Half life

Half life

Half life







					
I

doif Walde still resembled himself,  Handsome in a new dark blue suit. The tumors that overwhelmed his brain had not distorted his face. A long, sinuous scar that stretched from his jaw to the back of his skull had begun to fade.





His wife, Angela, bent down and put her hands on her husband's. His skin felt strangely warm and seemed to change at his touch. Maybe he could still wake up, thought Angela Walde. He recalled the biblical story of the resurrection of Lazarus. Gently, she shook her husband's body. Get up.



It was a hot Thursday in July of 2017, and the busy church in Albuquerque had been silenced when the young widow with long dark hair stood on the silk-lined coffin.



The mourners saw Angela sit in her seat as iron bearers closed the coffin and pulled an American flag over it.



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Thousands of nuclear workers became ill with cancer and other deadly diseases due to exposure to radiation and unrevealed chemicals during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. The government promised to clean up its national laboratories and pay for the damages. 

Are they keeping those promises?

  

The photographs and relics of Chad's life had been exposed. A navy blue cap. A flag of the giants of new york. A reflective work vest from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His military portrait with the face of a baby hung over the coffin.



"We do not know why Chad left this land at such a young age," the pastor said in a slow tapping in Texas. "When I realized that I was only 44 years old, my heart broke. I thought: 'Oh no. He is so young. "



That unanswered question: what killed Chad Walde? - It bothers Angela.



There were other funerals, even that month, for other people who worked at Los Alamos, one of the most important nuclear weapons labs in the country. Several, like Chad, had died of cancer. Others had thyroid diseases and respiratory problems, and suspected that some of the diseases could be due to contaminated work environments or the great fire that burned in the vast property of the laboratory in 2000. Nobody knew for sure if the diseases were related to the I work in the Laboratory, but they were wondering.



For decades, Los Alamos has been criticized for sacrificing the health and safety of workers in the name of atomic progress. In 1999, Bill Richardson, the energy secretary, admitted that the nuclear sites had hidden information and "sent many of our workers to danger". He said the government intended to "correct the mistakes of the past." Then, in 2000, Congress passed a compensation law, which offers medical benefits and payments for Workers with cancers related to radiation and other occupational diseases. But the government, and Los Alamos in particular, has said that those rulings were in the past and that they have established norms and practices to protect safety. The lab says that radiation exposures have been "consistently recorded" for many decades.



Despite these promises, Chad and his co-workers said the security problems continued. They witnessed accidents and heard the sudden and unexpected sound of radiation alarms. They saw the crews enter to decontaminate buildings and put radiation detectors on their hands and feet. They washed their limbs and changed their clothes. Sometimes It would be days before anyone noticed. The contamination had spread. Many workers say that their memories of poor working conditions and high personal radiation readings do not match the government's scant records.



Angela Walde poses for a portrait inside her house in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Adria Malcolm, special for ProPublica)
In addition to Chad, at least four other members of his maintenance team had been diagnosed with cancer in the past five years.



Before his death, Chad filed a claim for federal benefits and joined more than 1,400 people who said they became ill from radiation exposure from work done in the laboratory over the last 20 years, according to data obtained by the New Mexico of Santa Fe under the Freedom of Information Law. Another 335 dead workers also filed claims on their behalf.



Later, Angela would discover that Chad's personal file contained little mention of radiation exposures and no record of the security fears her husband had told her over the years.



Now, in the church, I listened to country music playing softly and the minister in prayer. After his treatments, Chad would laugh and tell his friends: "I get more radiation sitting in my office in Los Alamos." Even when he was suffering and in pain, he would smile and say that he was living the dream.



Looking at her closed coffin, Angela wished she could go back 18 years and tell her to find a different job, away from laboratories and nuclear weapons.



II



A new career and the risk of radiation



On his first day of work at Los Alamos,  Chad Walde dressed in the dark. It was the fall of 1999 and a week before he turned 27. The trip from Albuquerque to Los Alamos lasted almost two hours, and when he got on the highway in a small white Ford Escort, just after 5 a.m., the peaks of the Sandia Mountains would have been silenced.



The city of Los Alamos was beginning to move around the time it arrived. The preserved wooden huts of the military takeover of the government during the Second World War were mixed with modern buildings. The roads had been named after famous scientists and atomic test fields. Trinity Drive. Bikini Atoll Road. Oppenheimer Drive. Gamma ray When he reached the white doors of the laboratory, lines of cars had already begun to form, each of which stopped in the booths to present the armed guards with identification.



Inside, Chad was issued a special Z number, unique to each employee in Los Alamos, who would become a representative of their identity there. In the next few days, he underwent several medical examinations and was asked to detail any previous exposure to 81 radionuclides, explosives, chemicals, gases or dangerous laboratory animals. He gave a circle to each one. It was not perfect: he smoked, drank intermittently, and, for a man over 6 feet tall, he was overweight. A doctor found no abnormalities in the head, eyes, heart, lungs, thyroid, limbs or spine. His blood test returned normal.



Chad Walde joined the Navy when he was 20 years old and received training in electrical engineering and maintenance. He spent four years in San Diego on the USS Lake Champlain, sailing to ports in the Middle East and Asia. (Courtesy of the Walde family)
Chad was still adjusting to life as a civilian. He had left the Navy four months earlier and moved with his family to Albuquerque, where he had been working as an electrician. After four years on the USS Lake Champlain, sailing to ports in the Middle East and Asia, Chad still missed the sea, the way the sun turned red when it was placed in the middle of the ocean. Now, I would be working in a sacred place. And, earning $ 22 per hour, he would earn more than he had earned in his life.



Chad knew the historical role of the laboratory in the creation of the first atomic bombs, but little else. He did not know that his nuclear mission had had a human cost.



The employees of the complex had complained for a long time of health problems, but in a low voice, often only to friends and family. To speak ill of the laboratory was considered by some as anti-American, and some informants They said that they were often rejected by their colleagues and expelled or fired for reporting problems. Most of those who have requested compensation from state workers over the years for the diseases they attributed to their work in the laboratory have had their complaints Aggressively challenged In the court.



