Thursday, September 02, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Yucca complaint points to unsafe toxic dust levels

Lawsuit accuses contractors of withholding information, deceiving tunnel workers

Workers and visitors inside Yucca Mountain inhaled unsafe levels of toxic dust in 2002, five years after a tunnel was completed to study whether the mountain can safely entomb nuclear waste, attorneys claim in court papers filed Wednesday.

The second amended complaint against contractors who carved the five-mile tunnel asserts the companies systematically deceived workers and withheld information about levels of lung-scarring dust that should have required them to wear protective gear.

One of the plaintiffs, Judy Kallas, a former industrial hygienist for Kiewit Construction Co., stated that her supervisor, Barry C. McNeill, ordered her in 1996 to "change her field notes about the dust levels in the tunnel" so the companies could avoid providing workers and visitors with respiratory protection.

"They basically sacrificed the workers," said Joe Egan, an attorney for the plaintiffs, who is also Nevada's lead nuclear waste lawyer in the state's fight against the project.

"About 1,000 to 2,000 people have a very elevated risk of contracting diseases, some of which are fatal," he said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.

The amended complaint states that a Bechtel SAIC Co. industrial hygienist, Wilbert L. Townsend, warned his supervisors Feb. 20, 2002, that workers in the tunnel's south ramp would be overexposed to silica and other types of harmful dust in less than four hours. "The respirable dust in our tunneling environment is not simply nuisance dust. It is indeed biologically active," he reported.

The lawsuit was filed against Bechtel SAIC Co. and a host of other Department of Energy contractors in March on behalf of Yucca Mountain tunnel workers. It was amended in April to, among other things, add visitors Judy Treichel and Steve Frishman. They had toured the mountain numerous times as independent contractors for the state.

A Bechtel SAIC spokeswoman said her company's attorneys had not seen the newly amended complaint late Wednesday and could not comment on it.

Tom Janssen, a spokesman for another defendant, Kiewit Construction Co., said, "We're looking into it."

The amended complaint noted that in 1998, a year after the tunnel was completed, an operations manager had prior knowledge of the dust hazard as crews were about to construct a smaller, cross-drift tunnel. "Resumption of tunneling 'once again presents the possibility for our underground work crews to become grossly contaminated with silica containing dust,' " the complaint quotes TRW's Operations Manager Robert Sandifer as saying.