[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 82 (Monday, June 20, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Page S6813]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 ELIGIBILITY FOR AUTOMATIC COMPENSATION

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to 
celebrate a landmark achievement for former nuclear weapons workers in 
Iowa. Today marks the completion of an administrative process whereby 
workers from the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, who assembled some of the 
most significant nuclear weapons in this Nation's history and 
subsequently developed devastating forms of cancer, will become 
eligible for automatic compensation.
  Reaching this point has been an example of both the best and the 
worst in our system of government. I first started working on this 
issue back in 1997 when I received a letter from a constituent, Bob 
Anderson, who wrote about how he and many of his former coworkers had 
become ill after working on nuclear weapons in Burlington, IA. I shake 
my head every time I think of what Bob's reaction must have been when 
he got a letter back from me, telling him that the Department of the 
Army had assured my office that they never made nuclear weapons in 
Burlington!
  In fact, the list of weapons that were made by Bob and 4,000 other 
Iowans includes many familiar names: Polaris, Titan, Pershing, 
Minuteman the list just goes on and on. It's a tribute to the workers 
in Burlington that while the Cold War was going on, no one beyond the 
workers at the plant--including me--ever had a clue about the work that 
was occurring. They did their job with excellence, and they did it at 
great personal peril. The men and women of Burlington truly were on the 
front lines of the Cold War. They received no medals, no thank-you's, 
no special pay. Instead, they paid a terrible price. The levels and 
types of cancer that have afflicted this workforce are shocking. And 
along with these illnesses have come financial hardships--pain and 
suffering--which family members have witnessed and nursed loved ones 
through--and, in too many cases, premature death.
  Today, finally, workers from IAAP, including Bob Anderson, at long 
last, will receive compensation. Equally importantly, at long last, 
they have some measure of justice.
  This has been a long process. It seems like more than seven years 
since I brought then-Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson to the plant 
to meet with workers. It seems like more that six years since I got a 
team from the University of Iowa School of Public Health to track and 
analyze the illnesses that workers had developed. And it has been 
almost five years since Congress passed the Energy Employees 
Occupational Illness Compensation Act to actually provide compensation 
to these workers.
  For almost five years we have struggled through one of the worst 
bureaucratic processes that I have ever seen. We have been required to 
demonstrate that no documents existed that would allow the radiation 
doses the workers received to be accurately reconstructed. It has been 
mind-boggling that a program designed to compensate people who had been 
deceived by the government, could put those same people through a 
second bureaucratic nightmare.
  But today is a day to celebrate. It is also a time to say thank you 
for the marvelous team effort that has made this day possible. IAAP was 
the first facility to file a petition for automatic compensation, and 
only the 2nd in the Nation to be approved. While I have worked hard to 
make that happen, it simply could not have happened without the workers 
themselves, as well as the University of Iowa scientists.
  I would like to say a special thank you to Jack Polson, Sy Iverson, 
Paula Graham, and Vaughn Moore. It was their willingness to repeatedly 
challenge the assumptions that were made about the work performed at 
the plant, and about how that work was done, that forced the Government 
to acknowledge that the documents from the plant were just inadequate 
to accurately reconstruct the levels of radiation that workers were 
exposed to.
  I also want to thank Joe Shannon, Laska Yerington, Sharon Shumaker, 
Marge Foster and Nancy Harman for there service on the Advisory Board 
here in Burlington and Shirley Wiley and Ed Webb for their help with 
the petition.
  No thank-you is complete without acknowledging how fortunate we were 
to have the help of the University of Iowa team: Laurence Fuortes, Bill 
Field, Kristina Venske, Howard Nicholson, Christina Nichols, Marek 
Mikulski, Phyllis Scheeler, Stephanie Leonard, and Laura McCormick.
  I would also like to thank my own staff. Alison Hart, my staffer in 
Davenport, Iowa, has put her heart into helping hundreds of workers and 
their families navigate this whole process.
  I would also like to thank Peter Tyler, Lowell Unger, Michelle 
Evermore, Jenny Wing, Ellen Murray, and Beth Stein of my Washington, 
DC, staff for their years of sustained work on this effort. And a 
special thank you is owed to Richard Miller of the Government 
Accountability Project for his assistance and his commitment to making 
this compensation program work.
  Finally, I would like to thank Bob Anderson and his wife Kathy. Bob 
and Kathy have weathered the ups and downs of this process with 
patience, good humor, and great fortitude. It will be a proud day for 
me when they actually receive a compensation check in hand from the 
Treasury. It speaks volumes that a letter from one Iowan can set in 
motion a monumental process that, in the end, will bring 
acknowledgement, compensation, and a measure of justice to so many.
  While more than 700 former workers are still seeking compensation, 
today marks our first significant victory. The people who will now be 
receiving compensation include at least 364 of those who got the most 
serious illnesses from their work at IAAP. Unfortunately, this group 
includes far too many workers who are no longer with us. In their honor 
and in their memory, I thank all of the former workers of the Iowa Army 
Ammunition Plant for their patience, their persistence, and their 
service to America. They are genuine patriots.

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