For fear of responsibility, the famous nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who served as the first director of the laboratory, ordered that health records be labeled as top secret. According to a note written by his colleague. In 1946 and declassified in the nineties.



The Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, understood that safety and health problems in the laboratory were a responsibility, one that could cause a PR nightmare and close the project.



This began to change in the late 80's and early 90's. As the Cold War came to an end, the Department of Energy said it was committed to transparency. In the face of growing public and congressional pressure and legal action, he began to investigate conditions throughout the nuclear weapons complex. A team of 150 inspectors was sent to Los Alamos after the managers of a nuclear facility in Colorado were accused of environmental crimes - A type of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons triggers had left the factory to the outside air and was found in homes near the plant.



In Los Alamos, the researchers found Generalized radioactive contamination. The nuclear waste had been dumped in open wells and canyons around the laboratory. Workers had not been adequately monitored for exposure to radiation or other health problems. In fact, the University of California system, which had administered the laboratory since the 1940s, had poor follow-up of health, safety, and environmental problems, according to the inspectors.



By 1991, the lab's mandate for secrecy began to break down. More than 150 workers and members of the public. called a direct line to report accidents and concerns: about injuries when working with chemicals, working in areas with little ventilation with hazardous gases and lack of training and monitoring on radiation.



Many had concerns about cancer. A caller shared information about a public meeting in Los Alamos. "The caller expressed concern about the role that occupational health provided to people who had cancer," the registry said, "but the cancer was not discovered until the terminal stages."





  
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Other public fears led the Department of Energy to finance a study. Published two years later, he found a modest increase in brain and nervous system cancers in Los Alamos County, compared to the rest of the state. He recommended an additional study, but then officials decided it was unnecessary, and a follow-up study only looked at thyroid cancer.



(Corey Brickley, special for ProPublica)
The 1990s would see two important advances for the welfare of workers within the nuclear weapons complex. In 1991, the Department of Energy began drafting. new rules on how sites should protect workers, formalize monitoring requirements for nuclear workers who are "likely" to be at risk, and set limits on the amount of radiation workers may be exposed to.



Then, in the late 1990s, the Clinton administration recognized for the first time that the Department of Energy had not protected workers from exposure to radiation and chemicals in laboratories and factories used to build the United States' nuclear arsenal. The records had been destroyed or falsified. A report from various agencies On the prevalence of occupational diseases found, current and former workers may be "at greater risk of disease" from these exposures and the "physical risks associated with the production of nuclear weapons."



In Los Alamos, the found report a "statistically significant" increase in cancers of the esophagus, lungs, kidney and brain, as well as in lymphocytic leukemia and Hodgkin's lymphoma, among workers.



The problems were national news, but Chad, who worked on a Navy ship in San Diego, did not see the headlines.



The Clinton administration's reforms were to go into effect in 1996, and violations of these rules were punishable by civil and criminal penalties. Three years before Chad began his work, Los Alamos said he was serving.







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III



In Catastrophic Fire, Hidden Dangers



Six months after I started working.  Chad was involved in one of the most discouraging fears in the history of the laboratory.



On the first Thursday of May 2000, the officials of the US Forest Service. UU They started what was supposed to be a small 900-acre fire in a crescent-shaped part of the Bandelier National Monument below the city of Los Alamos and its sister community of Roca Blanca. .



The fire was established to prevent further major fires. But the Forest Service had forgotten to account for the wind, a report later found. The gusts collected more than 20 miles per hour, throwing embers more than a mile away in the Los Alamos canyon.



When Chad arrived at work the following Monday, the fire had spread to 3,000 acres, well beyond the control of the Forest Service. His supervisor sent him home, along with all the non-essential personnel. Thousands of evacuees moved to gyms converted into shelters in Santa Fe.



Residents and elected officials worried about what would happen if the fire, called Cerro Grande, after the name of the highest peak in Bandelier, enveloped the nuclear materials stored in the laboratory.



While the fire was still burning, New Mexico reported on a study, published in silence by the Department of Energy in 1997, who found a forest fire on the property of the laboratory could release radioactive smoke that would expose nuclear workers to a dose of radiation 135 times the annual limit allowed and would affect people within a radius of 50 miles. The study also said one of the most vulnerable facilities was a tritium facility on the west side of the laboratory, where radioactive isotopes of hydrogen and other explosives were processed.



At 11 pm. Wednesday, just a few hours after the last residents were evacuated from Los Alamos, A brush fire swept the area. surrounding the tritium facility, as the study said. Firefighters I would remember later to be told to protect certain buildings "at all costs" and how the flames unnaturally transformed into violent nuances of colors such as "different materials burned".



"We were not monitored during the fire," recalled a worker at a public meeting to help federal officials learn about the risks and risks of exposure that existed in Los Alamos over time, "although those areas contained almost 60 percent wastes. years". "



But the spokesmen of the laboratory maintained that everything was safe. All nuclear waste and bomb materials were buried or stored in concrete tankers, they said. The Environmental Protection Agency flew airplanes overhead to measure the radiation of the air. Air quality monitors were placed around the city. And more than 1,000 firefighters were on land, day and night.



Any radiation detected, officials would say later, was mainly from natural radon Burns plant life.



In 2000, firefighters battled the Cerro Grande fire, which threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The fire, which burned nearly 40 percent of the laboratory's properties and a total of 48,000 acres, left a blanket of smoke over the area. (New photo of Mexican file)
Two weeks later, Chad went back to work. He had recently been promoted, and his new role placed him in the field with a team of maintenance workers. Nearly 40 percent of the laboratory's properties and a total of 48,000 acres in the area had burned, making Cerro Grande the largest fire in the state's history at that time.



Chad recalled that the air was still fogged when the maintenance crews were hired to check the safety of the buildings and unclog the air monitors and fire alarms that were clogged with debris. The electricity had been off for weeks, and inside, the walls were covered in ash, making the corridors look like tunnels.



When Chad moved through the scorched campus, he noticed that some workers had small badges on their chests that registered their exposure to radiation in thin shavings, half the size of a pink nail.



