disease."

Zang said he had informed DOL officials in the Denver district office, which handles uranium miners' claims, of the problem.

"They were receptive and very cordial," he said. "They understand the perverse nature of this. So far as I can tell, they want to do the right thing."

Zang said he hopes that DOL will correct the problems he raised four months ago, but so far that hasn't happened.

"The ones potentially the worst off are the least able to get compensated," he said.

Zang has noticed other anomalies in the program.

Some uranium workers clearly are suffering breathing difficulties, but the lung tests seem to show lung function still within normal ranges.

George Tsosie barely can walk from the Indian Health Services hospital in Shiprock to his car in the parking lot. Just out of the door, the 71-year-old stops to catch his breath. He has pains in his sides. He sometimes coughs up blood.

DOL agreed that he has uranium-induced lung disease, but it said the results of his breathing test fall within normal range so he is not eligible for compensation.

Tsosie tried repeating the lung test several times, but during his fourth attempt, he lost consciousness. He doesn't want to try again.

His doctor sent a letter to the Denver DOL office on his behalf, but officials there told Tsosie that they lost it. At this point, Tsosie isn't sure where his claim stands, some three years after he first filed it.

"They keep asking for the same information," he said in Navajo. "I have my children translate their letters for me. They just read it to me, but I don't know what it means. Right now, I don't know what (DOL officials) are telling me."

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