A Grim Harvest
To Lloyd Mixon, Rocky Flats is an unwelcome newcomer. "I can walk out the back door twenty feet and see where I was born," he told us from his thirty-acre farm in Broomfield. "I was here a long time before that plant was."
Six miles to the east, Mixon can see the tall stacks of the plutonium factory, with the winds blowing toward him "right down out of the canyon."
In 1975 he told a joint congressional-gubernatorial commission that bizarre problems had begun surfacing among his animals, problems in quantities he had never seen before. There was a calf born hairless with a body full of a watery substance and a liver "three times normal." There were pigs and fowl with mutations. There was another calf born dead with tissue that tested similar to cows exposed to radiation under experimental conditions.
Mixon later told the crew from Dark Circle that pigs had been born on his farm whose "nose and mouth [are] twisted, where they’re not able to nurse." Some, he added, had been born with five toes instead of the normal four. Others had hips and ears badly deformed, "with eyes that were not like they’re supposed to be."
"We’ve had chickens with no eyes," he added, "you break open the shell, they’ve got beaks like needles." Mixon continued, "We’ve had them where their legs have been so badly twisted and turned that they were unable to kick out of the shell. We had a chicken hatch with the brains right on top of his head."
State health inspectors told Mixon his problems stemmed from poor feed and hygiene. "They brought down what was supposed to be an expert, and he didn’t even know how long it took for the eggs of different birds to hatch," said Mixon. But those birds that had allegedly been deformed because of poor food and hygiene had been kept in sanitary wire cages and fed commercial grain. "According to the ticket on the feed we buy, it has everything adequate in it. So it’s caused from something else." Inbreeding was also suggested, but in one case "the female came out of Pennsylvania and the male came out of Texas. There’s no way they could be related."
There were also charges of mismanagement. "I’ve had livestock ever since I’ve been three years old," Mixon said. "My people back years and years have had livestock."
Mixon’s anger was reminiscent of the days when the AEC had scorned sheep farmers whose animals had died in bomb fallout. And his experiences matched those of a growing roster of farmers near nuclear facilities whose animals seemed to serve as a bellwether for bad news to come from radiation. In Pennsylvania, New York State, Vermont, New Hampshire, Arkansas, and Colorado farmers have complained of bizarre deformities, reproductive problems, and unexplained deaths among their animals—problems that seem to have no other possible cause except nearby nuclear facilities. In nearly every case "experts" from state agriculture departments have discounted the claims, blaming other factors ranging from weather to bad feed to inbreeding to mismanagement.
But Lloyd Mixon blamed Rocky Flats. "We used to have several different varieties of pheasants," he told Dark Circle. "We got where they wouldn’t produce. The eggs were infertile. So we just went out of it. Then we had some lambs born with the guts, or the insides hanging out. [Some would] be alive. We’ve had some born dead that way. We’ve had kid goats born with growths on them. . . ."
And, he told us, there’ve been "geese who would walk across the yard and all of a sudden, they’ll stiffen up and die. There’ve been deformities in cats, and they’ve stopped reproducing the way they should. We’ve lost a couple of dogs with cancer."
The health department, Mixon added, won’t release any data on other cases. But Mixon has received numerous calls from neighbors, including one who complained of eleven colts, all born in the same season, all born blind. And there was general agreement that wildlife had disappeared from the area. "You don’t see a rabbit around here anymore," he said. "And people that try to raise them . . . they just stop reproducing."29 Mixon noted that many of his neighbors prefer to keep quiet about what is happening for fear of undercutting the value of their property and their produce.
One of his neighbors who did agree to talk with us—anonymously—told us she had lost so many colts to stillbirths and deformities that she went out of the horse-raising business altogether. "The animals aren’t what they used to be and nobody’s is getting any better," she said.30
Unfortunately the problems do not seem to be limited to animals. In the late 1970s Dr. Carl Johnson began finding abnormal cancer rates among human beings downwind from Rocky Flats.
The stolid, conservative Dr. Johnson is former director of the Health Department of Jefferson County, which encompasses Rocky Flats. He is also an officer with the Army Reserve and maintains a top-secret "Q" clearance. As a public-health officer Johnson became disturbed by the constant malfunctioning of the nuclear industry and began his own studies to confirm or deny what the AEC and DOE were telling—and not telling—the public about Rocky Flats.