But Chad said that he and several other men of his crew had not received badges like this. Many of the firefighters subsequently reported the same to federal officials at public meetings. Chad said he also had not attended the radiation training course, required by the federal government for laboratory workers who might be exposed to radiation.



"We did not care who had what monitoring or training," Chad would later recall in an interview, about the crew he left with during the fire. "At the time I did not have a TLD," he said, referring to the plate, called a thermoluminescent dosimeter, by an acronym.



Independent scientists hired by the state of New Mexico, as well as experts hired by the federal government, I would question later what had been burned during the fire and if there enough air, soil and other environmental samples taken to know with certainty which workers have been exposed. A toxicologist at the University of New Mexico said that scientists also I did not have enough information about the impact of low doses of metals and radiation on the body to know what the effects on health could be over time.



In 2001, Chad received the special TLD badge and went through the first level of a radiation training course. Only then did he remember the fire, the thick smoke and the memory stuck like a pin.





  

    

    

    

    

    



  
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IV



More responsibility, more risk



In the next months and years, Chad was given increasing responsibility and, like other maintenance workers, he was given exceptional access to one of the most secret sites on Earth. Crews worked on almost all of the 35-square-mile campus buildings in the lab. They toured old nuclear sites where the trash of the Manhattan Project was buried underground and entered modern laboratories. Sometimes they wore futuristic-looking security suits.



Almost every successive year brought a promotion and a salary increase. In 2001, her twin daughters, Cassandra and Angelica, were born and joined Chad Jr., who was in kindergarten at that time.



Chad went through increasing levels of radiation training, including an eight-hour course that teaches laboratory employees what ionizing radiation is, how it penetrates bodies and how they can protect themselves. It is required for workers whose jobs routinely place them in areas with high radiation, contamination or radioactivity in the air. In June 2005, he obtained a top secret security authorization, or "Authorization Q", from the Department of Energy, after extensive background checks and interviews.



Chad also studied part-time to obtain an associate's degree and was promoted to a manager position in 2006. By 2011, he was supervising the maintenance crews in the Radiological Laboratory Utility Office Building, a high-level facility which contains nuclear material. Chad's salary also continued to rise, and would ultimately earn more than $ 100,000 a year.



Supervisors repeatedly praised their greater emphasis on safety as a justification for promotions, and rated it as their "first concern" in an annual evaluation.



But his family saw this concern in conjunction with a growing awareness of laboratory risk.



One weekend, around 2008, when the Walde family was preparing food for a barbecue, Chad told his father-in-law, Billy Salas, about getting into trouble at work. Chad said he had been summoned for a meeting and questioned after his radiation plaque, which was verified monthly, returned with an abnormally high reading.



After an unexpected exposure, the laboratory is supposed to launch an investigation into the cause and try to determine the dose for the worker, as well as place the worker in a health monitoring program. In the criticism, Chad's supervisors suggested that he had to pass his license plate through an X-ray machine at the airport, he told his father-in-law and his wife. He was surprised that officials assumed that the dose came from outside the laboratory.



Cassandra, Chad Jr., Angela and Angelica Walde inside their house in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her father and husband, Chad Walde, died on June 28, 2017 after almost three years of fighting brain cancer with glioblastoma. (Adria Malcolm, special for ProPublica)
"I've never done that," Chad said later in an interview with New Mexico. "I had been down in [Technical Area] 53. "



Technical Area 53, home to one of the world's largest research accelerators, is among the most hazardous sites for the laboratory.



Chris Gallegos, a friend from Chad who works as an engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, also remembered the story.



"They asked him: 'Hey, did you go to the airport with this or the dentist?'" Gallegos said.



The new Mexican asked Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark, detailed questions about possible gaps in Chad's radiation monitoring, the exposure incidents he had counted, as well as his employment and health records. Angela Walde gave the laboratory written permission to discuss Chad's work and medical history with the newspaper. The lab did not answer any questions about Chad; Instead, Roark provided generalized answers for this story.



The laboratory, he wrote, "takes the health and safety of employees very seriously, so all employees who operate in areas with a potential exposure risk should use dosimeters. The laboratory and its radiological protection program pay close attention to these results; "When an employee reports a higher dosimeter reading than expected, an investigation is initiated and the source of exposure is resolved and corrected as necessary."



Over the years, Gallegos said that he and Chad joked as a joke because of their radiation plaque that produced higher numbers, according to the monthly reports of radiation they received in the mail between offices, but this began to alarm Gallegos.



"His were always taller than mine," he recalled.



Those reports were not in Chad personnel records that were later given to him and Angela. Other workers say that they usually just threw them out.



Gallegos recalled that Chad said he had exceeded his limit here and there, or that he explained that he had had to obtain an exemption to continue working because of a high reading.



If a worker exceeds the annual limit of exposure to radiation, he or she has to obtain priority authorization, or take time away from high-risk jobs, under the rule of the Clinton administration.



For her part, Angela said that she rarely thought about the risks of her husband's work. He recalled that Chad had bought gifts for his team when they arrived at a certain number of days without accidents. Los Alamos also gave Chad an assignment to frequently replace the steel-tipped boots he wore when he inspected certain parts of the lab, he said. And she remembered one afternoon, also about eight or ten years ago, when her husband came home with paper underwear and pants made of disposable light yellow plastic.



"I was laughing at him because he had funny pants," Angela recalled. "We were laughing."



In 1999, Chad Walde started working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the nation's most important nuclear weapons labs and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. (Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Chad told him that he had been sprayed with hard water to wash out possible radioactive particles, a decontamination process dubbed "Silk Shower" for his performance in a film about the nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood, and they sent him home.



If Chad explained to his wife what he may have been exposed to, she does not remember it now, nor is there a record of such an incident in the personnel file her family received.



His laboratory medical records never indicated that he underwent additional health monitoring related to a chemical or radiation-related exposure. But in 2007 and 2008, the Nuclear Defense Facility Safety Board, an independent board that advises the energy secretary, observed 13 unexpected incidents in which one or more workers were contaminated with radiation or inhaled chemical vapors, half which required decontamination to eliminate radioactive materials from workers or rooms. Many of the exhibitions were "Workers performing maintenance tasks in TA-53.", Where Chad worked sometimes.



