Contaminated drinking water at K-25?

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This article was in today's (Nashville) Tennessean:

The Tennessean
 
Sunday, 7/30/2000 
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Oak Ridge site's water was tainted for decades 
By Susan Thomas / Staff Writer 

OAK RIDGE -- Drinking water at the Oak Ridge reservation's K-25 atomic bomb
fuel plant was repeatedly contaminated with multiple poisons for decades,
former supervisors here say.

Workers were not told, and today scores of them report illnesses their
doctors cannot explain. Doctors hired by the U.S. Department of Energy,
which operates the site, are expected this week to tell some workers their
illnesses are linked to their K-25 workplace.

Documents and maps obtained by The Tennessean show the purified drinking
water lines at the K- 25 complex were improperly interconnected numerous
places with other lines -- designed to be separate -- carrying impure creek
water used to cool machinery and fight fires.

This creek water was laced with a variety of poisons generated from the
production of nuclear fuel. And, the former supervisors say, in dozens of
instances the contaminated water mixed freely with the drinking water,
which was consumed by thousands of workers at the facility that opened in
1943 to make the fuel for the first atomic bombs.

"We'd find things like the cooling water or fire water joined to the
sanitary pipes, with no backflow preventers or anything to keep the
drinking water from being contaminated with whatever happened to be in the
other systems at any given time," said Sam Vest, 57, a former operations
plant supervisor who went to work at K-25 in 1970.

"Simple but vital things such as labeling the actual kinds of water pipes
wasn't done.

"Many of the engineering maps weren't nearly as detailed as they needed to
be. If the (uranium fuel) process required additional water, they cut into
the nearest pipe whether it was the cooling water, fire water or sanitary
water."

Drinking water at K-25 was sampled and tested daily, Vest said, but only
for bacterial contamination, not the other contaminants that may have
entered the drinking water from the interconnected lines.

In one 1979 safety report obtained by The Tennessean that corroborates
Vest's account, inspectors noted that one set of drinking-water lines had
been connected to cooling-water lines and did not have devices needed to
prevent the entry of contaminated water, in violation of safety codes.

The problem was corrected when it was discovered, but no one knows how long
the pipes had been joined, or how much or what contaminants may have
entered the drinking water system through the connection.

In another instance, officials found a fire-water line had simply been
mistaken for a drinking water line.

"What had happened was that for some unknown length of time, the workers in
that particular building had been assuming they were drinking sanitary
water when, in fact, they were drinking fire water that contained an
antifreeze substance and the chromium we put in to keep the pipes from
corroding year-round and freezing in the winter," said Chris Elliott, who
coordinated water for the K-25 fire department before becoming disabled in
the early 1990s.

'It was a mistake. Nobody had meant for that to happen, and they fixed it.
But to my knowledge, the workers in that building were never told they had
been using contaminated water or told for how long they had been using it.
Simply no one knew."

Vest said when he raised the issue of informing workers their drinking
water might be contaminated, he was quietly told that was not done.

When the issue of fully repairing and restoring the water system to a safe
condition was raised at staff meetings, he said he was told there was not
enough money for that and to do the best he could.

DOE spokesman Steve Wyatt said he could neither confirm nor deny that the
K-25 drinking water was contaminated in past years.

"We do care about the water," Wyatt said. "Our first priority is the safety
of the water today, and we're very confident that it is safe.

"The problem with ancient history is harder. That would require a
considerable amount of study, so as to what action we might take now, I
don't know."

U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, R- Tenn., who has championed an ongoing
congressional push to help the ill nuclear weapons workers here and at
other DOE sites nationwide, responded, saying:

"While I haven't seen the details, I am of course concerned about any
exposures that people were not aware of. This will certainly need to be
looked into further. And exactly who needs to do that must be determined
from among the various regulatory agencies outside DOE," such as the
Environmental Protection Agency.

At the state level, Gov. Don Sundquist's senior policy adviser Justin
Wilson said that while he had no knowledge the K-25 drinking water was
contaminated, he was not taken by total surprise.

"There has never been a question that the pollution at Oak Ridge has
affected human health," Wilson said. "It's the causation idea that has been
a problem.

"And DOE has the responsibility to protect human health, both past and
present."

Workers were less restrained in their reactions.

"I am utterly and completely outraged," said Harry Williams, 54, a
permanently disabled worker and president of the local coalition of ill
workers. "The fact that the sanitary water was contaminated time and time
again isn't a surprise at all. We've suspected that for a long, long time.

