Nota: mentre in Italia l'ANPA, Agenzia Nazionale di Protezione dell'Ambiente (?), si appella alla legge sulla privacy per non dire ai Vigili del Fuoco quali sono i siti pericolosi dove vi sono le ditte dove avvengono lavorazioni nucleari (almeno 600 in Italia, la maggior parte nel Nord), negli USA, dopo aver pubblicato la lista di tutti i siti civili, Stato per Stato, si continuano ad interrogare i lavoratori del settore per cercare di ricostruire la portata del DISASTRO. Questa è un'altra delle testimonianze davanti ad una commissione del Governo USA.

Before  Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. House of Representatives
September 21, 2000

9 A.M., 2226 Rayburn
Washington, D.C.
Curriculum Vitae of Clara Harding
submitted pursuant to
House Rule XI, clause 2(g)(4)

Regarding the occasion of her testimony
Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims,
Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives
September 21, 2000
9 A.M., 2226 Rayburn
Washington, D.C.

Clara Harding is a resident of Paducah, KY, having moved there in 1951 as a young married woman after her husband, the late Joe T. Harding, got a job working for Union Carbide Nuclear Division in the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP). Mrs. Harding raised her two daughters, Martha and Clara Jo, working as an assistant to Dr. Curley, an oral surgeon to help make family ends meet when her husband's health deteriorated. She worked longer hours when he was abruptly terminated after 18 years of work by Carbide because of his illnesses. He was fired without insurance, disability or pension benefits.

For the next ten years, Mrs. Harding struggled to help her husband survive, watching his health decline rapidly, and finally losing him to stomach cancer in March, 1980. She has been a first-hand witness to Joe Harding's on-going struggle to bring to light the truth about the terrible conditions suffered by nuclear weapons workers throughout the country. She and their daughter, Martha Alls, carried on his fight after his death. Clara brought a state workers compensation case for widows benefits in 1983, only to have it dismissed 12 years later for failure to meet the statue of limitations. The order stated that for her to meet the filing deadline, under Kentucky law, she would have had to file her widows case five years before her husband died. In 1997, after fifteen years of legal battle, she settled her claim for a nuisance value of $12,000.

In September of 1999, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, came to Paducah and presented her with the Secretary's Gold Medal, saying that she had put a face on the Cold War. Clara Harding continues to live alone in Paducah on a fixed income, babysitting and doing volunteer work in the community. She enjoys needlepoint and watching C-SPAN. She attends Broadway Church of Christ in Paducah.

SUMMARY OF TESTIMONY OF CLARA HARDING
Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. House of Representatives
September 21, 2000
9 A.M., 2226 Rayburn
Washington, D.C.

Clara Harding's testimony will cover her life with her late husband, Joe T. Harding, who worked at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Kentucky, before dying in 1980 of what he and she allege were work-related illnesses. Because of his disabilities and his "trouble-making" in reporting health and safety problems at the plant, Joe Harding was terminated by Union Carbide in 1971. Clara Harding will testify about her husband's subsequent fight for his life and his tireless exposition of DOE's cover-ups right up until the day of his death, including trips to meet the Secretary of Energy Charles Duncan in 1979, as well as her own meeting with Secretary of Energy Richardson in 1999. Her testimony will also detail her struggle after Joe Harding's death with the Department of Energy and Union Carbide, regarding a workers compensation widows benefits case she filed in 1983, as well as her feelings about the current proposed nuclear workers compensation legislation now before this Subcommittee.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT OF CLARA HARDING PURSUANT TO HOUSE RULE XI, CLAUSE 2(g)(4) REGARDING THE OCCASION OF HER TESTIMONY

Before the  Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims,  Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives
September 21, 2000
9 A.M., 2226 Rayburn
Washington, D.C.

Mrs. Clara Harding has never received a federal grant, contract or subcontract at any time in her life. She represents no entity except herself.

CLARA HARDING
202 IDLEWILD
PADUCAH, KENTUCKY
270-443-9486

Before  Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims,  Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. House of Representatives September 21, 2000
9 A.M., 2226 Rayburn Washington, D.C.