It is not clear from the records if anyone involved it.



In the last 20 years, more than 170 incidents of this type have been published by the security board, according to an analysis of the records of New Mexico and ProPublica. And the lab has been repeatedly fined by the Department of Energy for Not implementing its radiological protection program. and for other cases of potential damage to the worker.



When asked about the problems of protecting laboratory workers and keeping records, Roark said in an email that the laboratory "has always maintained" radiation safety and health and safety programs for its workers that include specific training for the job.



Angela did not pay much attention to him, and assumed that since Chad was not a scientist, his work could not be very dangerous. "Chad was strong, I never worried about that," he continued. "It was just something that happened to other people, not us."



V



A devastating diagnosis



It was a warm Tuesday in September 2014 and Chad was having trouble concentrating on the meeting around him. The voices of his colleagues buzzed and mingled like the static of AM radio between stations.



Chad always started his day on an empty stomach, only coffee sweetened with vanilla cream, but now he thought he should have eaten something.



At the end of the meeting, he got up and felt the ground move beneath him. For a moment, everything turned black and he was firm in the arms of the man behind him. It was fine, Chad said, standing up. But when he returned to his office, he realized that something must be wrong. There was a large black spot that erased part of your computer screen.



Chad called his wife and, deciding to take a sick day, got into his truck. He did not want to worry anyone or bother them to return to Albuquerque.



Halfway home, he reached a stretch of Interstate 25 just outside of Santa Fe, known as La Bajada. The road suddenly falls around a curve, and at 75 mph it feels like a roller coaster that gains speed. Fue aquí donde Chad se dio cuenta repentinamente de que tenía que parar. Ralentizando sobre una delgada franja de grava, abrió la puerta del conductor y vomitó por un lado. Luego condujo el resto del camino a casa.



A la mañana siguiente, después de que lo que había sido un dolor de cabeza sordo se convirtió en un dolor abrumador y sorprendente, Angela y Chad se sentaron juntos en la sala de emergencias del hospital Lovelace Westside.



Le dijo al Dr. Marci Gambarota que a principios de la semana, "sentí como si alguien me hubiera pateado los pies por debajo de mí".



Angela dijo que Chad había estado actuando de manera extraña en los últimos meses: reírse de manera inapropiada y tener arrebatos de ira espontáneos e inusitados. Ella recordó los chistes crudos que había hecho en un viaje de campamento ese verano y le dijo que parara, incluso cuando sus amigos se reían con ganas.



Gambarota ordenó una tomografía computarizada. Un par de horas más tarde, regresó a la habitación privada donde los Waldes habían estado esperando y cerró la puerta.



Cuando varios médicos más entraron, el corazón de Angela comenzó a acelerarse.



"Hay algo que crece en tu cabeza, una masa en tu cerebro", dijo Angela, explicó Gambarota. El tejido cerebral sano era un óvalo gris que dominaba la radiografía, pero también había una gran mancha blanca en la película. Esto, dijo, estaba presionando el tejido detrás del ojo derecho de Chad y probablemente causaba sus síntomas. La masa mide un poco más pequeña que un limón.



"¿Tengo algo que crece en mi cerebro?" Repitió Chad, mirando a su esposa. Angela vio a su marido empezar a llorar.



(Foto cortesía de la familia Walde)
"Nunca lo había escuchado hacer eso", dijo ella, "excepto cuando su madre falleció".



Esa tarde, Chad fue llevado en ambulancia al hospital de la Universidad de Nuevo México para una resonancia magnética. Los amigos ya estaban reunidos en la sala de espera. Habían venido a orar.



"Nos mostraron una imagen de la gran masa y cambió su cerebro, por lo que esta es la razón del cambio en su personalidad, la pérdida de memoria a corto plazo y la pérdida de la función de la pierna izquierda", escribió Angela en Facebook, como hacía a menudo. En esas semanas. "Te amamos, gracias por tus oraciones y bendiciones".



Días después, el Dr. Howard Yonas, jefe de neurocirugía en el Hospital de la UNM, le cortó la cabeza a Chad y le sacó la tapa del cráneo. Podía ver que el tumor era agresivo. Se había empujado a través del lóbulo temporal derecho y había dejado un rastro de tejido muerto. Bajo un microscopio, las células se multiplicaron rápidamente de una manera que el tejido cerebral adulto normal no lo hace. Yonas vio uno de estos tumores cada una o dos semanas, pero generalmente en personas al menos 20 años mayores que Chad, o en niños.



Angela estaba justo afuera de la cafetería cuando recibió la llamada de que Chad estaba fuera de la cirugía. "Me fui corriendo", dijo ella.



Yonas dijo que Chad se estaba recuperando y le sugirió a Angela que lo siguiera a una habitación cercana. Una enfermera fue a buscar a sus padres e hijos.



"Sus ojos se veían rojos", recordó Angela.



Angela seguía preguntando si su marido estaría bien. Yonas dijo que deberían esperar hasta que su familia pudiera sentarse con ella, pero ella insistió. Finalmente, Yonas suspiró y dijo: "No. Esto es terminal ".



Chad tenía un glioblastoma en etapa 4, un cáncer de células complejas en forma de estrella en el cerebro. Los tumores de glioblastoma son difíciles de cortar porque se diseminan rápidamente a través del cerebro, rompiendo la barrera que pretende proteger el sistema nervioso central de la enfermedad.



"Nos dijo que era el peor tipo de cáncer que puedes tener", recordó Salas, el padre de Angela, que estaba sentado junto a su hija. "Nos dijo que Chad tenía seis meses, o 12 meses, para vivir".



Chad tenía 41 años.



Angela publicó las noticias en Facebook.



"Chad Walde Sr. tiene un cáncer que no es curable y, aunque se sentirá mejor en un par de días debido a la presión que se liberó, volverá a crecer rápidamente", escribió. “Pueden tratar de tratarlo y medicarlo, pero no se sabe cuánto durará. Él no conoce su diagnóstico, por lo que le pido que no lo contacte en este momento ".



