Cleaning up after the Cold War

It happened several times a week for more than 25 years. A truck or a train would roll up to the gate of the Iowa Army Ammunitions Plant near Burlington, Iowa, and a security guard would supervise the unloading of hundreds of sealed 55-gallon drums, shipments sent from places like Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Rocky Flats, Colo.

From 1968 to 1973, Bob Anderson was one of those guards. He would check the serial numbers on the containers against those on his manifest, climbing on top of one drum to read the label on another, squeezing between two to get to a third, pushing them out of his way, tipping them on their sides, rolling them like logs on the ground. Afterward, safety personnel would come with Geiger counters and hold them above the drums, which contained plutonium and uranium, material for nuclear weapons secretly manufactured at the plant in an area known as Line 1.

In 1987, Anderson had exploratory surgery at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The oncologist suggested Anderson’s cancer could have been caused by radiologic exposure. But no one could be sure.

Then evidence began to trickle in. Anderson heard that another guard had the same disease. Friends told him about two other former employees, both safety workers, who had developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So Anderson wrote a letter to Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, asking why the government health program for workers at other nuclear weapons plants wasn’t helping those from the Burlington plant.

As a result of Anderson’s initiative and Harkin’s fast action, in August 2000, the College of Public Health at The University of Iowa received a Department of Energy grant to identify and survey the health of everyone who came in contact with Line 1. The Burlington Atomic Energy Commission Plant Former Worker Program is a mammoth project, led by Laurence Fuortes, an epidemiologist and occupational health specialist in the College of Public Health.

Fuortes and his team were asked to locate thousands of people who might have been affected, then interview, screen, counsel, and refer them for appropriate health care and/or compensation.

Their first task was to enter data from 36,000 index cards–the only records the plant kept of its employees–into an electronic database. Of those, only about 4,000 were Line 1 workers; most of the others worked on assembly lines that produced conventional weapons. But there was some crossover. And many individuals, such as security, laundry, and janitorial workers, serviced the entire facility. In the first year of the grant, investigators followed up on the majority of living Line 1 workers.

The second challenge investigators faced was convincing former workers to speak freely. Patriotic, hardworking, and loyal, thousands of employees had signed secrecy agreements promising they would never disclose anything about their work. And for decades, they didn’t.

"We had to go in and convince them that the DOE had released them from their pledge," says Kristina Venzke, project coordinator for the former worker program.

Meanwhile, Fuortes held a series of public meetings to inform area residents about the survey and answer their questions about the health risks they faced. The situation in Burlington became more and more complex as investigators found that workers had been exposed to a multitude of hazards in addition to radiation.

"It could be people who were doing construction and maintenance of the facility where asbestos could be an issue," Fuortes says. "It could be people who were exposed to high explosives, the things that went around the fissionable material. It could be people exposed to radiation or to beryllium or to epoxy or glues or solvents."

Eventually, researchers in the College of Public Health will attempt to contact all 36,000 people who worked for the Burlington plant from 1949 to 1975, when nuclear bombs and artillery shells were assembled there. At this point, only Line 1 workers with certain medical concerns are eligible for the DOE’s Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program. But Fuortes and his team are compiling all the data, trying to refer others to appropriate health care providers.

The University’s College of Public Health was created in 1999 to support community health in Iowa, in the Midwest, and around the world. According to James Merchant, dean of the college, the survey and Fuortes’ work in Burlington typifies the mission and the wide range of research in the College of Public Health.

"There are literally thousands of people who worked at or lived near the Burlington plant and now have concerns about possible health hazards," Merchant says. "Dr. Fuortes’ investigation of potential hazards and assessment of workers’ health will provide the community, and the public at large, with much-needed information about the possible long-term health effects associated with the plant."