Mr. Chairman and other honorable subcommittee members, I thank you for allowing me to speak today not only in memory of my husband, Joe Harding, but on behalf of all workers like him, and on behalf of all the surviving families who have experienced what we---my daughter, Martha, and I---have experienced. We need Congress to do the right thing, after putting it off for over forty years, and passing a law to compensate workers and their families who have been killed cell by cell, atom by atom, by work we were told was to further the national interest and protect all of our children from harm.

My name is Clara Harding and I lived in Paducah, Kentucky. I have lived there ever since 1952 when my husband got a job as a chemical operator working for Union Carbide in the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. He did not know what was in store for him, and neither did I. He was so proud of getting a job like that, working for the government on such an important mission. He thought the work sounded big and fantastic. He was a very healthy, handsome man when he went to work for Carbide.

Within two years, Joe started having strange symptoms. He got sores on his legs which wouldn't heal, and which moved higher and higher on his body throughout his work years. He began to have stomach problems within a year of his starting work. He vomited a lot, earning the nickname "Joe Erp" and could eat very little. He first heard from a doctor in 1959 that his stomach problems were probably due to his work exposures to classified substances. You see, Joe could not tell me or his doctor what he was working with, although I guess everyone had a general idea of what "nuclear" meant. When Joe told his boss what the doctor had said, Joe said the boss called the doctor a "quack." Joe told me later he was so brainwashed by Carbide, he believed it. The training he got insinuated that Carbide "wrote the book" on radiation, and all of the information which he could tell us was comforting and reassuring. Still, I know this doctor quietly left town within a year or so. As long as he lived, no doctor would ever go on the record to say what might have caused his conditions, although they would speak candidly to us that it was likely work-related.

Joe was a hard worker, and continued on at the plant in spite of his worsening stomach problems. In 1961, he had 95% of his stomach removed, along with all of his duodenum and two feet of small intestines. The surgeon found no ulcers, just what he called a "strange rawness." His health continued to decline and he had to have expensive medicines and more and more treatment by specialists. Joe was also seeing what became an ever-growing list of coworkers begin dying of leukemia and cancers. Joe kept what he called a "death list" of these workers until he died (Attachment 1). We discovered this past year that the Company also kept a secret list of workers who had died of leukemia (Attachment 2).

In the next ten years, Joe continued to have sores on his body, including lip sores which were called highly unusual and pre-cancerous. He had what we called "fingernails" growing out of his palms and joints, which he kept clipped himself. His blood tests began coming back abnormal and he began having lung problems (Attachment 3). He also began earning the reputation at work of a "troublemaker" because he found too many things wrong and tried to report them so the problems could be corrected. He took too much time to double check radiation readings, and would not sign false reports just to make the records look good. One story he told me after they fired him was when his supervisor asked him to do a radiation reading in a certain spot, using some sort of instrument. He did so, and came back to report the detected levels. His supervisor said, "Well Joe, I think you must have read that wrong. Why don't you go back and do it again?" Joe did, but got the same levels. When he reported again, the supervisor again told him to "Try one more time." Joe understood finally what was being asked of him. Joe would not cooperate. He felt he was being pressured into quitting because he would try to do right, and noticed that all the hot, dirty work was thrown his way.

I also wonder whether he was treated this way because of the large amount of medical benefits Carbide had to pay out for him while he was working. It is really expensive to get medical care for serious illness, especially when the doctors and the company are pretending they don't know what is causing the problems. Of course, now I know that Carbide had all this money for workers benefits reimbursed to them by the Department of Energy.

In any event, Carbide terminated him when he was at his sickest, in early 1971. Joe had been warned by his doctor that this was coming, and the doctor told him that he considered Joe disabled from his knee alone, not to even mention all the other health problems he had. Joe had injured his knee in a fall from a truck in 1953, and it had gotten steadily worse, requiring surgeries and physical therapy through the years. The doctor told him in 1971 that he judged him to be totally 100% disabled if Carbide required Joe to do his regular work crawling around in all those pipes and valves, and sent a strongly worded letter to Carbide to that effect. A little later, the managers called Joe in to terminate him. Joe said if they would acknowledge his 100% disability he would take a medical retirement, and Carbide agreed. Joe would have had approximately $900 a month to live on, including his social security disability of about $200 a month, plus all medical insurance and life insurance premiums paid. All the papers were signed, and were sent to the corporate headquarters for what they told him was routine approval. After seven months, there was still no word from Carbide, and Joe had to do some very light work, sitting and fixing air conditioners, to help us make ends meet. Joe said that you can drop a man off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and tell him that if he will be real still, some help will come in seven months. Even knowing that if he tries to swim, he won't get very far, and knowing that if he tries to swim, he won't get anything, nevertheless he will start swimming and swim until he dies. Joe had no choice but to swim. In another month or so, we heard from Carbide that they would not approve Joe's disability retirement, yet they would not hire him back! They just lied to him, pure and simple.