Luego volvió a casa, por primera vez desde que ingresaron a Chad en el hospital, para gritar.



VI



La esperanza de una línea de vida federal



Dos semanas después, En la mañana del 8 de octubre, Chad llamó a Ed Keith, su supervisor en Los Alamos, para hablarle sobre el tumor. Tomó notas de la conversación en pequeños y ordenados guiones en trozos de papel guardados en una carpeta de tres anillos. Chad sabía que necesitaría tratamientos médicos costosos, probablemente más allá de lo que su póliza de seguro cubriría, y no estaba seguro de cuánto tiempo más podría trabajar, de todos modos.



Había algo más que presionaba su conciencia. Estaba preocupado por su tripulación. ¿Fue su tumor el resultado de algo en el trabajo? Y si lo fuera, ¿quién más podría estar en riesgo?



En 2014, Chad Walde fue al hospital después de desarrollar problemas de visión y equilibrio, y dolores de cabeza debilitantes. An MRI showed a growth slightly smaller than a lemon pressing into the tissue behind his right eye.
Chad kept notes, on the advice of a lawyer, describing his conversations with people at the lab, in case of future memory loss. He told Keith about the link between brain cancer and radiation and told him about “this concern & my elevated readings.”



Glioblastoma is a relatively rare cancer compared with lung, skin or thyroid cancer. When it does occur, however, one of the only known environmental risk factors is radiation exposure, according to the National Cancer Institute. The research is largely based on the cancers found in the survivors of the atomic bombs and children who were exposed to radiation therapies. Studies have also found an elevated rate of brain cancer among workers sent in to clean up the radioactive fallout after Chernobyl and in some residents living there at the time of the accident.



Chad learned about the risk from a doctor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he had sought a second opinion and planned to travel that month. He had no family history of cancer.



“I expressed I am not pursuing a lawsuit but we need to get affected workers into programs for monitoring. I have [Ed Keith] will investigate how to do that & get back to me,” Chad wrote on one slip of paper.



The following afternoon, Chad called Keith again. Keith had met with human resources that morning. According to Chad’s notes, Keith told him it was the “most depressing meeting he had.”



Chad was not eligible to upgrade his benefits because he couldn’t show he was healthy. But there was another option. A woman who did administrative work at the lab had breast cancer, and she had received federal compensation as a result. Keith would get Chad the paperwork so he could apply.



In the weeks to come, Chad would learn more about what he called the “LANL workers cancer fund.” Formally, it is known as the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, or EEOICPA. Even his human resource representative’s mother had received money from it, he wrote in his notes.



“Cancer funding is legit,” Chad wrote.



The program had been established by Congress in 2000 as part of the effort to make up for how the government had harmed its nuclear workers — and to prevent future lawsuits.



Based on more than two dozen studies Y extensive worker testimony, lawmakers required the government to pay for medical care, plus a $150,000 lump sum, to workers who may have gotten cancer from radiation exposure at Department of Energy facilities, including Los Alamos. The law would later be amended to include illnesses from chemicals such as asbestos, mercury, silica and chromium.



To win compensation, a worker had to prove he or she was employed at the lab for more than a year, give a detailed exposure and accident history, and provide proof of illness. The government would then determine if the radiation or chemical exposure history correlated to the illness.



In 2012, federal health officials decided that those who worked at the lab before 1996 would be presumed to have been exposed to radiation and automatically qualify for compensation if they had an eligible cancer.



In a recent interview with the New Mexican, former Energy Secretary Richardson said that after attending town hall meetings and reading letters from the widows of dead nuclear workers, he believed the burden of proof should fall on the government and not workers.



“A lot of the records are all over the place,” he said. “These DOE complexes should have kept better records, and they didn’t.”



Richardson said the long-standing philosophy was to “defend the country,” even against its own workers, with the idea that workers “are well-paid, but why should we be responsible?” He called this a mentality of neglect, noting that workers’ medical records had been considered garbage at many facilities.



The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, which Richardson helped create, laid out a list of nearly two dozen radiation-linked cancers it would compensate workers for — based on cancers that resulted from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among them is brain cancer.



Chad, it seemed, fit the bill. He applied for the program in December 2014.



(Corey Brickley, special to ProPublica)
VII



A Gap Between Records and Recollection



Chad was cleared to return to his job at the lab in late January 2015, four months after his diagnosis. He’d undergone radiation and two chemotherapy treatments, and Los Alamos’ occupational medicine staff said he was fit to continue working with classified material, his medical records show. At risk for seizures, he couldn’t drive or climb stairs or ladders. Chad carpooled and had Angela drive him to the laboratory several times a week. His supervisor offered him a desk job, a step down from his managerial role — but one that kept his health insurance running. He accepted. The only real alternative was termination.



Roark says the lab’s goal is to treat all employees with debilitating conditions with “utmost respect” and says when employees are unable to perform the functions of their jobs, Los Alamos “makes reasonable efforts to accommodate them,” which can result in job reassignment.



Separately, to process his claim for cancer benefits, the Department of Labor also told Chad it would need all of his medical and radiation exposure records from the lab. The Department of Labor sends these to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, another federal agency that uses a probability equation to determine if a worker had a high enough dose of radiation to cause cancer. If the computer found a 50 percent or higher correlation, Chad would get benefits.



When the records arrived from Los Alamos, containing a single CD and a brief letter, it was the first time Chad realized that his own experience differed from what the lab had noted in its records.



The lab had found “no records” of Chad having been exposed to anything or other environmental occupational hazards, the letter said. And his dosimetry report, a spreadsheet that showed his total dose of radiation annually, was scant.



The lab had not tracked Chad’s radiation exposure in 1999, his first year on the job, the report indicated, or in 2000, when the Cerro Grande fire burned. External monitoring began in 2001 but showed a clean zero for 11 out of the next 14 years. (Only in 2008, 2013 and 2014 were there any hits on the report.)



The report said his total dose was 0.254 rems over his career, well below safety limits and slightly less than an average person gets from background radiation from the sun and environment in a single year. A rem is a unit used to measure the absorbed dose of radiation, with 1 rem equivalent to a CT scan, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.



