Monday, March 15, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

DOE to detail screening program

Hearing to spotlight toxic dust exposure in Yucca tunneling

Lax enforcement of guidelines to protect Yucca Mountain workers from inhaling toxic dust while they drilled a five-mile tunnel in the mid-1990s has led to an aggressive program to screen thousands who might have been exposed, an Energy Department safety expert will tell a U.S. Senate field hearing today.

Gene Runkle, senior safety adviser for the agency's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said he plans to tell members of the Senate Energy and Water Subcommittee that his office has received 240 responses to the 2,400 letters sent earlier this year to current and former workers about the screening program.

That is in addition to 93 workers who have participated in a medical surveillance program that was established in 1998.

In the program, two cases of silicosis, a degenerative lung disease, were diagnosed in 2000. In both cases, the employees had previously worked in other mining operations.

Runkle said those who respond to his letters will be interviewed and examined for health effects from breathing air inside the tunnel while miners bored through veins of silica and other minerals.

"Basically what we're going to indicate is that we have received employee concerns for silicate exposures," Runkle said in a telephone interview Friday.

"We have investigated those concerns (and) in response to that we have found some exposure levels exceeded the regulatory standard," he said.

As a result, the Energy Department announced a silicosis screening program in January that will employ specialists from the University of Cincinnati to conduct interviews, examinations and take X-rays. The cost of the contract this year is expected to be $680,000 based on screening between 1,200 and 1,500 people.

Last week, a lawsuit was filed by a North Las Vegas man who alleges he was exposed to toxic dust while federal contractors carved the Yucca Mountain tunnel.

The lawsuit filed by Gene Griego seeks class action status on behalf of tunnel workers.

Tunnel workers blame chronic lung ailments on inhaling dust laden with silica including a cancer-causing fibrous mineral, erionite, and a sister mineral, mordenite, during the tunnel excavation from 1994 to 1997.

Griego, a Los Alamos, N.M., national laboratory employee, worked as a tunnel supervisor during the excavation.

One former industrial hygienist for Energy Department contractor Kiewit Construction has said she was told to falsify her field notes about silica dust levels inside the tunnel and that she was fired after she complained about the record-keeping practice.

Kiewit Construction bored the 25-foot-diameter tunnel. A stop order was issued in 1996 to launch a more rigorous enforcement program that required workers to wear respirators during the tunneling effort.

Kiewit did not immediately comment on the lawsuit, filed late Thursday against it and other contractors.

Before the 1996 stop order, Runkle said, "the records indicate there was not always full enforcement of respiratory protection."

The field hearing is at 10 a.m. at the Clark County Government Center. Griego is scheduled to testify.