Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B0088UTOBA | Format: PDF
Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats Description
Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and - unknown to those who lived there - tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets - both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed) - best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.
But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She learned about the infamous 1969 Mother's Day fire, in which a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited and - despite the desperate efforts of firefighters - came perilously close to a "criticality", the deadly blue flash that signals a nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that would have had devastating consequences for the entire Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which accidents were always called "incidents".
And as this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism - a detailed and shocking account of the government's sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents' vain attempts to seek justice in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky Flats workers - from the healthy, who regard their work at the plant with pri...
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 13 hours and 52 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: June 5, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0088UTOBA
Be prepared to be terrified, amazed and astounded as you read this book about the Nuclear horror of Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado. Like Los Alamos, it is a research facility, builder of plutonium triggers and this site was initiated to fight our part of the cold war. Right in the back yard of this nuclear test site and plutonium harvester, were homes where children played in the smudge of plutonium, rode horses across contaminated land, and drank water from poisoned wells.
Kristen Iversen intersperses the history of Rocky Flats with the story of her Nordic Family - a family that keeps secrets and does not speak out of turn - and do they ever have a lot of secrets to keep. Kristen's father is an attorney who is heading down the deep slope of alcoholism, her mother refuses to acknowledge what is happening at Rocky Flats. She talks about cleaning agents being manufactured there.
Despite the workers coming down with epidemiological markers for cancer, the government just won't take the people seriously. There are more agencies of the government than I could have ever imagined and each one is there to protect another agency. They work in tandem to keep the public relations good and the people fooled.
Kristen has spent years writing this book, interviewing people, going over court cases and following the problems from the very start. She opens with the Manhattan Project which began in 1942 and closes with the classic poem, 'Plutonium Ode' by Alan Ginserg. I grew up listening to Ginsberg and he was a brave poet who knew when to speak up and how to do it. He feared nothing and told the truth. Even in the days when homosexuality was in the closet, Ginsberg was out of the closet.
Ms.
Author Kristen Iversen's 12 years of research is evident in this fairly epic look at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon's factory, and the contamination, cancer and dishonesty the facility left behind. But, this is the price for a nation's protective nuclear arsenal - the weapons have to be built somewhere, and Rocky Flats was the source for the nuclear warhead's plutonium 'triggers.'
The 'villain' of the piece is of course the government and the private companies - Dow Chemical, for example - that willfully kept secrets from the close-by Denver population, pretending the facility was much safer than it was, and that the health effects were minimal. A grand jury's recommended criminal indictment was ignored, and at the book's conclusion, an appeals court overturns a mammoth legal judgement in resident's favor.
None of this is really a surprise. But it's depressing to see how local communities are ignored - or worse, how decent jobs are considered more important than long-term health. Thousands of perfectly content workers are at the plant; had they up and quit one day in protest, maybe they could have changed things. But that never happens; in fact, Iversen shows several cases where whistle-blowers were threatened by their fellow workers, scared the plant would close and take away their jobs. So it's easy to blame the companies and the government, but we're the ones who sit idly by.
This part of the story should anger and disgust readers, but we should not be surprised that a nuclear program designed to try and protect the entire country would have been unwilling to sacrifice the health of a few towns.
The book's parallel thread is Iversen's childhood in the community, and dealing with an alcoholic father.
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