Radioactive fallout victims seek compensation

Thursday, Aug. 5, 1999 | 12:13 p.m.

Douglas "Mac" Trone dreamed of traveling when he retired from his job monitoring radiation released from underground nuclear blasts at the Nevada Test Site.

But he hardly got out of town before cancer galloped through his body.

Trone retired in May 1995 but when he broke his leg 17 months later, he and his wife, Eileen, never even considered radiation as a cause of the tumor doctors discovered.

Trone died at age 65 on June 16 after bone cancer spread from his left leg into his lungs and chest.

"Such pain, such pain," Eileen Trone recalled during a meeting Wednesday with Justice Department attorneys who explained how former underground uranium miners, workers at nuclear weapons sites and residents living downwind of radioactive fallout could get compensation for a horrific list of illnesses.

About 200 former workers who had measured radiation, built tunnels and equipment and witnessed the nuclear blasts at the tunnels 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas attended the Justice Department's meeting at Skinny Dugan's Pub to see if they were eligible to file for benefits.

Some workers came in wheel chairs or pushing oxygen tanks. They arrived from Oregon and Arizona and California. But if they worked at the Test Site after 1962, most likely their diseases are not eligible for compensation under the current act.

Trone is just one poignant example of the hundreds of nuclear workers across the country who are suffering from or have been killed by radiation-related ailments.

Doctors at the University of Southern California Medical Center and the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., thought Trone had Paget's disease when they discovered the tumor.

"It knocked us over when the doctors discovered it. It was a constant fight after that," Eileen Trone, 63, said. "If it wasn't surgery, it was chemotherapy."

Now she is waiting for medical results from her husband's lung tissue before filing a claim with the Justice Department's Radiation Exposure Compensation Program.

Trone had volunteered for a cost-free medical screening program offered to former Test Site construction workers through a program sponsored by the Department of Energy and conducted by Boston University's School of Public Health. He had been examined by doctors a week before his death, brought to the screening site in a wheel chair.

"I only wish that he could be alive to just retire and enjoy it," Eileen Trone said of their 43-year marriage and four children. "His dream was to retire and travel."

While Trone's family finances were destroyed by his illness, some workers got good news at the Wednesday meeting about paying for their treatments.

Former Test Site electrician John Glasgow, 69, will qualify under the current act. Doctors removed his thyroid gland and all four parathyroids after he retired in 1988. Thyroid cancer is covered under the act.

His wife, Patricia, suffered from lymphoma, but both are in remission. They live in Delta, Colo., today, caring for a 43-year-old son suffering from multiple sclerosis.

The news wasn't so good for former Test Site mining supervisor Fred Widmier, 71, who does not qualify for one of the 13 illnesses spelled out in the 1994 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

Widmier said he has suffered heart problems, blood clots and arthritis, none of which have been linked to radiation exposure.

"But we worked out there all week, then took our dirty clothes covered in mud home and the family washed them," Widmier said.

Since compensation is so limited, politicians such as Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., have submitted four bills this session to expand the diseases and the people who were affected by radiation exposure.

Test Site tunnel superintendent John Campbell said new and broader legislation to cover a hidden epidemic of radiation illnesses is vital.

After 28 years at the Test Site, Campbell said he became involved in helping former tunnel workers "because I gave so many eulogies after I quit work" on June 30, 1994.

Campbell remains in good health.

"They (DOE) did a good job for the most part protecting workers, but they didn't know a lot about radiation," he said of the tunnels winding under Pahute Mesa and Rainier Mesa where underground experiments were detonated.

Over his career there, Campbell said he worked 40 underground nuclear blasts. "We lived inside that mountain, and radiation seeps out," he said.

A worker exposed to radiation may receive up to $75,000 under the current act, but that is not enough to cover medical expenses and the costs to the family, Campbell said.

"Mac Trone's is a real sad story," Campbell said. "By the time Trone died, the family didn't have enough money to bury him."