Idaho Falls Page 11

  On the afternoon of January 10, the body of the third crewman was finally delivered to the chemical plant by the flatbed semi-trailer. Despite being encased in a lead-lined cask, the packaged body was spewing out massive levels of radiation. Members of the autopsy team leaned over the cask and flushed off loose bits of flesh, clothing, and reactor debris. Then they filled the box with water. The team knew the next day's autopsy on the third body would be the most dangerous, and the most gruesome. The poor kid they were going to examine had been impaled and then lifted at terrific speed into the ceiling, where he had hung over the sizzling reactor for days before anyone could figure out how to rescue him safely. There seemed to be only one way to steel themselves for the grisly job that awaited the following morning. “We were interested in heading back to the White Horse for martinis,” Petersen admits.

  While Petersen can't recall exact threads of the conversation that occurred over drinks that night at the hotel, it's a safe bet that they speculated about the cause of the explosion, an explosion that provided them with some of the most challenging work of their careers.

  * * *

  First thing the next morning, January 11, the autopsy crew drained the lead-lined cask containing the third body and again flushed the battered remains with water. The changes of water had little effect: detectors placed five inches from the head read five hundred roentgens per hour. And the health physicists estimated that if the detector were placed on the head itself, the reading would have been fifteen hundred roentgens per hour, a massive level of radiation equal to what was coming out of the exposed reactor core. There was absolutely no way the head could be buried in a public cemetery emitting that kind of radiation—the gamma rays would blast right through a casket.

  The cask was drained and refilled with water and a heavy-duty detergent, and the body was soaked for another two hours. The autopsy team then attached a sling to the crane and then slipped the sling around the body. By raising and lowering the crane repeatedly, the crew agitated the body in the solution like a bundle of dirty clothing. The “wash cycle” didn't cleanse the body of much radiation. They would need to try something else.

  The body was raised from the box and Polaroid photographs were taken. The photos revealed that the bulk of the head had been damaged beyond recognition by the nuclear blast. The crewman's face had simply been flattened. The nose and lower jaw had been pushed back into the neck and base of the skull. And the entire top portion of the skull, along with the scalp, had been severed cleanly—“as if by a cheese knife,” the autopsy report noted—and remained attached to the head by just a thin flap of skin. The brain was exposed and severely damaged—barely recognizable as an organ that was once the center of a man's consciousness, his thoughts and emotions.

  Petersen recalls the frustrating nuclear age conundrum the team faced with the third body: “Think about it. There is an object reading fifteen hundred R an hour. What do you do with it? Just being practical about it, you recognize you simply can't put that stuff out for the garbage man or put it in a medical incinerator. You couldn't even go to a crematorium and cremate it because this would contaminate the crematorium. The stuff [radiation] doesn't go anywhere. It's just there, and you have to deal with it. It would be terrible to say to the families, ‘Here's the casket, but we're going to have to put it out in the middle of this field and have a funeral.' That was the consideration. What did you have to do to get the bodies' [radioactivity] down to where [the families] could not have open caskets but certainly no restrictions on the funerals?”

  The way Lushbaugh saw things, he really didn't have a choice. If the body was not to be consigned to a high-level radiation waste dump, extreme action had to be taken quickly. But the only avenue left open to him was one that couldn't be traversed lightly, either ethically or politically. Lushbaugh knew that what he was about to do had the potential to be misinterpreted.

  “I got a call from Dr. Lushbaugh,” recalls George Voelz, then the AEC medical director at the Testing Station. “He said one of the high radiation levels was in the head and they were going to have to do some cutting and trimming to get rid of some of that. He just called me to let me know that was going to go on and asked whether I had any problem with that. I remember when he called me, I said, ‘Gee, that's ugly.' But I said, ‘If that's the only way we can get those levels down, you'll have to do that.'”

  After having discussed over the telephone the general course of action with Voelz, Lushbaugh got back into his bulky anticontamination gear and re-entered the chemical plant bay. He and his team grabbed the custom-made autopsy tools and approached the lead box. One of the team members slipped a wire noose attached to a ten-foot-long pipe over the head of the body inside the cask. Lushbaugh had noticed that the Polaroids showed several fractures in the neck, and he positioned the remains of the head to expose those breaks. Leaning over the body with a long-handled saw—a brittle, inch-and-half-wide hacksaw blade—Lushbaugh severed the head from the body with, as the autopsy report puts it, a “rapid, sharp dissection.” The head, dangling from the noose, was raised from the cask and carried to what the autopsy report calls a “lead cave,” twenty feet away.

  The headless body was then raised by the crane, and the team used some of the long-handled blades and hooks to rip off the shredded clothes that still clung to the body. The body was then winched to an empty sink ten feet away, where a radiation survey was conducted using high-level detectors. The team quickly realized that cutting off the head hadn't reduced the radiation nearly enough: some parts of the body were still giving off lethal levels of radiation. And the absence of clothes revealed the extent of the nuclear injuries.

