USS Calhoun County sailors dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste into ocean

USS Calhoun County sailors dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste into ocean Tampa Bay Times, Times Staff Writer Dec. 24, 2013

They asked the dying Pasco County man about his Navy service a half-century before. He kept talking about the steel barrels. They haunted him, sea monsters plaguing an old sailor.”We turned off all the lights,” George Albernaz testified at a 2005 Department of Veterans Affairs hearing, “and … pretend that we were broken down and … we would take these barrels and having only steel-toed shoes … no protection gear, and proceed to roll these barrels into the ocean, 300 barrels at a trip.”

Not all of them sank. A few pushed back against the frothing ocean, bobbing in the waves like a drowning man. Then shots would ring out from a sailor with a rifle at the fantail. And the sea would claim the bullet-riddled drum.

Back inside the ship, Albernaz marked in his diary what the sailors dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. He knew he wasn’t supposed to keep such a record, but it was important to Albernaz that people know he had spoken the truth, even when the truth sounded crazy.

For up to 15 years after World War II, the crew of Albernaz’s ship, the USS Calhoun County, dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste into the Atlantic Ocean, often without heeding the simplest health precautions, according to Navy documents and Tampa Bay Times interviews with more than 50 former crewmen.

Albernaz began a battle for his life in 1988 when part of his brain began to die, mystifying doctors who eventually concluded the rare ailment might be linked to radiation. He filed a VA claim for benefits in 2001 that was repeatedly rejected, often with tortured government reasoning.

The VA and Navy told Albernaz he was not exposed to radiation on the Calhoun County, a vessel the Navy ordered sunk in 1963 because it was radioactive. The VA ignored Navy documents discovered by a former congressional aide proving the ship’s radioactivity, telling Albernaz they were “unsubstantiated.” And the Navy today points to Cold War records that are incomplete and unreliable as proof crewmen were not exposed to dangerous radiation.

The Navy and VA’s insistence that atomic waste on the Calhoun County was not dangerous comes 15 years after the VA linked the death of a crewman who served with Albernaz to radiation…….

Up to 1,000 men served on the Calhoun County in the years it dumped radioactive waste, a practice that continued until about 1960 — two years before the ship’s decommissioning.

It’s impossible to know how many suffered unusual health problems after they left the ship. The VA and Navy never followed up on their health. Some got sick and never filed VA claims. And after more than a half-century, much of the crew has died………

The opening of the Atomic Age brought a vexing problem — how to dispose of radioactive waste.

The Atomic Energy Commission, which then managed most aspects of U.S. atomic energy policy, settled on a cheap, convenient fix: ocean dumping. The Calhoun County soon became the only Navy ship on the East Coast dumping radioactive waste.

The containers looked like ordinary 55-gallon steel drums. Nobody on the ship was quite sure what was in them.

They arrived by the hundreds by train and truck at the ship’s home port at Sandy Hook Bay, N.J. or the ship picked them up at Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island. Less often, waste was picked up at other ports, including Boston. The hottest waste came from Floyd Bennett. At times, the barrels were marked with color-coded dots or a painted X. The “red dot” barrels were said to be the most dangerous.

Not that it mattered. Few if any of the crewmen, according to interviews, received any special training on handling the waste. They said they handled the “red dot” barrels the same as all the rest.

Much of the waste, which was packed in concrete, came from Brookhaven National Laboratory, a government research facility on Long Island that had a reactor and generated radioactive material.

Several shipments emitted 17 rems per hour of radioactivity even after the waste was encased in concrete, Calhoun County‘s deck logs show. That is the equivalent of about 1,700 typical chest X-rays.

Two sailors would place each barrel on its side and roll it to the edge of the ship. The Calhoun County, with its flat, shallow bottom, always shifted crazily in the waves, back and forth, a metronome marking time for a dangerous waltz.

As the ship tilted in their direction, the men released their barrel with a push and let gravity help take it overboard.

The ship carried the waste out off the continental shelf several times a year to waters of varying depths, usually 6,000 to 12,000 feet. The designated dumping areas were a full day’s trip up to 200 miles out to sea, though several men said in interviews that the ship would dump much closer to the coast when the weather was bad.

After they handled the barrels, the men went below deck to drink coffee or eat.

No documents appear to exist showing what exactly the Navy dumped. Deck logs list dumping coordinates, tonnage handled and drum radiation levels — but often, even that information is missing. And from 1946 to 1953, the Calhoun County‘s officers were not recording any dumps in deck logs at all………

On the Calhoun County, according to documents and interviews, radiation was neither feared nor respected. “We had no supervision,” said Bob Berwick, 82, of Laguna Niguel, Calif., an officer on the ship in 1952 and 1953. “We were on our own.”…….

None of the crew interviewed for this story recall getting special clothing or gear during dumping operations. An exception were the cotton gloves provided to the crew in the early to mid-1950s.

“We threw the gloves overboard into the ocean when we were done with them,” said Richard Tkaczyk, 85, of Buffalo, N.Y., who served on the ship from 1949 to 1951.

Several men said they were told to shower and take off clothing for washing after dumps. But for much of the ship’s history, this was not done, according to crewmen.

Albernaz told the VA in 2007 he recalled a trip when an AEC worker came through the crew quarters with a Geiger counter.

“It would go off like a machine-gun and he would say to us, ‘Okay. Get your pillow, blanket and mattress. We’re moving you to the tank deck,’ ” Albernaz said.

But the tank deck was under barrels, too. “So actually, there was really no place on that ship that was safe,” Albernaz said……….

the ship was radioactive.