This left him at age 50 with no job, with a crippled knee, no stomach, bad lungs, anemia, plus incurable skin conditions. No way to get a job, no way to make a living, no income from Carbide or from Social Security, no way to pay medical expenses, no insurance and uninsurable. That is a pretty bleak picture for a man whose health has gone from perfect to rotten in 18½ years in a Carbide death trap. Then they throw him in the trash pile with nothing when the best of him is used up, and grab other young men to do the same way. I can only imagine somebody made some money off this practice. It could be that the reason this compensation bill seem so high is because the costs have been built up for quite a while, with the government appearing to have no costs for what they have done, and it has now come due.

After Joe was fired, I continued to work even more. Joe filed a workers compensation case to try to get some of his medical expenses covered. It took until May of 1973 to get the case to court. He and his attorney went into the courtroom and there was a plant attorney, a plant doctor, a Paducah attorney hired by Carbide, my last supervisor, and at least ten Carbide people from Oak Ridge, including attorneys, doctors, and officials--all together, fourteen. After a huddle with the attorneys, the Judge announced that Carbide needed more time to prepare. In the end, the Judge dismissed the case without prejudice to bring it again. After a few weeks, Joe's attorney withdrew, saying a law partner had died and he was covered up. Joe used to tell me that fighting Carbide and DOE was like fighting a tiger with a toothpick in its own den. It is true that no worker I knew of ever won their workers compensation case. We have heard of some being settled out of court, in exchange for a vow of silence. After Joe's case was dismissed, Paducah workers knew better than to even try to sue.

Joe became sicker and realized that he had to get this story out to the American public some how, some day. By this time, on top of all his other health problems, he had toe-nails growing under the arches of his feet, coming out of his ankle bones, and coming out of his knee caps. As I described earlier, he continued to have fingernails growing through his fingers and thumbs and coming out on the balls of his fingers where his fingerprints were. They also grew out of his knuckle joints, wrists, and elbows. He tried to keep them clipped and then bandaged them up, they were so sore. He was still keeping track of his coworkers who were dying of cancer, heart attack at a young age, and other diseases.

He began to have tremors in 1978 which got progressively worse. More and more coworkers were dying of cancer. This was a relatively small group of workers who had all hired on together in 1952 when the plant first opened. We knew everyone. The children of these workers died too, just like our own youngest daughter died of a strange ulcerated stomach condition in 1976 at age 32, leaving us to raise her 8 year old son. There is not that much difference between the worker and the family when the worker comes home with plant dust all over him, and the family lives and plays near the plant.

Around the time of the Three-Mile Island incident, Joe decided that his story had to come out to the public. Joe was a very smart man, and had an amazing recall, as well as being very attentive to detail and documents. He kept every check he ever wrote, even every report card he ever got in school. He began gathering information and making calls. Joe began talking into a tape player in 1979. Before he died in March, 1980---in fact up to the night before he died--he recorded his story, talking well over 16 hours jam-packed with information. I would be happy to provide the Subcommittee with a copy of the transcript. A Swedish film crew was in the process of interviewing him on camera just before he died. They came to the house to continue the interview and found out Joe had died in the night.

He wanted to get in touch with the news media, newspapers, radio, TV and get this dirty story to all the American public because he believed that they would care about what had happened and be horrified by it, just like us. He told me, "Let's spearhead this and demand justice and fair recompense for our suffering." He called on all decent, serious and thoughtful American citizens to put pressure on all our Senators and Representatives to keep the ball rolling and have some true investigations. He did not want these crimes to continue. Some people in Paducah thought he was a kook or anti-nuclear, just because he would dare to talk against Carbide and DOE. They were afraid because they knew Joe was telling the truth, but they also knew their security badges could be pulled and they would be out of a job if they ever spoke up.

