Andy Akulaw spent seven months helping to dig a mile-deep pit on Amchitka Island about 35 years ago. Today, he's getting by on one kidney, and it doesn't work as well as it should.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Andy Akulaw spent seven months helping to dig a mile-deep pit on Amchitka Island about 35 years ago.
Today, he's getting by on one kidney, and it doesn't work as well as it should. He thinks that's because he was exposed to radiation while working in the shaft where the Atomic Energy Commission blew up a five-megaton Spartan antiballistic missile warhead in 1971.
If Akulaw can hang on until the end of May, the U.S. Department of Labor says it will have regulations in place to process his application and compensate him for the kidney cancer diagnosed in 1998.
Akulaw is one of more than 3,200 people who worked on the remote Aleutian island from 1964 to the early 1970s, when the AEC was conducting three underground nuclear tests there. A medical surveillance program set up a few years ago to check on the health of those workers has tested about 1,100 of them; more than 260 cancers have been reported by or found in participants, according to research by Dr. Mary Ellen Gordian of the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Similar monitoring is being done on workers from other U.S. nuclear sites. The results from Amchitka workers show a prevalence of leukemia about three times higher than the average among workers in screening programs at several other nuclear sites, said Dr. Knut Ringen, who directs the Amchitka surveillance program.
Akulaw sat in on a news conference Thursday with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who championed a drive in Congress last year to move the energy workers compensation program from the federal Department of Energy, where it had largely languished, to the federal Department of Labor, which has been far more efficient in processing atomic workers' claims through another compensation program.
Murkowski said people who worked at Amchitka and other U.S. atomic sites during the Cold War undertook risky work -- sometimes unknowingly -- in the nation's interests. America owes those who later contracted diseases because of their exposure to radiation or other toxic substances, she said.
"No different than sending our young men and women off to fight in a war," she said. "They were defending, working for our country, and they suffered as a consequence."
Akulaw and two Amchitka widows whose husbands have died in the years since they worked on the island, Sylvia Carlsson and Kathryn Peters, credited Murkowski's efforts in helping to secure passage of legislation that both transferred the compensation program to the Labor Department and cured many of its biggest problems. "It probably would not have gone too far without her," Carlsson said.
Under the old system, claimants had to convince a physicians' panel that their illness was related to radiation exposure on Amchitka, and find a "willing payer" -- a construction company or its insurers -- to cover the claim. Under the new system, the federal government covers the claim under a mandatory funding provision, and more than 20 kinds of cancers and respiratory diseases are presumed to be Amchitka-related. The Energy Department, which had processed only about 3 percent of the claims filed with it after four years, has been replaced by the Labor Department, which Murkowski said had processed more than 95 percent of the workers' compensation claims filed with it.
Murkowski's press conference came amid a flurry of activity for Amchitka workers or their survivors this week. The Washington, D.C.-based head of the Labor Department's Energy Employees Compensation Program, Peter Turcic, was here to explain how the new compensation process will work.
The Amchitka Medical Surveillance Program, which was expected to run out of money early this year, has been extended through at least November 2006. The program provides free medical screenings to Amchitka workers who still live in Alaska as well as those who have moved from the state. Of the 3,254 Amchitka workers identified so far, surveillance program staffers are still searching national databases for 927 they have been unable to locate.
Ringen encouraged any Amchitka worker or survivor of a deceased atomic worker who hasn't yet contacted the program to do so.
"Anyone with any kind of cancer, any kind of serious lung disease, or anyone who thinks they have any kind of health problem related to their work out there should be filing a claim," he said. "Because unless you file a claim you won't know if you're eligible."
The new program will award compensation under a formula that considers the degree to which a worker's disease impairs him as well as lost or diminished wages over time. It can be as little as $2,500, or as much as $250,000, Turcic said.
The compensation program that has been administered by the labor department for the past three years grants one-time $150,000 compensation awards to former employees who have contracted any of more than 20 cancers or diseases caused by exposure to beryllium or silica. The Labor Department has processed 416 cases under that program, Ringen said. Fifty-nine percent have been recommended for approval, a rate he said approaches twice the national average for energy employees. Akulaw is among them, and he also hopes to qualify for the new program when the agency completes writing regulations to implement it. There's one other thing Andy Akulaw would like.
"We have not yet received a letter of apology from anybody for exposing us to radiation ... without telling us," Akulaw said, standing in a hallway of Murkowski's downtown Anchorage office. AEC records indicate two canisters of radioactive material went missing near the shaft, he said.
"That is the thing that really peeves me off. We should have been given a chance, or a choice, to decide for ourselves if we wanted to go down there and be exposed. But there was no indication we were being exposed to it."
INFORMATION
To contact the Amchitka Medical Surveillance Program or to inquire about compensation, call 258-4070 in Anchorage or 1-888-827-6772 toll-free.
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