Funk, advocate for ex-test site workers, dies at 69

John Funk, a former Nevada Test Site worker who helped his Cold War colleagues fight for compensation for illnesses linked to their jobs, died Oct. 13.

He was 69. He died at Desert Springs Hospital of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his friend Brenda Sieck said.

"He fought so long to make everything right for all the people who worked at the test site," Sieck said. "He had a motivation. And, in the last 10 years he'd get more and more angry when he dug up something they were hiding."

Sieck sought his help filing a claim for her mother after her father, a test site worker who re-entered nuclear weapons test tunnels, died in 1986.

For nearly a decade, Funk battled the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program over benefits to which he felt he was entitled for exposure to toxic and radioactive materials. As a carpenter, he re-entered test tunnels and post-shot experiments where he was exposed to benzene from diesel engines. The compound, in addition to exposure to radioactive materials, was linked to his bout with myeloproliferative disorder, a form of bone marrow cancer that affected his blood cell production.

After the compensation program was established, Funk founded a nonprofit group, Atomic Veterans and Victims of America Inc., to facilitate many of the thousands of families who filed claims.

His own case dragged through the program, which was first administered by the Department of Energy and later by the Department of Labor.

He supported a campaign to acquire special exposure status for those who worked at the Nevada Test Site, now called the Nevada National Security Site.

The special exposure designation allowed former workers and survivors to obtain compensation without enduring dose reconstruction that were costly and time-consuming for the agencies and the program's contractors.

After setbacks and appeals, Funk said last year that he would never live to see the day the government paid him.

In April 2009, the Labor Department's Final Adjudication Branch deposited a $250,000 check in his account.

"I finally won that argument that people who worked in tunnels prior to 1986 were exposed to ... benzene from diesel exhaust. It took me six years to win that argument," he told the Review-Journal in June 2009.

John R. Funk was born Jan. 28, 1941, in Monongalia County, W.Va.

At 17, he joined the Army and served as a military policeman from 1958 to 1960.

From 1976 to 1994, Funk worked at the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a carpenter, welder and supervisor, Sieck said.

A memorial will be at 11:20 a.m. Nov. 1 at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City.

He is survived by his sister, Margaret Barry, of Brockport, N.Y.; and four nieces.