He made contact with the Department of Energy, which had just been created by President Jimmy Carter, and which had all the records of accidents and exposures at all the plants. He also contacted a family in Nashville, Tennessee, the Honickers, who helped us with getting more information from the government, and helped to introduce Joe to others who had been exposed working in the nuclear plants, or serving in the military and having to watch nuclear bombs explode or fly airplanes through the mushroom clouds, or exposed by just having been little kids playing in the fallout from bomb test, which looked like summer snow. Letters began to come in, from sick workers, from widows. Joe began writing Freedom of Information requests to the DOE in Oak Ridge. He wrote to the Governor of Kentucky (Attachment 4) and the Kentucky Department of Environment (Attachment 5) , warning them they better look into the Paducah plant and see what was going on. All these letters were written by hand and while Joe was in great pain. Yet, in a way, I feel that doing this kept him alive longer than he would have lived if he had just lain down and given up.

In one of the letters to DOE, he said:

"I feel sure the Lawmakers who enacted the Atomic Energy Act, with its provisions for security and secrecy, intended for the security rules to be used to safeguard our Atomic Energy knowledge, materials, methods, processes, equipment...from Foreign Countries and potential enemies, but they did not intend for the corporations operating the Atomic Energy Facilities, the AEC, Security, or the FBI to use these security provisions as a cloak behind which to hide personal work records, medical records, termination records, and working conditions, radiation hazards and exposures and any other plant records concerning employees." (Attachment 6)

Twice in the fall of 1979, Joe and I went to Washington, despite his recurring pneumonia. We met with DOE officials in Washington, DC, at the Forrestal Building to discuss Joe's disclosures about the plant and his own health. We had help from other victims of DOE's operations and their advocates, along with some ethical DOE employees like Tina Hobson, Director of the Office of Consumer Affairs. Joe would always say, "I only have one story, the truth, so I have no fear of telling it to everyone." Joe had hours of meetings with DOE officials, and met with Secretary Charles Duncan (Attachments 7, 8, and 9).

We had faith in the DOE's intentions at first. They discussed how to investigate what he was telling them about all the cancer deaths at the Paducah plant, and the shoddy safety and health practices which put the lives of workers and the public at risk. The investigation was to address both the adequacy of the radiation safety practices at the Paducah plant between 1952 and 1971, the years Joe worked there, and whether or not Joe's medical conditions were related to the radiation he was exposed to. This investigation went on with my cooperation after Joe died.

As far as I could tell, the investigation into the Plant was unimportant to them. If it had been important, they could have found the problems uncovered in 1999 back in 1979. It soon became clear to me that the most important thing for DOE was to "prove" that Joe was not harmed by radiation. DOE figured that Joe had been exposed, over his entire 18 ½ years of work, to 4.95 rem of radiation. This is less than workers are allowed in one year of work. The "proof" was in his exposure records, which showed how year after year, he was exposed to nothing whatsoever at the Paducah plant.

I carried on this fight, with my toothpick, after Joe's death. My husband died on March 1, 1980, after having been diagnosed less than two months before with a massive inoperable cancer of the stomach (Attachment 10). Of his ninety pounds, at least a third of it must have been cancer. Joe was closed up and allowed to come home to die. His death certificate stated that he had died of heart failure.

In 1983, my attorney, Robert Hager, filed a workers compensation case on my behalf. I allowed my husband's body to be exhumed so that some of his bones could be analyzed for uranium found at the Paducah plant. The analysis was done at a Canadian lab with no ties to DOE. The report on his bones done by a respected and independent physician (Attachment 11), stated that he had from 1700 to 34,000 times the expected concentration of uranium in human bones. The normal concentration results in an annual dose of 18 millirems, while the amount in my husband's bones gave him a dose of 30 rems to 600 rems per year from uranium alone. Now I know, after all the publicity, that he was also exposed to plutonium and neptunium, as well as many chemicals including highly toxic fluoride and chloride compounds. My husband tried to warn DOE and other workers about what was happening at that plant but no one listened. If they had, maybe not as many would be sick or dead now.

