With the airpacks strapped to their backs, the firefighters had a difficult time maneuvering in the crowded production area. They used up oxygen quickly and had to go back outside every twenty minutes to get new bottles. The smoke was so thick that they fought the blaze on instinct alone and found their way to exits by groping along the fire hoses or crawling on their hands and knees, following the yellow arrows that pointed the way out.
Conditions were equally chaotic outside. Within an hour, dozens of supervisors, radiation monitors and workers had been rounded up and ordered to the plant. A "hot" area was cordoned off for the firefighters. As the first wave of firemen stumbled out, sweating and exhausted, a phalanx of workers stripped off their clothing and suited them up again with freshly cleaned masks, hoods, double pairs of coveralls, booties, gloves and full bottles of oxygen. Some of the fireman grew alarmingly contaminated, with more than 100,000 counts per minute detected near noses and mouths. Nevertheless, the firefighters staggered back into the burning building four, five, six more times before being ordered to the medical department for decontamination and as many as three showers.
Rocky Flats workers manipulated plutonium using lead-lined gloves that protruded from airtight glove boxes.
Rocky Flats workers manipulated plutonium using lead-lined gloves that protruded from airtight glove boxes.
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An hour or so after the fire began, the bystanders saw the first puff of smoke drifting out of the building. They donned respirators and watched as the whitish cloud rolled over the buildings and south toward the Denver-Boulder Turnpike. "Boy, it made our hearts sink," remembered one employee. "We saw this smoke coming out of there, and it was really bilious...I ran for my Volkswagen and I had the window down, and I figured if [the car] was going to get crapped up, I would just get it crapped up outside and I would roll my windows up and I didn't want my golf clubs to get hot..."
The roof of the burning building was a shockingly flimsy affair composed mostly of metal, plywood and Styrofoam. Parts of it had been damaged by wind and were being held in place by concrete blocks. Firefighters poured water on the surface and maintained an around-the-clock watch. The roof grew soft from the heat but managed to hold. Finally, at 8 p.m., the blaze was brought under control.
After the fire, the Atomic Energy Commission sent a raft of investigators, including Rowland Felt, to Rocky Flats to find out what had happened. The visitors toured the two devastated buildings, but they were limited in what they could see because the electricity wasn't working and the buildings were so contaminated they could remain inside for only a few minutes at a time. To reconstruct what had happened, Felt says, they relied heavily on photographs that they snapped on their brief forays.
For weeks the investigatory board interviewed supervisors, workers, fireman and plant officials. Eventually the findings and the transcripts of those interviews were assembled into multiple volumes and made public. (Many of them can be read at the DOE's public reading room at Front Range Community College.) Perhaps the most damning of their conclusions was that Rocky Flats, the nation's sole supplier of nuclear pits, did not even meet the minimum fire standards set by the Atomic Energy Commission. There were no overhead sprinklers or fire breaks, and the heat-detection system on the briquette cans had been rendered all but worthless when the extra shielding had been installed.
Toward the end of their investigation, the board summoned several of the plant's top officials and asked them what arrangements, if any, had been made with local authorities for protecting Denver and its suburban neighbors in the event of a future disaster. The plant manager and his sidekicks admitted they had made no plans for contacting neighboring fire departments, the sheriff's department, highway patrol or hospitals. In a remarkable display of hubris, they also added that they had no intention of developing any such plan in the future because such disasters simply couldn't occur at Rocky Flats. "I don't think we belong here if we could cause that type of an accident to our surrounding people. I think that's an impossibility," opined Charles Piltingsrud, Dow's manager of health physics.
But General E.B.Giller, head of the AEC's Division of Military Applications, was less sanguine when yanked before Congress several months later. If the fire had breached the roof, he admitted, "hundreds of square miles could be involved in radiation exposure and involve cleanup at an astronomical cost as well as creating a very intense reaction by the general public..."
The 1969 fire marked the end of Rocky Flat's ability to operate with complete impunity. Scientists, reporters and congressmen began asking questions; the horrifying implications of the blaze gradually dawned on the public. Some $22 million dollars' worth of plutonium had gone up in smoke, and the fire had caused $45 million in damages, making it one of the worst industrial accidents in AEC history. But, once again, Rocky Flats officials hemmed and hawed when asked to quantify how much of the plutonium had escaped into neighboring communities. The fact was, Church lawyers later told the court, "no one knows the amount of plutonium released in the 1969 fire."
