Widow battles red tape in bid for compensation

Bonnie Mattick knows the painstaking process of wrangling with the Department of Labor to receive compensation for her late husband's cancer death that she blames on his exposure to toxic and radioactive materials at the Nevada Test Site.

Since 2001, she has sent 52 letters to officials regarding her quest for at least $150,000 that she claims she's entitled to under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program. Her journey through the red tape and bureaucracy began a year after Congress launched the program.

Now, after denials and two appeals and dealing with two dozen different Labor Department examiners who have reviewed the files of her husband, John Mattick, she is still at square one.

"I'm not giving up on this," she said in a telephone interview Thursday from Phoenix, where the couple moved in 1997 after John Mattick's last stint as an industrial hygienist at the Nevada Test Site.

He died in 2001 of cancer at age 53. He had worked as an industrial hygienist and environmental engineer for two contractors from 1974 to 1981 and from 1989 to 1996. He was a senior environmental engineer for Reynolds Electrical & Engineering Co. and EG&G.

After he left the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, he was diagnosed with three types of cancer, including bone cancer.

Much of his work involved going to the back of tunnels where nuclear devices had been detonated to collect samples for analysis.

"He had access to all areas at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51. He was required to re-enter the tunnels on numerous occasions," Mattick said.

But when she tried to process her compensation claim as his survivor, the Department of Energy provided her with only partial records, she said. Much of the documentation about his exposures was missing, and that has hindered her attempt to prove that his work involving toxic and radioactive material more than likely caused his cancers, she said.

The Labor Department said the dose reconstruction showed there was a 29 percent chance his cancer was caused by exposure to harmful materials at the test site.

If dose reconstructions show that workers' cancers are more than likely caused by their workplace exposures, then they stand to receive $150,000 each in compensation plus reimbursements for medical costs.

Mattick has since sent a letter seeking more records she feels will bolster her case.

She said based on her experience it is obvious that the Labor Department is bent on denying claims rather than giving claimants the benefit of the doubt.

"What I want to do is expose the Department of Labor and their inability to act on all the information they've been given," she said.

As of November, the Labor Department had paid $18.9 million to 161 former test site workers or their survivors after dose reconstructions showed their illnesses probably were linked to exposure to radioactive materials at the test site.

Labor Department officials have declined to comment on specific cases.