Former Nevada Test Site workers Oscar Foger and Sandie Medina walk Thursday down a hallway in a Las Vegas hotel after they discussed working conditions and missing tunnel records outside a presidential advisory board meeting on radiation and worker health. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

For 25 years, Sandie Medina filed records for Nevada Test Site workers, keeping in cardboard boxes the toxic-materials reports, personnel rosters, weekly safety meetings, accident log books and lists of miners and craftsmen who re-entered a tunnel where nuclear bomb tests were conducted.

In all, 100 green-and-white Xerox boxes that held the records from 1970 to 1995 were stored in an alcove building at the entrance to N Tunnel in Area 12 at the test site.

It was diligent work Medina was proud of because she thought the information would be useful to any of the workers who might later seek compensation for illnesses they believe stem from their jobs at the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

When she last checked in the fall of 1997, Medina said the boxes of records were still in the alcove building.

"But when we went back in February 1998, they were gone," she said Thursday in the hallway of a Las Vegas hotel near where a presidential advisory board had gathered to discuss problems that former test site workers have in proving their compensation claims.

What she found out from a forklift operator who carted off the boxes was that they were taken to a landfill at the test site and buried.

"It really hurts," she said. "It destroyed a lot of information that could be helpful to what we're doing now."

After her job as chief clerk for a test site contractor, she became union project manager for the Southern Nevada Building and Construction Trade Council's test site medical surveillance project. As such, she said, she has seen the result of exposures to radiation and chemicals that many miners and craftsmen endured.

"Now with the job I'm doing, I see my friends sick, funeral after funeral," she said.

In interviews since July, officials with the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration have denied that any records that would be useful to resolving worker claims under the Labor Department's Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program were destroyed.

They said many records were kept in duplicate and triplicate forms and are being scanned in a computer database under a cataloguing project with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Ken Hoar, acting assistant manager for safety programs at the test site, said Friday any industrial hygiene record would have been sent to the Safety Department at Mercury and stored in a warehouse for archiving.

Some records might have to be kept for three years or 75 years, for example, based on the government's records retention requirements.

"Is it a record or operational information? If it's a record we should have it," he said.

Documents and reports about site operations that didn't contain information about industrial hygiene or exposure to radiation, or information that didn't deal with health and safety, might have been disposed of, Hoar said.

"That kind of stuff probably ended up in the landfill," he said.

However, Hoar said, if it was a record pertaining to the health and safety of workers, then "the government has been very studious about making sure the records have been managed in a professional manner."

Test site spokesman Darwin Morgan said hundreds of thousands of pages of historical records from 1955 through 1992, including health data reports, radiation personnel listings as well as industrial hygiene logbooks and reports from 1986 to 1990, have been supplied to Dr. Lew Pepper.

Pepper, of Boston University, was selected in 1996 by the Department of Energy to conduct medical screening and surveillance of former test site workers.

Pepper's proposal for independent research was reviewed and recommended by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

Morgan said Thursday that his agency has maintained "a very defensible and trackable system" of records.

"Our position is there is enough other records ... to establish claims," Morgan said.

Nevertheless in a July interview, Pepper recalled the time in late 1997 when he was making arrangements to check the N Tunnel records that had been kept by Medina.

"I was coming out to review the records, and I was told they were no longer available. We were told they were put in the landfill, accidentally placed in a landfill," he said.

Pepper said he doesn't know for sure what records were hauled to the dump, but the test site's prime contractor at the time did provide him later with 10 years' worth of electronically stored industrial hygiene data.

In telephone conversations last week, Pepper said for the most part he has been pleased with DOE's effort to provide him records.

However, he said, "The absence of data doesn't help us. I think any information can be useful in general to improve the understanding for a group of workers from a particular part of the test site. Better data always helps."

At last week's meeting of the Presidential Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, the chairman of the Nevada Test Site working group, Robert Presley, noted in his report to the board that missing data and employee misuse of radiation detection badges are among the issues that fog the compensation process.

During a break in the meeting Wednesday, he said some exposure and industrial hygiene records are probably missing from throughout the nation's nuclear weapons complex.

"There have been campaigns over the last 40 years that we don't need these records so let's get rid of them. We didn't think we'd need them 30 years later," Presley said. "Yeah, there could have been records that were taken out and dumped."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., also referred to the plight of former test site workers, many of whom "have already died while waiting for the compensation, stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare of obstruction and delay."

They have been denied compensation "as a result of flawed calculations based on records that are incomplete or in error as well as the use of faulty assumptions and incorrect models," Reid told the board in a videoconference from Washington, D.C.

Medina, former test site miner Oscar Foger and John Funk, a carpenter who installed bulkheads in tunnels, said among faulty assumptions is that the dosimetry records based on film badge readings are accurate.

They noted, too, that working conditions inside the tunnels didn't always meet health and safety standards.

Medina said in some cases dosimetry badges were not worn inside the tunnels or were covered to prevent detection of exposure to radioactive materials.

In other cases, workers who approached the safe limit for exposure over a certain period were told not to come to work or risk losing their access to the tunnels.

"Those are nothing but a joke, because those guys worked in these hot areas and they show zero, zero, zero," Medina said about the dosimetry records. "Then why would they send a guy home for four days?"

Funk wonders why workers would register triple zeros for exposure to radiation when they knew they were entering so-called "hot" areas for radioactivity.

"Guys were laid off because they exceeded their allowable rate, and they still had triple zeroes on their report card," Funk said.

Foger, the miner, said he and co-workers used rags instead of respirators or masks to keep from inhaling dust laced with toxic substances or radioactive particles while they worked inside tunnels.

"You got a bandanna thing to put across your face to keep dust out of your mouth," Foger said.

He said managers also provided the miners with an ample supply of beer and pizza. The beer was for flushing contaminants from the body.

"They would pacify you to keep your mind off of it. They would bring beer and told us it would keep your kidneys flushed. ... They really didn't care," he said.

Asked Friday whether the landfill could be exhumed in an effort to locate the records described by Medina, a test site spokesman wouldn't comment.