Chad marveled at the document. It didn’t track with his memory — or hold any record of the time he’d been called in for going over his limit and accused of taking his badge to the airport, or when he was sent home wearing disposable clothes.



“They aren’t on here,” Chad said when he looked at the document.



It also seemed impossible there were so many years that were completely blank.



Asked about the discrepancy between Walde’s memory and the reports, Los Alamos spokesman Roark said, in general, that the lab “maintains a comprehensive archive of worker radiation dosimetry data” and that it “provides any and all records in response to requests as quickly as possible.”



When NIOSH reviewed the records, it had a simple way to fill in the gaps. For the two years when Chad was not monitored, NIOSH assumed the maximum dose he could have been exposed to was the maximum background radiation at the lab (which was 0.4 rem), adding in the possibility of a couple missed readings.



NIOSH said Chad’s records showed he had been exposed to “various sources of radiation during his employment,” but the maximum dose he could have received at the lab, based on its calculations and assumptions, was a 3.744 rem dose to the brain. The agency modeled his probability for cancer based on how this amount of radiation would affect and mutate cells of the thyroid. It does not have a model for how external radiation might impact brain tissue.



On a phone call with a NIOSH claims representative in September 2015, Chad asked why the agency used general air monitoring data to fill in his missed readings. Chad, who made a recording of the call, said this would fail to account for the radiation present at the more dangerous nuclear areas he had been assigned to.



He told the representative how his badge often took hits. Like he’d told his father-in-law, and his friends, Chad said his boss kept asking him why his readings were “above the reporting levels.”



I “wonder if we are not missing something,” Chad said on the recording. “I also worry about the Los Alamos reporting,” relaying instances in which the lab certified an area free of radiation only to discover contamination later while he was working on a maintenance job. Chad began to talk about something he witnessed at the liquid radioactive waste plant but trailed off, saying, “I don’t know if I am allowed to say any of this stuff — never mind.”



Chad Walde's radiation shells hang in the garage of his family's home. The shells help keep the head still while a patient receives radiotherapy. (Adria Malcolm, special to ProPublica)
Stu Hinnefeld, director of the division of compensation analysis and support for NIOSH, said in an interview that those exposed to radiation have a “relatively low” likelihood of developing brain cancer compared with lung and thyroid cancers. He said the institute’s risk models, as a result, require a worker to have a much higher documented exposure to radiation than many of the other cancers in order to get compensation.



The Department of Labor concluded there was just a 2.67 percent chance his cancer was related to his radiation exposure history. His claim was denied on Jan. 14, 2016.



Chad’s dates of employment made him more likely to be rejected than if he had worked at the lab in a prior era. Overall, the Department of Labor has approved nearly 60 percent of claims filed by Los Alamos workers for cancer and beryllium disease. But for workers who started working at the lab after 1996, that figure falls to 45 percent, according to data requested under the Freedom of Information Act.



A spokesperson for the Department of Labor said, “While gaps in past records have existed at some sites, workers in the modern era have more extensive monitoring records. There are no unexplained gaps or readings in this employee’s radiation dose records.”



Still, Chad wanted to appeal. Over the next year, he would undergo another surgery and start experiencing frequent seizures, at one point spending two days in a coma in Texas, where the family had traveled for the twins’ volleyball tournament, when the spasms refused to subside. The family held “Gray Be Gone” recaudadores de fondos, referring to the color of the tumor tissue, to raise money to send Chad to MD Anderson for treatment. He also started clinical trials with a doctor in New Mexico.



During that time, Chad learned that he was not the only person at Los Alamos who thought missing records had led the Department of Labor to deny a claim.



For more than a decade, workers at Los Alamos have been telling federal officials that similar data and records problems have prevented them from getting compensation. In June 2005, at a NIOSH forum for the lab’s technical workers’ union, one worker said the lab “had lied and falsified documents right and left … the monitors were turned off, people weren’t qualified to be doing the monitoring, the equipment was never calibrated,” according to meeting minutes.



Another man, an X-ray technician, said his personal radiation badge always showed up with zero contamination.



Falsified radiation data or medical records have been documented at other labs, including in 2003 at Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Hanford Site in Washington state. Radiation records also were falsified at an Ohio nuclear facility in 2013. The Department of Energy fined lab managers in South Carolina and Ohio more than $200,000 each for “willful falsification.”



Los Alamos has not been fined for willful falsification of health records, but it has been cited within the past year for serious safety violations and for failing to check laboratory rooms for químicos tóxicos before allowing workers to enter. Internal incident reports from the early 2000s, obtained by NIOSH, described how records had been removed from radiation log books, “deliberate tampering” with nasal swipe samples (used to test if a worker inhaled radioactive particles) and problems with workers not wearing their radiation badges.



    Chad Walde speaks with his wife, Angela, before dinner at their home in December 2016. He was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer in 2014 and died at the age of 44 in 2017. (Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican)
Soon after Chad’s diagnosis, another electrician on his crew, Cesario Lopez, told Chad he’d recently had part of his kidney taken out after being diagnosed with cancer. Both Lopez’s mother and uncle, who worked at the lab before him, had been diagnosed with cancer, too. Lopez applied for and was denied compensation by the Department of Labor but has appealed.



Then Chad learned about his friend Gilbert Mondragon. Mondragon started working as an electrician on the fire protection crew in August 1999, three months before Chad. Mondragon was just 19 and from the beginning saw Chad as a mentor. Chad, he said, taught him how to have a good attitude at work and find value in it. That became harder after Mondragon was diagnosed with kidney cancer in the spring of 2014 at the age of 34.



Like Chad, Mondragon’s radiation report showed 14 straight years of zeroes, and only two years, 2006 and 2007, in which his badge took any hits, totaling 67 millirems of radiation over 16 years.



“It’s not like people think it is,” Mondragon said about lab safety. He, like Chad, recalled several times he’d been decontaminated and given new work clothes or boots.



