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By Adam Jadhav ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 06/11/2007

Don Thompson (right) and another worker man machining station at a metal working plant in Madison, Ill. The workers processed radioactive materials and say they later developed cancer because of their exposure to the metal.

From the outside, the hulking former Dow Chemical metalworks is a stark reminder of the nation's once-booming industrial sector, of a time when a factory job was a ticket to the good life.

Yet the men and women who worked there have a far darker tale. Radioactive materials once processed at the factory helped build the nation's nuclear arsenal. But the workers say the operation was so secret that even they were unaware of what materials they were working on and what basic safeguards from exposure they should have gotten. Now, they say, that past has come back to haunt many of them in the form of cancer.

"My dad died because of the work he did on behalf of this country," said Kay Bopp, whose father, Omer Bridges, succumbed to breast cancer that spread through his body after working for years at the plant. "He had no clue what he was dealing with, what he was working with, knowing that it could and would kill him."

A few years ago, Congress mandated compensation — reparations, really — to men and women exposed to radiation while working in factories like the one in Madison. Just last month, a number of workers at the plant found out they, too, will likely get paid. But activists and some members of Congress say that the pool is too small and that more of the former employees should get aid.

In May, a presidential advisory board recommended that workers at the Madison plant from 1957 through 1960 — a time when Dow was doing work for the U.S. Department of Energy — get automatic eligibility for compensation set up to aid ill nuclear workers. A 2001 federal law has meant $150,000 checks to some 20,000 people across the country so far.

More than 100,000 people have applied for the benefits.

Under federal rules, the secretary of Health and Human Services and Congress also must sign off on the board's recommendation for the Madison workers. That would clear the way for about four dozen former workers who have been diagnosed with one of 22 radiation-caused cancers to receive payments as well as future medical treatment. In cases where the workers died, the money would go to their descendents.

The workers have fought for years to get the compensation. Their struggle is the same as one endured by former Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. employees who processed uranium at a factory in downtown St. Louis in the 1940s. In 2005, hundreds of workers from that plant were deemed eligible for the federal aid.

Activists cheered the board's recommendation for the Madison workers. But they remain worried by the reluctance of the Department of Labor, which administers the compensation act, to make payouts. Also in question is whether compensation will ever be paid to employees who began working at the plant after 1960 but who also have developed cancer and blame residual exposure.

Any ill worker can apply for individual compensation — rather than the blanket coverage the Dow employees from those four years are now likely to get — but tens of thousands have jumped through bureaucratic hurdles seeking such aid only to be denied. Thousands more are waiting to see whether their claims will be approved.

That trend and some internal government documents questioning the costs of the payouts prompted a congressional hearing last year, in which Labor Department officials were accused of trying to avoid payouts to sick workers because of the cost.

Area lawmakers have joined the fight, urging compensation for the former nuclear workers. Both Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, put staff members to work on the cause.

"I think, as a nation, we owe them as much," Obama told the Nuclear Weapons Workers Advisory Board last month at a meeting in Denver. "These workers responded to the call of duty during the Cold War. They sacrificed their health to defend us."

Obama was one of 15 senators — Democrats and Republicans — who in a June 4 letter called for a congressional hearing on the administration's handling of the program. In another letter, he and other officials also called for more funding to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates nuclear workers' claims.

In faded, decades-old pictures, men in the Madison factory sport box haircuts and thick-rimmed glasses. They wear flannel shirts and jeans.

In a photo of one room, a crane lifts a sheet of metal and workers prepare to sand out impurities. The photos show another wing housing a machine the size of a house that used 14,000 tons of force — almost the weight of the Gateway Arch — to squeeze hunks of metal into intricate shapes.

In the photos, there are no moonsuits, lead vests, radiation badges or Geiger counters — no real protection from or monitoring of radiation. The men say they didn't even always wear face masks, just gloves and work clothes.

Federal documents confirm that Dow was a subcontractor for the Department of Energy at least for a few years and that the Madison factory processed radioactive materials such as thorium, uranium and plutonium used for nuclear weapons. But workers say the company dismissed any notion that their jobs were dangerous. Furthermore, they claim, they were working with such metals for decades.

"We never got a straight answer about what exactly we were working with," said Caroll Denny, a 79-year-old Granite City man who worked in the plant from 1953 to 1989 and later developed cancer on his eyelid. The cancer was removed in 2004. "In later years, a lot of the boys started dying. We put two and two together."

The government uses a complicated method called "dose reconstruction" to discern whether an individual worker was exposed to enough radiation to cause cancer.

But records are often incomplete, and employees — many of whom are well past retirement — frequently have difficulty getting past bureaucratic hurdles to prove their illness was caused by their work, said Dr. Dan McKeel, a retired Washington University pathologist who has fought on behalf of workers at the Dow and the Mallinckrodt factories.

A majority of individual applications have been either denied or left in limbo. McKeel blames "fearmongering by the Department of Labor," which he says is trying to cast the compensation program as a vast money pit.

McKeel points to retired workers such as Don Thompson, now a Granite City alderman, whose individual claim has been repeatedly denied. Thompson developed a rare form of cancer; his bladder and prostate were removed in 1999. "Everyone's got their nightmare to tell," Thompson said.

Dow, based in Midland, Mich., sold the factory in the late 1960s. Today it's the site of an industrial park.

Dow spokesman Scot Wheeler said the corporation supports the federal compensation process.
"Dow certainly understands the emotions of people who either have developed cancer or who have loved ones who have been diagnosed," Wheeler said.

The Nuclear Weapons Workers Advisory Board's recommendation for the former Madison workers will likely be approved, but coverage beyond that specific 1957 to 1960 group is questionable. The board did say it wants more information to possibly extend the compensation period beyond those four years — an encouraging sign — but the workers have become accustomed to hoping without resolution. If the board were to recommend that additional workers be covered beyond the time when radioactive materials were processed, it would be a first.

"There's no excuse for these guys waiting for years and years," said attorney Joe Kusmierczak of the law firm SimmonsCooper, which has provided hundreds of free hours of time for legal analysis, depositions and more. "These guys are not getting any younger. A lot of them have already died."

Bill Hoppe knows that all too well. In the basement of his Granite City home, he has large file drawers filled with information on Dow employees like himself.

Hoppe, who has prostate cancer and an unidentified lung disease, is one of several unofficial organizers of the employees. But he himself may never be compensated. He started work only in 1961, and it's not clear whether his illnesses would be covered as radiation-caused.

Hundreds more people who now have cancer worked at the factory after 1960 but still worked around radioactive waste, former employees say. Hoppe still has a sketch of the factory's layout; red ink outlines the numerous stations where nuclear material was machined.

As he thumbs through documents, he finds a roll of employees at the plant who have died. Their names and ages are jotted down.

"Tommy, 62. Mike, 45. George, 30. Doug, 44. The list goes on," Hoppe said. "All these guys, cancer. These guys died too early."