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As legal case is delayed, Hanford nuclear victims are dying

The clandestine 1949 test was among the early Hanford releases that raised thyroid cancer risks to 16,000 infants and small children who drank milk from cows eating contaminated grass, the dose reconstruction study conducted a half-century later would conclude.

Hanford radiation plaintiff near death – Spokesman.com, Karen Dorn Steele,  – Feb. 5, 2011 A woman suing Hanford contractors over her thyroid cancer, whose request for an expedited federal trial was denied last year by a Spokane judge, lies near death in a Longview, Wash., hospice.

Deborah Clark, 61, was transferred from the Oregon Health & Science University hospital in Portland to the hospice on Tuesday, according to her mother, Betty Hiatt, of Vancouver, Wash. Clark’s thyroid cancer had spread to her bones; she cannot walk and needs sedation for extreme pain.

Before Clark was sedated this week, she gave her 79-year-old mother a message. “She told me the Hanford downwinders should keep fighting and never give up,” Hiatt said.

Hiatt lost her other daughter to thyroid cancer in 2000 and encouraged Clark to file suit against the Hanford contractors who released clouds of radiation in the early years of the Cold War.

Clark’s lawyer, Richard Eymann, of Spokane, says her fatal illness is a reminder that Hanford’s victims – unknowingly exposed to radiation as children – are dying while waiting for justice in federal court.

“I get so angry. The government has recently bailed out big banks and corporations, but they could care less about these poor people,” Eymann said Thursday. Citing a life cut short and huge medical bills, Eymann asked the government nearly two years ago for $2 million to settle Clark’s case but received no counteroffer……………

The clandestine 1949 test was among the early Hanford releases that raised thyroid cancer risks to 16,000 infants and small children who drank milk from cows eating contaminated grass, the dose reconstruction study conducted a half-century later would conclude. At highest risk: the children who drank milk from backyard cows……….

Clark said she was never breast-fed and drank raw bottled milk from a farm near Irrigon, Ore. She also fished with her family in the Columbia River, which contained radioactive effluent from Hanford’s reactors when she was a young child.

Her sister, Rebecca, was born in 1951. She also developed thyroid cancer and melanoma and died in 2000 at age 48.

The public wasn’t told about the dangerous radiation emissions until 1986, when the U.S. Department of Energy released documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Spokesman- Review and two environmental groups. The revelations triggered several lawsuits against the private contractors who operated Hanford for the government.

2,000 plaintiffs

Clark, whose thyroid cancer was discovered in 1997, is among 2,000 people who sued, collectively called “downwinders.” They claimed that the radiation that escaped from Hanford’s plutonium factories in the 1940s and ’50s caused their illnesses. About 1,500 plaintiffs remain in the case…….

The federal government has paid $59.2 million to Van Wart’s law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, and several other law firms through the middle of fiscal year 2010 to defend the Hanford companies in the downwinders’ case, according to documents provided by the Department of Energy under the Freedom of Information Act. That total doesn’t include Department of Justice costs or the costs of the Energy Department’s litigation database.

The government, in an agreement dating back to the Manhattan Project, agreed to indemnify the contractors for operating Hanford….

Hanford radiation plaintiff near death – Spokesman.com – Feb. 5, 2011

February 7, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, USA