Mondragon believes some of the zeroes are also the result of being told, by his supervisors, to take his badge off when he was doing work in contaminated places. “Now I know better,” he said, “but it’s too late.”



Roark, the lab spokesman, denies workers were ever told to remove their badges, saying its “Radiation Protection Program would never allow, endorse or recommend removing dosimeters to avoid contamination.”



Ken Silver, who sits on a Department of Labor advisory board and is a professor of environmental health at East Tennessee State University, testified before Congress in 2007 that instructing workers to remove their radiation badges was a common practice for “cleanup crews” at Los Alamos in the past. Silver said this practice was based on the belief that if a badge was contaminated, workers would go on to spread radiation throughout the laboratory, which he called a “flimsy assumption.”



Los Alamos officials did not testify at the hearing. But the lab says its rate of injuries has dropped significantly since 2006 and is well below the industry average. The laboratory says it does not track the cause of death for its employees.



Hinnefeld said NIOSH has looked into allegations that workers were told to remove their badges and, “We hear that on occasion.” But he said, in the past, officials have concluded that this wouldn’t affect how the agency reconstructs a worker’s radiation exposure because a single missed reading is unlikely to hold much weight in the overall career of a worker.



Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, which his physician has linked to chemical exposure, Mondragon resigned from the lab this winter. The doctors’ visits have consumed his life. His cancer claim, like Chad’s, also was rejected by the Department of Labor, but he was told he would likely be accepted if he were to develop another cancer.



For the last six months, he has relied on the help of an oxygen tank to breathe, trailing a long, green plastic tube wherever he goes.



VIII



A Desperate Search for Proof



By January 2017, Chad was running out of time. He had gone through 19 rounds of chemotherapy and was taking an oral chemotherapy treatment five days a week while wearing a portable device 18 hours each day — white electrodes attached to his skull with a mesh cap — to try to disrupt the mutation of his cancer cells.



But nothing eased the pain in his head.



He’d appealed to NIOSH’s Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health at a meeting in Santa Fe, telling members to look deeper into the problems at Los Alamos when assessing claims like his.



“I am a common man,” he told the board at a meeting two months earlier, in November 2016, explaining he had seen problems while working as the maintenance manager at the radiation laboratory in recent years.



“There were several times that the alarm would go off but nobody knew why or what have you. There were also times when employees’ TLDs would start taking hits and nobody can explain why,” Chad said. “There is a lot of work to still be done. There is people being denied. … There is periods of work there that we don’t have any documentation on.”



Chad was hitting a dead end with the Department of Labor. He wasn’t sure where he’d find additional evidence. In his chart, his doctors noted that Chad worked in the Navy and at Los Alamos, “so probably does get exposed to certain things if there are any spills of any chemicals or radiation.”



But no oncologist provided him with conclusive proof that his cancer was related to his exposure at the lab.



“It isn’t as simple as A plus B plus C gives you something,” Yonas, one of Chad’s doctors at the University of New Mexico, later said. Some people are genetically more sensitive to radiation, but that is a science in its infancy, while others develop cancer without any radiation exposure history at all.



Dr. Akshay Sood, an occupational pulmonologist at UNM who diagnosed Mondragon with asthma, said one of the main hurdles that claims assessors and doctors face is overcoming the perception that Los Alamos is safe.



Photographs of Chad Walde and his family adorn the family's home to keep his memory alive. (Adria Malcolm, special to ProPublica)
Workers “are told that everything they are doing is top secret so they don’t want to talk about the workplace,” he said.



A group of Los Alamos workers, however, have spent the last decade petitioning NIOSH to approve a petition that would deem them eligible for compensation if they worked at Los Alamos for at least a year between 1996 and 2005 and have one of the 22 radiation-linked cancers found among atomic bomb survivors.



These workers say the lab did not keep accurate records of their exposure during this period and their claims are being denied as a result. All Los Alamos workers prior to 1996 have already been granted this exemption based on problematic record keeping. If NIOSH were to approve this request, Chad and hundreds of other workers who have been denied by the Department of Labor would become eligible for compensation.



Physicians and bureaucrats often assume that facilities follow current federal safety rules and thus decide that illnesses can’t possibly be caused by the work, Sood said.



But in the last decade, after treating more than 500 Department of Energy employees, he said he still sees a great deal of disease and questions how well the lab’s safety practices are protecting workers.



“I am preparing for a deluge from the national laboratories. Every year the number of people we see from the national labs is increasing,” he said.



“Los Alamos National Laboratory is a very prestigious place to work … so a lot of these people don’t think it is fair for them to ever blame their employer because that is the culture in New Mexico,” Sood said. As a result, workers “underestimate their symptoms and disease, their employers underestimate their symptoms and disease, and the entire compensation program underestimates their symptoms and disease.”



(Corey Brickley, special to ProPublica)
IX



“God Is Here, and He Is Real”



“Today is March 3, 2017, and we are still here,” Chad said, looking into the camera. Angela sat beside him with her hand on his shoulder. “We are still loving life. I am still blessed to have Angela in my life — and our children. And the friends come every day.” Chad had lived more than twice as long as his original prognosis, and with a third surgery on the horizon, he said he felt stronger every day.



“God is here, and he is real,” Chad said. “He brought us a new surgeon, he brought us a new doctor … and with them they bring new trials, new treatments, new ex —,” Chad struggled to find the word and looked up to the ceiling. “New excitement.”



Angela thanked everyone for their support. And just as she seemed like she might cry, Chad looked at the camera with a sly look and said, “God bless the USA.” Angela collapsed into him, laughing.



Ten days later, Dr. Muhammad Omar Chohan chose a thin, curved blade to cut through Chad’s shaved skull, drawing an “S” shape through skin, blood, muscle and bone. Inside his head was a new mass of dead tissue, soft and gray. It took over an hour to sever the cancerous growth from the fragile, otherwise healthy brain matter. Thin slices of red, tan and brown tissue were sent to pathology.



Still, the cancer cells were continuing to spread.



“He never really recovered after that one,” Angela said. “Have you seen that movie, ’50 First Dates’? I had to remind him about everything, sometimes all day long. If I would go to the kitchen to get him coffee, he would say, ‘Oh, you got back from work.’ He would wake up and say, ‘I gotta go to work,’ and I would say, ‘Chad, you have to rest.’”