  The left leg had been almost completely severed from the body by a shearing force that had destroyed the left hip joint and pelvis. The right leg hadn't fared much better. Just eight inches of skin held it to the body. Ten feet of intestines protruded from a massive wound to the abdomen. The buttocks had been shredded. Both wrists were partially torn away, and the hands, colored dark blue, dangled by tendons. And the body's architecture had been completely rearranged. The upper half of the torso was twisted one hundred eighty degrees. The right shoulder was where the left should have been, and the left was where the right once was. The entire body—what was left of it—was embedded with radioactive particles.

  The autopsy team found a sheet of quarter-inch-thick lead and hung it from the crane. They maneuvered the lead shield in front of the sink into which the body had been placed after the head was removed. Hiding behind the shield, Lushbaugh and an assistant studied the body closely, then ducked out from behind the lead partition to make quick cuts with an electric Stryker autopsy saw. Both the right and left legs and both hands were severed from the body. As each extremity came free, it was snared and carried, hanging from the end of a long pole, to the lead cave. What was left in the sink was then surveyed once again for radiation. The levels were no longer lethal, but they weren't low either. Yet if the crewman's family was going to get any of the remains back for burial, there simply couldn't be any more cutting. The body was rinsed a second time with detergent, then wrapped in plastic and put in the freezer with the two other bodies.

  On January 12, the flesh, bones, head, limbs, and organs cut from the three servicemen were put in a fifty-five-gallon drum, which was then lowered into a lead-shielded box. The box was lifted onto the back of a semi-trailer and driven to an isolated section of the vast Testing Station grounds. The box was dumped into a deep slit trench, and a bulldozer pushed fallow desert dirt over it. An indecorous end to a substantial physical portion of the three men killed in the SL-1 explosion. The body parts had been designated high-level nuclear waste, subject to federal disposal regulations, and so joined, in sealed disposal units, the rest of the highly contaminated debris being generated by the new atomic age.

  The autopsy team flew back to New Mexico on January 13 with tissue samples, notes on the locations of the three men's wounds, and a renewed respect for the power of t
he atom. Understandably, the families of the three crewmen were not made privy to the details of the autopsy. Nor was the public. The autopsy report, when completed, was marked “Official Use Only” and was never released to the public. But within days of the medical team's departure, rumors began to circulate among the four thousand Testing Station workers, rumors that petrified into legends in the nuclear world. The SL-1 explosion was so unprecedented, and the details surrounding it so bizarre, that gossip was only natural. Several months after the autopsies, the rumors prompted Donald Seifert of the local chapter of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union to write a letter calling for a congressional investigation into the SL-1 incident. He took particular exception to the handling of the bodies: “Medical butchers removed glands, organs, blood and what have you for study purposes . . . Highly radioactive parts of the bodies were removed; heads, arms and what have you were removed and unceremoniously buried in the hot waste dump at the site.”

  Members of the autopsy team didn't like being called butchers. They said they had been charged with lowering the radioactivity of the bodies so the families could hold relatively normal burials. Faced with the level of lethal gamma rays the bodies were throwing out, they didn't have any other recourse but to use snares, hooks, and hacksaw blades.

  Before his death in the early 1980s, army Colonel Savino Cavender, one of the three physicians on the autopsy team, tried to explain what the team faced: “Lushbaugh and I treated that individual [the third crewman] with all the respect in the world, and tried to save as much tissue as we could. We literally would have had to skin everything—all the skin off—because he had radioactive particles in so . . . he was so hot. It was a very difficult decision for Dr. Lushbaugh doing the autopsy, there's no doubt about it.”

  Petersen says that those who had not seen the bodies lying in the chemical plant's steel sinks simply could not grasp the destructive force of the nuclear blast. The third crewman, for example, had been squatting over a heavy bell housing on top of the reactor when the explosion occurred. The steel cap and parts of a control rod, followed by viciously radioactive particles, blew clear through the victim.

  “The bell housing pinned him,” he says. “It came up through his groin. I found one testis up in the armpit. Now that gives you an idea about the kind of trauma these guys suffered in the initial explosion.”

  The team left the site believing they had done a difficult job as well as could be expected. The bodies, if extensive precautions were taken, could be buried under headstones without taking anyone else with them. Furthermore, the charts detailing the blast injuries provided valuable clues about what had transpired on the night of January 3. And the team left with two surprises: one a medical curiosity, the other of more import.

  The first oddity, says Petersen, involved how the bodies decomposed—or, more accurately, didn't decompose: “The thing we were worried about, particularly with the third individual, was that it was very hot up there in the ceiling, and we were afraid he was spoiling. A body left to its own devices deteriorates pretty rapidly. It turned out this was not the case. He wasn't spoiling at all. All these guys had tissue that looked like biopsy specimens. The radiation field was so high and so intense, coupled with the initial dose, the bodies were essentially radiation sterilized and would have been perfectly OK at room temperature.”

