PART III
The Industry’s Underside
8 Bomb Production at Rocky Flats: Death Downwind
Kristen Haag was born in 1967. Rex, her father, was a well-to-do contractor in suburban Denver who did all he could to show his blue-eyed daughter the world. "She had a happy childhood," he said. "She rode horses, she rode motorcycles. She went to Hawaii, she went to the mountains. She was just a beautiful, high-spirited girl that everybody loved, that never really lacked for anything."
In March of 1979, at age eleven, Kris bumped her knee. In early May doctors found a malignancy; she was diagnosed as having bone cancer. Her leg was amputated, and she began undergoing chemotherapy. "It didn’t slow her down much," Haag said. "She swam. She got her swimming certificate, her life-saving at the end of the summer." Kristen asked her parents to get her amputated leg analyzed, "so other children won’t get what I’ve got." Kris Haag died before the year ended. Her parents agonized over where her disease could have come from and then heard about a fire at the Rocky Flats plutonium facility, six miles from their home. "When she was just two years old I built her a sandbox in the backyard," her father told us. "I later found out that was the year they had the big fire at Rocky Flats."
In talking with us and with a film crew from Dark Circle, a documentary on nuclear hazards, Rex Haag outlined his fear that the same factory whose sloppy practices had killed Leroy Krumback and his coworkers inside its walls had also claimed his daughter six miles away. "The plutonium that went out with that fire must’ve carried right into her sandbox. It just tears me up to think about it now. We were right downwind."1
So was Denver.
Like the dozen-odd other facilities in the American nuclear weapons production chain, Rocky Flats has been plagued not only with hazardous working conditions, but with accidents and uncontrolled radiation emissions that have threatened the health of millions of downwind Americans like the Haag family.
At Rocky Flats two major fires and a wide range of accidents and unexpected leaks have led to charges that the plant has seriously contaminated the nearby countryside; has caused a plague of reproductive problems, mutations, and death among farm animals downwind; and has led to an escalated cancer rate among human residents in the Denver area. It has also raised serious questions about the entire process of producing nuclear bombs.
1. Rex Haag, quoted in Dark Circle, and Rex Haag, interview, May 1981.