"But tell me this: How on God's earth have the DOE officials looked us
square in the face and lied over and over, telling us the water was safe
when their own documents show that is an absolute, total, cruel lie?"

Since early 1997, The Tennesse- an has reported claims of ill workers who
have long suspected their nuclear weapons workplaces are somehow linked to
mysterious health problems. These range from bleeding rashes, slurred
speech, immune system shutdowns, memory impairments and respiratory
ailments to constant bone and muscle pain so severe that wearing clothing
can be unbearable.

The newspaper has interviewed more than 400 individuals suffering from
similar unexplained immune, neurological and respiratory problems who work
or live near 13 nuclear weapons sites in 11 states, stretching from
California to New York.

Contaminated drinking water at K-25 is the latest revelation the ill have
to add to their personal lists of reasons they believe the federal
government "just decided to throw us away once the Cold War was over. We
got sick, and they decided they didn't need us anymore,' Williams said.

"It is so hard to keep hope when it's so incredibly clear DOE simply does
not care about us, if they ever did."

Federal legislation sponsored by Thompson to provide financial and medical
help to certain ill nuclear weapons workers passed the U.S. Senate earlier
this year and is awaiting action in the House of Representatives. If
approved, it would require the signature of the president to become law.

Past practices that led to the contamination of the sanitary water system
at K-25 for the most part resulted from the dashing pace of the Manhattan
Project to produce bomb fuel to win World War II and then later to keep the
nation armed for nuclear combat throughout the Cold War, Vest said.

"I don't know of anything that was done with the water to intentionally
hurt anyone," he said. "Looking back, I truly believe the people in the
very beginning of building K-25 either didn't know exactly what they were
doing or were in such an understandable hurry to process the uranium that
problems started at day one, particularly in the water systems."

K-25 is one of three major facilities on the sprawling Oak Ridge
reservation. It turned uranium into nuclear weapons fuel, using a process
known as uranium enrichment. At one time, the uranium enriching building
was the largest structure under one roof in the world.

Uranium processing there continued until 1987, and at its peak, K-25
employed some 9,000 workers.

There is no indication the water supplies of the other two facilities on
the Oak Ridge reservation -- the Y-12 weapons' refurbishment facility and
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- were similarly contaminated.

"I came from a job working at the Virginia Power Company, so I had a good
idea of how operations work around a nuclear workplace," said Vest, who
took a medical retirement in 1995.

"That's why I barely could believe what I saw at K-25 when I first went to
work in 1970. I just couldn't believe people were running around in and out
of contaminated buildings with zero protection.

"It was astounding."

K-25 was designed with three separate water systems. Beyond the sanitary
drinking water system -- designated for outlets such as drinking fountains,
shower stalls and cooking at the K-25 cafeteria -- K-25 also has a
fire-fighting water system and a separate cooling water system for the
machines essential to producing weapons-grade fuel.

Rising into management, Vest said he was at K-25 for only a couple of years
before he became concerned about the safety of the drinking water.

"It's not that anyone wanted to contaminate the water," he said. "Whenever
we found a problem like pipes connecting the sanitary water into the other
systems, we'd fix it as best and as soon as we could. For that, I'm very
proud of the people I worked with and who worked for me at K-25."

Still, during his tenure at K-25, Vest said, he has personal knowledge of
"dozens" of instances in which the drinking water was contaminated with
toxic substances ranging from the radioactive strontium-90 to arsenic.

"If there's any one thing to blame, it's the fact that we were grossly
under funded,"he said. "We didn't have the money through those years to
build a new, guarded sanitary system. And I'm not blaming DOE or the
various contractors and subcontractors over the years.

"We just had to make do, and that's what they did. And for me, when I think
about those days and those workers and those friends at K-25 who are either
sick or dead now, well, it breaks my heart that I couldn't have done more."

Last year, a DOE oversight investigation was launched after Thompson and
other congressional leaders blasted DOE for the slow pace the lawmakers
said the Energy Department was taking to attempt to unravel the mysteries
of the unexplained illnesses.

Vest has been questioned as part of that probe -- but not in detail about
the water supply. On Friday a Washington-based DOE spokeswoman said the
ongoing probe would include the water systems and claims of contamination
at K-25.

"That," disabled K-25 worker Harry Williams added, "sounds like just
another lying game DOE plays to try to satisfy the politicians and silence
media in hopes us sick folks just go away.

"The only thing I can say to that is simple: We'll be knocking on the DOE
door for justice as long as the last one of us is still breathing."

 

© Copyright 2000 The Tennessean
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