A month after Chad’s last surgery, Dr. Olivier Rixe, his oncologist, wrote a letter to the Department of Labor, saying Chad’s cancer “may be correlated to his chronic exposure to uranium” and recommended further investigation.



A spokesperson for the Department of Labor said the agency has no record of the letter in Chad’s file. Rixe declined to comment for this story.



But by that time, Chad’s heath was rapidly declining.



He began to lose his vision and struggled to walk, and in May, another MRI showed tumors everywhere. He and Angela decided to try a new clinical trial, hoping he could get a little better, live just a little longer. But it only made his symptoms worse. “He was just too sick,” she said.



By June 2017, Chad had lost the ability to see, talk or move from the hospital bed set up in their home.



Angela had stopped working, and friends and family constantly came by to visit.



Chad’s supervisor at the lab brought a box of Chad’s work belongings to their home: The American flag he’d hung in the office, the yellow fire protection vest and a Bible.



On the morning of June 28, as Angela came out of the bathroom, a strange gurgling sound rattled from Chad’s chest. Angela called in the children to sit by their father. Her parents and sister had spent the night and came into the bedroom, too. “We were all there,” she said. Together, they cried softly, watching him make those strange sounds of death.



Angela held her husband as he took his last breath.





  

    

    

    

    

    



  
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X



“The Laboratory Understands This Is a Difficult Time”



Two days after Chad’s death, a letter was mailed to Angela Walde with the subject line, “Deceased spouse.” The human resources staffer had forgotten to replace Chad’s name with that of another deceased employee, who worked as a chemical engineer at the lab’s plutonium facility and died in 2016.



“The laboratory understands this is a difficult time,” the form letter said, and offered grief counseling services.



Instead, Angela turned to her church, as she always had. For almost three years she had prayed that Jesus would heal her husband. Now, she prayed that God would change her, so she could handle living in the world without him.



Around Veterans Day 2017, just before sunset, Chad’s family drove to his gravesite. He would have turned 45 that day. The sun cast long shadows across the grass and dirt still clung to the ground around the flat gravestone that bore Chad’s name. The twins stood close together. Angela forgot her coat and wrapped her arms around herself. Two bundles of red, white and blue balloons bobbed in the November wind. She told Chad he would always be the love of her life.



Cassandra, Chad Jr., Angela and Angelica Walde inside their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their father and husband, Chad Walde, died on June 28, 2017 after a nearly three-year battle with glioblastoma brain cancer. (Courtesy of the Walde family)
Angela went back to work as a paralegal in Albuquerque. There is still a daunting stack of medical bills left over from Chad’s care. She says she was told her best chance of getting compensation will be if the government agrees there are gaps in the lab’s record keeping after 1996 that prevent officials from knowing what Chad was exposed to.



Until then, she said, “I probably am out of luck because they don’t have a lot of information on brain cancer.” She could also apply as a “survivor,” the term for widows like Angela, but such claims have to meet the same standard of proof.



The twins are getting ready to apply for college, and Chad Jr. will graduate with a degree in engineering from UNM in December. He said, standing near his father’s grave, he might start a business with friends, or consider a job at the lab, like his dad.



Angela taught herself how to ride Chad’s “trike,” a large, three-wheeled motorcycle, and painted it gray to represent the color of the tumor inside his skull. On the hubcaps, she inscribed the words “Living the dream.”



“I do wonder,” Angela said recently, “I wonder if he hadn’t worked at Los Alamos, if he would still be here.”



How We Reported This Story









This article tells the story of Chad Walde’s final illness, his death and his family’s search for answers. Rebecca Moss, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, met Chad in November 2016, about two years after he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma brain cancer. Over the next seven months, she interviewed him three times and saw him testify at a meeting of a federal advisory board, where he asked members to look into safety problems at Los Alamos National Laboratory, his workplace of 18 years. After Chad died in June 2017, Moss attended his funeral. Months later, she accompanied his family to his grave when they celebrated what would have been his 45th birthday.

To reconstruct the story of Chad’s life and death, Moss relied on her conversations with him, as well as more than a dozen interviews with his wife, Angela, and their family and friends. She reviewed Chad’s 400-page medical file, his Los Alamos personnel file, his dosimetry reports documenting his official radiation exposure and laboratory medical records. She also examined his claim for benefits filed with the Department of Labor and supporting paperwork as well as his wife’s Facebook posts. Moss read handwritten notes and listened to recordings Chad made after his cancer diagnosis detailing his conversations with doctors, government representatives and laboratory employees. She sought interviews with all of Chad’s doctors, with his widow’s permission. Only one talked to her, but notes from many of the others were in his medical records.

Moss also interviewed several members of Chad’s maintenance crew from Los Alamos. In total, she interviewed more than 20 current or former Los Alamos workers, as well as the widows and children of additional workers who had died of cancer or diseases linked to chemical exposures. She interviewed firefighters who worked during the 2000 Cerro Grande fire. She relied on newspaper archives from the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Albuquerque Tribune, state and federal environmental reports, and workers’ testimony from federal worker outreach meetings to recreate scenes from the fire.

Her reporting also relied on Department of Energy reports over several decades, congressional testimony, health studies and classified laboratory records made public as part of the Clinton administration’s investigation into radiation experiments conducted on humans. Moss used records from weekly site reports published by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Department of Energy’s notices of violation issued against Los Alamos to create a database of instances of worker safety issues dating back to 1996. Under the Freedom of Information Act, she received certain cancer studies, the number of workers who had filed claims for work done in the last 20 years and their rate of compensation. She also interviewed former and current federal officials, federal advisory board members and radiation experts.





Do you work or have you worked at Los Alamos, or another national laboratory? We’d like to hear your story. Fill out our questionnaire here.



					

					


 

 

    

    

    

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Rebecca Moss covers energy and the environment, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, for the Santa Fe New Mexican. Email her at rmoss@sfnewmexican.com and follow her on Twitter @rebeccakmoss.













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