Brenda Pigg hasn’t worked for the old Westinghouse Nuclear fuel site in Hematite for 24 years, but a corner of her dining room is covered in research dedicated to helping her former coworkers and their families deal with cancers allegedly associated with working at the plant.
The same is true for Debbie Jordan. She has been collecting information about the plant since her husband, Gene, who worked at the plant from 1981 to 2001, was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2007. Her husband, a former plant supervisor and father of three, died July 14, 2013, at the age of 54.
Pigg, who worked at the plant 21 years, and Debbie Jordan, with the help of ombudsman Denise DeGarmo, filed a Special Exposure Cohort (SEC) petition in August on behalf of all former employees of the Westinghouse Nuclear fuel site that operated at 3300 Hwy. P in Hematite from 1956 to 2001. They are petitioning the Department of Health and Human Services to compensate and provide medical care for those with cancers associated with the site.
Pigg, who lives just outside De Soto, said she believes the site employed more than 600 employees over the years. She said the SEC petition has been filed for all employees who worked there from January 1956 through July 2006. People worked to clean up the site after the plant’s operations ended in 2001.
The petition was filed on behalf of anyone who ever worked at that Hematite site, or for survivors of employees who worked there but are no longer alive, said Jordan, who lives in Illinois.
Pigg was 25 years old when she started working at the plant. Gene Jordan was 21.
Both rose to supervisory roles and worked in every building at the plant. They said employees often worked forced overtime.
When Pigg was asked if she knew how many of her former coworkers have been diagnosed with cancer, she immediately rattled off 10 names.
“One thing, and I’ve said this many, many, many times, I wish somebody would do a cancer cluster study of just employees that worked there,” Pigg said. “We don’t know where to go to get this done, but I have a list of every employee who worked there since 1955. I would venture to say that probably every fourth or fifth name on that list either has cancer or has passed away from cancer.”
Petition’s success depends on inactive board
This isn’t the first petition that has been organized on the employees’ behalf, but Pigg feels DeGarmo’s SEC petition makes a strong case.
“Dr. DeGarmo, when she was writing our petition, she uncovered some since-declassified documents,” Pigg said. “These documents were classified for a point in time, and she discovered some classified documents that support that Hematite was participating in government contracts for the Navy and the Army for some of their missile programs and that high-enriched material was there on site.
“I think we had always heard that there was high-enriched material there on site, but we were always told that it was remediated in between the sale between United Nuclear and Combustion Engineering (in 1974). That the site had been cleaned up and there was no residual, no exposure to be anything harmful. And we believed it because we didn’t think anybody would lie to us.”
There’s one big problem with the petition: It may never be reviewed.
Pigg said the U.S. Department of Health and Senior Services suspended the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health early this year.
The Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health was established in 2000 to advise the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services on the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program and review petitions like the one filed for the former employees of the Hematite plant. Pigg compared it to a worker’s comp process.
Emily Hilliard, the department’s press secretary, confirmed this month that the board is not meeting.
“Meetings of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health are currently paused due to outstanding administrative requirements, which the program is actively working to resolve,” Hilliard said.
DeGarmo said that is the same response she received months ago.
“The rhetoric has not changed,” she said. “I have contacted congressional staffers about the issue and have been told they are working on it.”
Pigg said President Donald Trump signed an executive order that paused the board’s activities, and DeGarmo said Trump needs to sign another executive order to reactivate the board, or the program will end on Sept. 30.
Without further action by Trump, the board will “cease to exist,” DeGarmo said.
“Since the board is critical to the SEC (petition) process, I do not see what the future holds for the petitions without the board,” DeGarmo said. “We have not been informed of any information regarding this concern.”
Pigg and Jordan have reached out to the members of Congress who represent them. They spoke to a staff member at Sen. Josh Hawley’s office, who asked “some really excellent questions,” Pigg said.
The two have been unable to speak directly with Rep. Jason Smith’s office.
“We just need for that board to be reinstated,” Pigg said. “We need for the members to be knowledgeable, to know what they’re looking at. And again, we don’t want to turn this into a political thing.”
“I mean, it’s political, but it’s not Republican or Democrat,” Jordan said. “It transcends all of that.”
DeGarmo provided a website for the public to email politicians to urge them to restart the work of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. Visit contactmypolitician.com and enter your address for a list of both elected and appointed politicians.
The plant
The Hematite plant was owned by several companies over the years. Uranium products were produced for the government for the first two decades.
According to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, from 1956 to 2001, the main activity at the facility was the production of uranium fuel for nuclear reactors. Initial operations focused on fuel for U.S. Department of Defense reactors and later changed to fuel for commercial reactors.
According to the SEC petition, the list of classified projects developed and produced by the facility include “production of specialized uranium oxides for use in the U.S. Army’s Package Power Reactor; production of highly enriched uranium oxides for a General Atomic gas-cooled reactor; production of highly enriched uranium metal for materials test reactors used by the U.S. Navy; production of uranium-beryllium pellets for use in the SL-1, an experimental military nuclear power reactor that was part of the Army Nuclear Power Program; production of high-enrichment uranium zirconia pellets for a naval reactor; and production of high-enriched oxides for use in General Atomics nuclear rocket projects.”
In summary, the petition alleged radiation exposures and radiation doses were not monitored and radiation monitoring records have been lost, falsified or destroyed.
Jordan said any employee filing an individual claim for Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program encounters a problem with a mandatory dose reconstruction.
“My husband filed an individual claim in 2007 but was denied because part of doing the claim is they need to do a dose reconstruction,” Jordan said. “So in order to file that claim, they had to do a dose reconstruction of what they believed his (radioactive) exposure would have been. And in order to be approved, it had to be a certain percentage where they would say more likely than not, your cancer was caused by working here. Well, Gene fell below that. He had pancreatic cancer, and we both knew in our gut that was wrong, but we picked our battles and that was not one of them at the time. That is the process that most of the employees have had to do.”
Jordan said she knows her husband would want her to keep fighting for his former coworkers. He was the type of man who was always smiling, happy and positive. He was also protective of the people he cared about.