The Hartford Courant
Unwelcome Exposure
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By SUSAN E. KINSMAN
The Hartford Courant
February 04, 2001

Alfred L. Lavoie of Manchester thought himself "lucky."

The Korean War veteran and his new wife were struggling in 1958 when Al landed a job at the Connecticut Aircraft Nuclear Engine Lab in Middletown.

Work at the high-security facility - where a classified nuclear-powered jet engine was being developed - not only paid well, $1.90 an hour, it also included benefits.

But Lavoie's job - cleaning, plating and heat-treating parts, some of them labeled radioactive - may have left him with more than memories.

Lavoie, 67, suspects that his exposure to radiation and other toxic materials during his six years at CANEL contributed to his developing Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system.

Lavoie is among thousands of workers - or their survivors - who have contacted the federal Department of Energy in recent weeks, looking for answers and compensation. The agency could not say how many are from Connecticut.

"I feel myself and many other people are entitled" to compensation, Lavoie said. But he may have to make the case. Hodgkin's disease is not one of the cancers specifically linked to radiation exposure that are eligible for compensation.

Lavoie's cancer is in remission, but he lost his spleen to the disease and has limited lung function. An allergic reaction to chemotherapy also damaged his shoulders and hips, requiring surgeries to replace them with artificial joints.

Lavoie said he called the Energy Department because he worked at CANEL, a facility built and operated by the Atomic Energy Commission - the forerunner to the Energy Department. Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Aircraft, now United Technologies Corp., was a major subcontractor.

When the lab closed in 1964, Pratt acquired the property. The buildings were closed and torn down in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the site was decontaminated. Pratt's part-manufacturing, engine assembly and testing facility now stands on the site.

CANEL is one of 11 workplaces in Connecticut - and more than 300 nationwide - identified by the Energy Department as places where radioactive materials and the toxic metal beryllium were used in government projects related to nuclear weapons production.

After decades of secrecy about the weapons projects and the materials to which workers were exposed, the federal government is willing to make that information public, and to pay compensation.

The Energy Department is responsible for regulatory oversight of the health and safety of workers at Energy Department facilities covered by the federal Atomic Energy Act.

"These workers, most of whom were employees of private contractors, faithfully served the nation during the Cold War and, in doing so, faced risks to their health," then Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in a letter to Congress earlier this month.

"In many instances, state programs do not adequately address the needs of these workers when they incur certain occupational illnesses," Richardson wrote.

The Energy Employees Occupational Illnesses Compensation Act, passed last year, will pay medical benefits and a lump sum of $150,000 to workers who contracted a cancer caused by radiation, beryllium disease or chronic silicosis while working for the Energy Department or its contractors on nuclear weapons projects.

Employees or their survivors are eligible if the employee's cancer was at least "as likely as not" related to their employment, based on guidelines that are being developed. The factors to be considered are the employee's radiation dose, or reconstruction of that dose, the type of cancer and other health-related activities.

The covered cancers include bone cancer, leukemia (other than chronic lymphocytic) lung cancer (with some exceptions), multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and primary cancer of the thyroid, male breast, female breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gall bladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary and liver (with certain exceptions).

The plan creates a presumption in favor of paying benefits to workers. The standard is lower than that of most federal and state workers' compensation programs, which require workers to prove their illness is "more probable than not" the result of their workplace exposure.

Workers such as Lavoie, who suffer from other cancers, could still make a case with the Energy Department for benefits.

Changes pending before Congress this year would give workers the option of choosing lost wages in lieu of the lump sum payment.

The department acknowledges that its list of work sites may be incomplete and that additional workplaces and eligible employees could be added later. Earlier government lists of nuclear licensees identified more than two dozen companies, as well as a number of hospitals and universities in Connecticut where nuclear isotopes were being used.

And former workers, or their survivors, have told The Courant about other locations in the state where government weapons work was conducted, and where beryllium and radioactive materials were used.

But that does not mean they will be eligible for compensation.

The act specifically excludes an entire class of weapons workers - those involved in the Naval nuclear propulsion program - at the Pentagon's insistence. Naval nuclear propulsion is a joint program of the Energy Department and the Navy, responsible for the design, testing, construction and operation of nuclear propulsion systems for surface warships and submarines. The Department of Energy also produced highly enriched uranium for the Navy at its nuclear weapons complex facilities.

The Navy disagrees with the lower level of proof required by the Energy Department and says it would establish an expensive precedent if it adopted the same standard.

Nor does the act cover all types of cancer, only those forms linked to radiation exposure. Nor will it cover workers whose health problems stem from exposure to toxic chemicals in the workplace, rather than radiation, even if the workers were exposed while working on the weapons projects.

Richard Miller, a Massachusetts lawyer and former union lobbyist for the act, said that where sick workers are concerned, the distinctions are arbitrary.

"This carve-out was clearly a function of responding to opposition. We were not going to jeopardize the whole bill over that," Miller said." "It's really about budgeters making decisions about who's in and who's out."