All through the twelve years the company fought my claim, it felt like they were mostly fighting a public relations battle. My husband had, by the time of his death, become well-known. If DOE had admitted the problem, they would have had to admit tremendous liability overall, as much as they have admitted this past year. Only twenty years ago, they just weren't ready to do that, I suppose. Instead of just letting Union Carbide fight the battle, which would have been bad enough, DOE got their own attorney, Mr. Jake Chavez from Albuquerque, on the case. He came to all the proceedings and signed his name to all the legal papers. I was told that Mr. Chavez specialized in fighting people who claimed to be hurt from DOE operations, and that he had a huge file of material out in Albuquerque which he used to fight all the claims. Normally the DOE lawyers don't reveal themselves but just stay in the background. This DOE attorney took over the case in my workers compensation case. It makes me wonder how much DOE spent to win this case. All I could have gotten was $50,000 if I had won everything. It makes sense when you know that DOE pays all the legal expenses and all losses of companies who work for them like Carbide (Attachment 12). I have been told that the amount of legal paperwork in my case, if we stacked it up, would be 5½ feet high, taller than me. I have a CD-Rom of the complete record if the Subcommittee would like to see it.

At the end of twelve years, the Kentucky Workers Compensation Board ruled that I filed my widow's claim too late. They said that I would have had to file my case five years before my husband died, five years before we knew he had cancer. My attorney appealed the decision, but the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld it. My case finally settled in 1997 for $12,000 because the company and DOE thought it would be a nuisance to fight the appeal to the Kentucky Supreme Court. My lawyers did not take any of it, except $2000 to cover some of the expenses. So I ended up with $10,000 after 15 years of legal battles.

Please try to imagine yourself in the survivors' place, knowing our government is using every resource at its disposal to do everything that they can to deny you justice. As a matter of fact, while Congress and even the Secretary sincerely apologize, the DOE and Department of Justice lawyers continue to scorch the earth in denying us any kind of realistic, well-deserved relief.

The best bill you could write would include a way to add to the list of compensable diseases. I think it is clear by now, the government has done its medical studies in secret and have only communicated what will help them in a lawsuit. Physicians and medical researchers simply do not know all the ways their patients can become sick if we are exposed to these toxic materials.

Mr. Chairman, for a decade now, we have heard that the Cold War is over and that we won. How can we say we as a nation have won unless those wounded in the battle are given the respect they deserve?

For his long battle for workers health, and twenty years after his death, my husband was finally called a Cold War Hero, after being called nearly every name in the book by those who fought him. Just last year, I was given a gold medal and a kiss on the cheek by the Clinton Administration for "putting a human face on the Cold War" as Secretary Richardson said. Mr. Chairman, I would gladly trade that gold medal for the best compensation bill this honorable Congress can create.

* * * * * * * *

Attachments

Joe Harding's death list
Union Carbide secret list of Paducah workers with leukemia
Joe Harding's medical/work chronology
Letter from Harding to Governor Carroll of Kentucky, 7/17/79
Letter from Harding to Kentucky Department of the Environment
Letter from Harding to DOE Oak Ridge Operations FOIA Officer, Wayne Range,
from Joe Harding, 8/25/79
Memo dated 1/7/80, "Meeting with Mr. Joe Harding, Former Employee, Union Carbide Corporation";
Memo dated 1/16/80, "Review of Activities Concerning Mr. Joseph T. Harding;
Letter to Clara Harding from DOE Tina Hobson, dated 1/16/80;
Memo dated 2/22/80, "Follow Up on Joe Harding complaint".
Joe Harding's final medical records, January, 1980
Report on Joe Harding's bone analysis, 1983
Excerpt from "Our Own Worst Enemy", chapter 6, pp. 140-141, on AEC medical-legal strategy
Also included for the Committee Files:
-Transcript of Joe Harding's 16 hours of audiotape, telling his story
-DOE Report, "Investigation of the Radiological Safety Concerns and Medical History of the late Joseph T. Harding, Former Employee of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant," March, 1981.