  The second surprise was of even more importance, and it would lead investigators down a strange path as they sought to find a reason for the explosion. During the initial survey of the accident scene, the three crewmen had been misidentified. None of them was who rescuers thought they were. “They were going to end up burying them in the wrong place,” Lushbaugh said years later.

  The second body recovered from SL-1, the one lying next to the reactor, had been originally identified as Dick Legg. But the body, the doctors found, bore two tattoos. One was a red heart. The other was a flowery marking with the name “Jack” in the middle. The body was also five feet ten inches tall, a height Legg had reached only in his dreams. The body was Jack Byrnes's. The discovery meant that the first man rescued from near the reactor door, thought by Ed Vallario to be Byrnes, was either Legg or McKinley. Both men were a diminutive five feet six inches. But the first man dragged out of the reactor and taken to the chemical plant was only one hundred fifteen pounds. A tiny guy, and no one had ever called Legg that. It had to have been McKinley, the hapless trainee. That fact was confirmed when the third body was finally coaxed from the reactor ceiling and readied for autopsy. The body was stocky—one hundred sixty pounds—a weight that matched Legg's. And since Legg was the only sailor among the three, the tattoos on the third body were a dead giveaway. On the right shoulder was the letter “C,” followed by the drawing of a bumblebee: SeaBee, the navy's construction battalions. The other tattoo, etched on the inside of the left bicep, was classic sailor trash, one of those ideas that must have seemed good at the time: an eight-inch-tall dancing girl.

  The mix-up, in retrospect, was understandable. The rescuers were in the reactor for just a minute or two, their face masks were fogged up, and the bodies were hustled away from the reactor quickly and wrapped in blankets of wool and lead. Moreover, only a few among the rescue and recovery workers who entered the reactor had ever met any of the crew members. And the autopsy team painstakingly detailed that the bodies had been severely damaged by the blast. The men, in death, hadn't looked anything like they had in life.

  The discovery of the misidentification had implications beyond just tying up loose ends—and making sure they were buried in the right plots. In the coming months, Lushbaugh and his team would use the positions in which the men had been found and the location of their injuries to reconstruct where they were and what they had been doing at the time of the explosion. The answers would add further twists to an already bizarre story.

  Dr. George Voelz remembers the events that took place the day the autopsy team left: “We had a mortician from Idaho Falls come out to the site. This was after the autopsies had been done. We wanted him to come out and see what had been done and make sure that someone in the mortician line looked over what we had done. I was with him. We went out to the decontamination room at the chemical processing plant. There really wasn't any way they could embalm the bodies. He had what he called drying powder, and he suggested that in wrapping up the bodies—at least for the third individual—we just put a layer of drying powder around and then wrap the body.”

  The mortician had arrived at the chemical plant with three sixteen-gauge steel Batesville MonoSeal caskets, first-class commercial boxes that could be hermetically sealed. The mortician had spent days rounding up the unusual coffins after being told by site officials that it was essential they be constructed of steel and not leak air. That morning, eight volunteers donned the same kind of protective gear the autopsy team wore, pulled the remains of the servicemen from the refrigerated boxes, and began burial preparations as complex as any performed by ancient Egyptian embalmers. One by one, the corpses were wrapped in bolts of cotton spread thickly with the special drying powder, which may have dried the bodies' fluids but did nothing to preserve the flesh. The radiation had completed that task already; there was no bacteria left in the bodies to complete the cycle of life, death, and decay.

  Next came layers of ubiquitous plastic sheeting. Then the real work began. The volunteers labored for ten hours to cut, bend, and form twenty-five hundred pounds of lead sheets around the bodies. The body of McKinley was wrapped in a lead sheet one-eighth of an inch thick, with extra pieces around his head to reinforce the spot where a piece of radioactive metal had slashed his skull. The “leaded package,” as an AEC casualty report called the encased body, was then banded by metal strips and placed inside the special coffin in the bay with the crane. Extra strips of lead were laid in the coffin to further reduce radiation levels. Before the men closed and sealed the coffin's lid, they slipped two signs inside. One was made of cardboard and declared “Caution: High Radiation Area,” and the
other, made of plastic, warned “Caution: Radioactive Materials.” The signs, while strange mementos for McKinley to take with him, were also chilling symbols of the macabre side of the atomic age he had unwittingly helped to usher in. The casket containing McKinley's body was then lowered and closed into a specially constructed lead vault.

  The bodies of Brynes and Legg underwent the same meticulous preparations. Extra strips of lead were added to Byrnes's coffin around the head, and the “package,” already wrapped in lead and banded by steel, had another eighth-inch-thick lead sheet placed atop it before the lid was closed. The third “package,” the torso of Legg, considerably smaller than the other two, was wrapped with three-quarter-inch-thick lead. Both men also went to their graves accompanied by yellow-and-black radiation warning signs.