Lavoie was 53 in 1988 when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, roughly 20 years after he left CANEL to work in heat treating at Pratt's engine plant in East Hartford. He came back several years later to work as a security guard for Pratt in East Hartford, but has since left the company.

"Many times I handled materials that had little radiation stickers," Lavoie said. "All the parts that came back from the test cells came to my department. We cleaned them out and flushed the tubes with acids and alkalies." The cleaned parts were wrapped in paper or plastic.

Lavoie wore goggles, rubber gloves and a badge that changed color when exposed to radiation. "I know they changed it a few times for me," Lavoie said, but he was never told about his exposure.

He also wore white cotton gloves while handling cleaned parts - to protect them from fingerprints, he said, rather than to shield his hands.

"Being young at the time, I didn't pay no mind to it," Lavoie said.

Lavoie's story of a hard worker who never questioned his employer or the government, even when faced with known hazards, is by no means unique.

Stephen Stone, 53, of Windsor, was diagnosed a year ago with lung cancer. Stone is a former heavy smoker, but suspects that other factors were at work in his disease - the radioactive dust he believes he inhaled while working for Combustion Engineering in Windsor in the naval reactors division.

The company designed nuclear reactors for submarines and operated a submarine training simulator at the site, but did not make weapons there.

It was 1966 and Stone, right out of high school, was working days at Combustion and going to college at night.

"I was a handyman. I was sent to wherever they needed help," Stone said. One of his jobs, he said, was washing down the walls of a building that were contaminated with radiation after the refueling of the nuclear reactor of the full-size submarine simulator.

"We did it every day, five days a week, for the better part of the summer," Stone said. They used water and rags to wash the walls from ceiling to floor.

Stone wore protective clothing: a one-piece jump suit, gloves and boots taped at the wrists and ankles, and a hood. But nothing covered his face, no respirator and no dust mask.

The workers did wear radiation badges, or dosimeters, to measure their external exposure. Those badges were collected and reviewed daily by the company's health physics department. "There was never a situation where we were told not to work" because of overexposure, Stone said.

But until 1989, radiation doses from radioactive materials inhaled or ingested by workers were not calculated or included in the Energy Department's worker dose records.

"The radiation levels were not that high, but I'm worried I inhaled it," Stone said. "There are a lot of questions out there."

Fenn Machinery Co., formerly of Hartford and now of Newington, makes metal-forming equipment and helicopter parts. During the 1950s, the company was involved in the experimental shaping of uranium materials.

Sally Judd of East Hartford said her father, George Popik, was a machinist at Fenn and worked with uranium and beryllium.

Popik was employed at Fenn from the early 1950s until his retirement in 1985, Judd said. He died in 1995 at 77 from lung cancer that also spread to his bones. The Energy Department said it would contact her in July about her claim over her father's cancer.

But that wasn't the only problem. Judd remembers that while he worked at Fenn, "my father's hands from below the elbow to the fingertips were always raw and peeling," she said. "He would come home from work, soak them in ice water, cover the skin with Vaseline and sleep in white cotton gloves.

"I don't remember when he contracted it, but he was sick for many years. He was in a lot of pain and discomfort," she said. "Not even the doctors knew what it was."

Judd recalls her father as being a "very private person" who did not discuss his illness or his work. But he was very concerned about his family's safety, building a 10-foot square cinderblock bomb shelter in the basement of their East Hartford home in the early 1960s.

From a portable toilet to medical supplies, the shelter was stocked with everything the family of six would need for three months.

"He used to say, `We're going to be safe. We're going to be able to live, and you don't have anything to worry about,' " Judd said.

Wayne Ferguson's father worked at Fenn, too - from 1951 until 1970, when he died of a rare cancer at 48.

William J. Ferguson Jr. of New Britain, a handsome Army veteran of World War II, was a lathe operator who worked with beryllium on numerous government contracts involving helicopter parts and components for Minuteman missiles, his son said.

"He got sick after I got out of the service," Ferguson said. "At first we thought it was the flu, but it kept coming back."

It was a form of leukemia that attacks red blood cells. It killed him the same year.

"He couldn't breathe. He simply didn't have enough red blood cells," Ferguson said. "He was a pretty healthy guy until the last year of his life."

Ferguson persuaded his mother to have an autopsy performed, and the results confirmed leukemia as the killer. He still has the doctor's report.

William and Lois Ferguson had five children. Wayne, the eldest, was 23 when William was buried. Jane, the youngest, was 7.

Lois Ferguson went back to work to support her family, and later remarried. She is now 75.

Ferguson doesn't know whether his father was ever told about the risks he faced on the job, or whether the government or his employer deliberately kept the information from him and other workers.

"It's very discouraging. I think that's one of the reasons people don't trust the government," Ferguson said.

He has applied to the Energy Department for compensation on the family's behalf. "They offered $150,000. Big deal. It doesn't begin to compensate for what my two brothers, my two sisters and I went through without a dad. And my mom."

"We felt kind of cheated that my dad died so young," Ferguson said.