Hanford employment records verified for ill worker program

RICHLAND -- The old Hanford records vault in Richland is being used for sleuthing these days.

Since the federal government approved a program to compensate ill Hanford workers in 2000, a staff that now numbers more than 10 has been assigned to help compile Hanford information.

The first step for most applicants for the program is verifying they worked at the Hanford nuclear reservation and then when and where.

It's not as easy as it might sound.

Hanford seems to have both too many records and, yet, also not enough.

Department of Energy and contractor workers have 25,000 boxes of Hanford records stored in Richland near the Federal Building.

And another 100,000 boxes are stored in Seattle at the Federal Record Center.

In addition, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has records going back to 1944 for the 220,000 people who have been assigned dosimeters to wear at Hanford, to detect and record any radiation exposure. They are used not only to determine whether people worked at Hanford but also to help the federal government estimate their radiation exposure.

"We do have a marvelous ability to find people," said Gail Splett, DOE Hanford program manager for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Program Act.

The act provides $150,000 to workers who developed cancer because of radiation exposure on the job and up to $250,000 for impairment and wage loss for a wide range of illnesses caused by exposure to radiation or hazardous chemicals. Survivors also may be eligible for compensation.

The Department of Labor, which administers the program, has sent DOE and its Hanford contractors requests to verify the employment of 6,100 potential workers, some of whom were at Hanford when work started in 1943 to create plutonium for the world's first nuclear explosion.

For the workers who spent decades of their careers at Hanford or who worked there in recent years, verifying employment is a cinch.

But the records of workers who were at Hanford only during World War II, when the site was producing the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, can be difficult to track down. Wartime contractor DuPont took all the employment records for workers who did not remain at Hanford post-war, and a fire later destroyed many of those records.

Occasional workers, particularly craft or construction workers who may have picked up short-term work at the nuclear reservation during WWII or the Cold War, also can be a challenge. The only record of their work may be through a small subcontractor that hired them for a specific Hanford project.

"They come and go," said Lorna Zaback, a program specialist for DOE contractor Navarro. "(Like) crane operators -- they move all over the country."

DOE has compiled a 60-page -- and growing -- list of subcontractors who once worked at Hanford.

Stored boxes continue to turn up valuable information, like a collection of 46,000 employment records for mostly craft workers. Many were listed as employees of subcontractors that DOE had yet to discover.

And the records covered 600 workers who had applied for the compensation program, including some who DOE has only found listed in those files so far.

Those employees who worked directly for the federal government are easy to verify. Two log books that were started when Hanford still was farmland and sage-covered desert list every employee through the end of 2009.

The list starts with Lt. Col. Franklin Matthias, the WWII manager of Hanford, and second is Lt. Col. Harry Kadlec, the chief of construction, and namesake of Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland.

On early pages it lists the names of those assigned to confiscate the farms and small businesses that were cleared to make way for the nuclear reservation during the war, members of the Women's Army Corp assigned to Hanford and those who delivered Coca-Cola to the site.

One valuable resource has turned out to be early telephone books, and DOE is hoping to find more of them.

One man who filed a claim for his late father was sure his dad used to say he worked for wartime contractor DuPont. But the W-2 form he supplied said the man had worked for Hankee-James.

After staff found the company listed in an early Hanford phone book, they were able to verify that it had been an early piping contractor.

In addition, they discovered medical records from when the son had been treated as a child at Kadlec, then a federal hospital to serve Hanford workers and their families, that included the father's name and job title.

Some early telephone books from when Richland was a company town include both home numbers for workers and their office telephone at Hanford. Particularly important are the subcontractor telephone books DOE has been able to find, like the 1954 directory for BLAW-KNOX, a subcontractor that worked on construction of the Hanford PUREX plant.

DOE has been able to verify the employment for about 95 percent of the people who file compensation claims, sometimes with records such as those for a badge request, training certificate or medical exam, and it continues to look for the histories of new claimants and those who have eluded it so far.

"Everybody has their own story, their own history at Hanford," said Angela Lowman, Navarro program specialist.

* Annette Cary: 509-582-1533; acary@tricityherald.com. More Hanford news at hanfordnews.com.