Dividing the downwind area into four zones and correcting for age, race, sex, and ethnicity, Johnson found male cancer rates in the zone closest to the plant to be 24 percent higher than in the zone farthest away. Intermediate zones showed excess rates of 15 percent and 8 percent. Female cancer rates were 10 percent higher in the near zone as opposed to the farthest one, with intermediate zones showing excesses of 5 percent and 4 percent. The excess cases for both sexes involved cancers of the lung and bronchus, upper respiratory tract, colon, rectum, stomach, gonads, liver, thyroid, and brain as well as leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma.
There were other alarming statistics as well. Johnson’s studies of people forty-five to sixty-four years of age in eight census tracts near the plant showed a doubled lung-cancer and leukemia death rate over subjects living in "relatively uncontaminated" zones. In essence Johnson found 491 excess cancer cases when the DOE said there would be less than one.
A separate study of a large suburban area near Rocky Flats found a congenital malformation rate of 14.5 per 1000 births as opposed to 10.4 per 1000 for the rest of the county, and 10.1 for the state overall.31
Johnson’s findings raised public awareness of Rocky Flats and helped fuel a movement to close the plant. His findings also put him in a difficult political position. Local real-estate interests began applying pressure to have Johnson fired from his job as Jefferson County health director. In May of 1981 they succeeded.
Meanwhile autopsy reports on workers at Rocky Flats showed plutonium concentrations in all organs of their bodies. And a study for the EPA by Dr. John C. Cobb of the University of Colorado School of Medicine indicated preliminary evidence of excess plutonium levels among other local human autopsy specimens plutonium that was traceable by its isotope-ratios to Rocky Flats. But in an interview Cobb warned us that plutonium might not necessarily be the chief culprit in any area health problems that might surface. "I’m not sure plutonium is the right thing to look for," he told us. "They also burned thousands of gallons of oil with uranium chips in it out there. A combination of the uranium in the cutting oil might be more important than the plutonium."32
Whether it was uranium or plutonium, or both, Lloyd Mixon had been directly exposed. "I had some tumors taken off my chest," he told the Dark Circle crew. "I’ve had my thyroid taken out. I’m tired quite a bit of the time, more than what was usual, and [I’ve] got a numbness in my left side, my shoulders. They found a growth on my right arm between my elbow and my shoulder. . . . My daughter was born with a hole in her heart," he said. Mixon also noted that his neighbors complained of being perpetually overtired, numbness in their hands, and other inexplicable health problems.
There was also talk of "children being born retarded," he told us, "of them with mental problems."
Few of his neighbors, he said, would point an accusatory finger at Rocky Flats. But, he asked us, "if it isn’t that place, what is it?"33
For Rex Haag there wasn’t much doubt. He had lived within six miles of the plutonium factory, and as a contractor had built another five dozen houses nearby "without the least bit of knowledge of that being a dangerous area."34
After Kristen Haag’s death from bone cancer, the body was cremated. At her father s request, her ashes were sent away for testing. When the results were slow in coming back, Johnson called the laboratory, where a technician told him "there was some problem because there appeared to be a large amount of plutonium 238" in the ashes. And when the official report finally arrived months later, it cited what Johnson termed "rather high" levels of plutonium 238.35
Rex Haag soon helped organize a business coalition to help close Rocky Flats. People justify the operation of the plant "in the name of national interest, or national security," he said. "But I wonder if the same people who are saying that, if it were their child, if they could actually sit there and say the same thing."36
Lloyd Mixon had similar questions. "I’ve been hearing a lot more problems lately," he told us. "In a few years things are gonna get a lot worse."37
29. Lloyd Mixon, "Statement," Hearings of Governor Lamm’s Task Force on the Rocky Flats Plutonium Facility (Boulder, Colo.: April 1975); in Dark Circle, and interview, May 1981.
30. Anonymous, interview, April 1981.31. Johnson, "Cancer Incidence"; and Carl Johnson, "Evaluation of Cancer Incidence for Anglos in the Period 1969-1971 in Areas of Census Tracts with
Measured Concentrations of Plutonium Soil Contamination Downwind from the Rocky Flats Plant in the Denver Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area," 5th International Congress of the International Radiation Protection Association, Jerusalem, Israel, March 9-14, 1980.
32. John C. Cobb, et al., "Weapons Grade Plutonium in Humans Near Rocky Flats," abstract submitted for a poster session at the AAAS Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada, January 1981; and Cobb, interview, April 1981.
33. Mixon in Dark Circle, and interview.
34. Haag in Dark Circle.35. Johnson in Dark Circle, and interview, July 1981.
36. Haag in Dark Circle.
37. Mixon interview.