On June 5, 1956, according to Navy memos, Naval Research Laboratory technicians took radiation readings on the Calhoun County before barrels were loaded on its deck.

Parts of the ship were radioactive, a memo to the Third Naval District commandant said. The ship’s captain, Herbert Hern, was ordered to “decontaminate affected areas” as soon as possible.

The discovery prompted a more thorough examination of dumping operations. Navy brass did not like what they found. The ship’s handling of this dangerous waste was sloppy, haphazard………..

George Albernaz, then 22, was excited to be on the Calhoun County as its newest quartermaster. He was born in Fall River, Mass., and had hardly been away from home. He thought he was going to be part of the Navy’s storied amphibious force.

He took a diary with him and recounted his adventure in the words of a wide-eyed sailor.

“This is the story of the most fascinating experience of my life … doing a job I never dreamed existed, serving on a ship whose days as a man of war are but a story in the past but today she is engaged in a service equally important as any fighting ship in the Navy,” he wrote.

It wasn’t long before Albernaz began keeping a different kind of diary. He titled this new log “Nuclear Waste Dumping Diary.”

Jan. 20 1957: “371 tons atomic waste.”

Feb. 7, 1957: “368 tons atom waste.”

Nov. 13, 1957: “299 (tons) poison gas (and) A.W.”

One of Albernaz’s last entries was on June 12, 1958: “200 tons. Spec. weapons,” or special weapons. That was the day, Albernaz later told his wife, that he helped dispose of an atomic bomb.

The Calhoun County sailed out of Norfolk, Va. with two giant crates. The ship’s log noted it dumped “confidential material” at 2:31 a.m.

Albernaz’s wife said he told her about that trip. He said the crew was told the crates contained two atomic bombs. Other sailors interviewed said the occasional dumping of disassembled atomic bombs occurred several times in its history. • • •……..

On March 10, 1958, one of the Calhoun County‘s crew, Harvey Lucas, was ordered to a Navy hospital. He was in pain and vomiting a brownish liquid, hospital records show.

Two months later, the ship’s muster rolls show, Albernaz was hospitalized for two weeks. His wife said he later told her he had severe nausea. The two men were among a handful that year with long hospitalizations, records show. Albernaz later said doctor’s diagnosed them with stomach ulcers………..

A Dec. 13 memo by the chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Ships doubted radiation on the Calhoun County could ever be reduced to levels then considered safe. The memo noted the Navy had never been able to decontaminate a radioactive ship.

“Complete paint stripping and sandblasting have failed to accomplish this (on the Calhoun County) and in the cases of ships contaminated in nuclear weapons tests,” the memo said.

So the Navy ordered the Calhoun County sunk……….

Navy officer George Self, 83, of Pahrump, Nev., got the job to ready the Calhoun County for sinking. …………

Self did not go out on the second trip, so he is unsunsure how the ship met its end. The Navy said demolition charges sent the old LST to the bottom.

The years after his 1960 Navy discharge were cruel to Calhoun County crewman Harvey Lucas.

Lucas, a Denver man who spent more than three years on the ship, had always been suspicious of the Calhoun County‘s mission even while still a deckhand. Like Albernaz, Lucas tried to document the ship’s work. He stole a radiation badge and took pictures of the barrels.

“He documented everything,” said daughter Jeanine Lucas.

His family said he wondered if the work had been far more dangerous than the Navy let on. Those concerns could only have been stoked when his uncle, George Dutcher, who served on the ship with Lucas, died of cancer in the late 1960s still in his 40s.

Lucas left the Navy and developed osteoporosis. It was so severe that a doctor said he had the bones of a 95-year-old, his family told the VA. He and his wife had five children born with birth defects or health problems.

Cancer took Lucas, too. He died on June 17, 1985, at age 47 of leiomyosarcoma, an aggressive soft-tissue cancer. It has been documented in women who in the 1950s and 1960s received radiation treatment for excessive menstrual bleeding.

Damage from the disease was so bad a funeral home couldn’t embalm him. Lucas was buried in a body bag.

Lucas, and then his wife after his death, battled the VA for benefits, arguing the radiation caused his cancer and brittle bones. The VA repeatedly denied a link, at first saying the ship hadn’t carried radioactive waste…………..

William Kemper, a retired Naval physicist, estimated Lucas had been exposed to radiation five times greater than the legal limit when he served.

Kemper told the VA, “it seems most likely that he had ingested some cobalt 90 or other (radioactive) waste in . . . his duties.”

In 1998, the VA finally ruled Lucas’s death was caused by radiation he was exposed to on the Calhoun County and approved benefits for his widow…………

Civilian workers at Brookhaven, the lab that packaged much of the waste dumped by the Calhoun County, found it difficult to prove their on-the-job exposure to radiation in the Cold War led to cancers some of them suffered. Records were too incomplete. Some workers were never monitored.

o in 2010, the federal government decided they would no longer have to prove their specific radiation exposure to get financial compensation and medical care. If they worked at the lab at least 250 days from 1947 to 1979 and were diagnosed with one of 22 radiation-related cancers, they qualified.

Congress protects military personnel in much the same way. But none of the men who served on the Calhoun County are eligible for automatic VA benefits for radiation illnesses because they did not participate in underwater or atmospheric atomic tests and related activities, the government says.

Thus, the crewmen do not meet their country’s definition of “Atomic Veteran.” https://www.tampabay.com/news/military/veterans/the-atomic-sailors/2157927/?fbclid=IwAR2LJbkpgGf3wFer8x96o_60n2EMtJ8hS-JREmkbBp_EkER9sl_iAxJuDkA