Idaho Falls Page 8
In the end, they were left with no choice. The crew was missing. The reactor was unguided. The building in front of them was leaking dangerous gas. Moshberger and two health physicists slipped on their respirator masks again and trundled back through the eerily quiet, deserted support building. They entered the control room and charged up the covered stairway. They didn't stop this time, even as the reading on their detector soared.
Gaining the top of the stairway, Moshberger stuck his head through the doorless entrance and observed the reactor room's operating floor. The respirator mask hampered his peripheral vision. But, as he later told Lamprecht, what he saw in that one quick scan was more than enough. The room was dim, humid, and awash in the water that should have been cooling the reactor. Small river rocks and metal punchings about the size of hockey pucks, once buried beneath the floor to shield the reactor vessel, were strewn around the circular room. On the finely crafted reactor top—a massive thing studded with bolts and housings—ports were blown open, exposing the hot core.
What Moshberger glimpsed was a deadly tableau of twisted metal. Violent forces—atomic forces—had rocked the room. And those forces were still at play. At the doorway to the reactor room, the needle on the detector was holding steady at its maximum reading. There was no sign of the crew. Moshberger turned away from a scene that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
Lamprecht still remembers the assistant chief's cryptic report to the men outside. “When he got back down he just said, ‘We have a problem here.'”
The exposed reactor top following the explosion. Metal punchings and other debris are visible in the foreground.
Even before Moshberger ascended the stairs, Ed Vallario had received a phone call at his home in Idaho Falls, routed through central dispatch, that warned him there was some kind of trouble at SL-1. Vallario was the health physicist for the experimental reactor, charged with safeguarding the men who trained and worked there. Vallario later said he could hear his caller getting updates from firefighters even as they spoke, and the situation in the reactor's courtyard was obviously hectic. Vallario felt a sick jolt of adrenaline shoot through his body as he got the news: SL-1 heat alarms were blaring, high radiation had been detected, and the crew was missing. By then, duty logs had been checked, and Vallario was informed that Dick Legg, Jack Byrnes, and Richard McKinley had been manning the reactor. Vallario knew Legg and Byrnes and had met McKinley. He liked them well enough, though he didn't interact with them socially. They were a few years younger than he and a bit less educated perhaps, but they were family men, well traveled, and bright enough to be chosen for the military reactor program. Most important, they were his charges; he was responsible for their safety. And anyone who knew Vallario knew that he was fiercely loyal.
* * *
Ed Vallario's son doesn't know what his father was doing that night, before the SL-1 reactor accident took his measure. Raised on stickball, Mozart, and urban energy, Vallario seemingly had little in common with the western landscape and the locals. Vallario had an edge, a certain street quickness in his step. The Idahoans moved through life more slowly and quietly. Brooklyn buildings kept nature at bay where Vallario grew up; Idahoans' lives were defined by the changing of seasons. Vallario played classical music on piano, an instrument he learned from his immigrant father, a professor of music; folks in Idaho Falls listened to Patsy Cline or Bob Wills, if they gave much thought to music at all.
“You know, it was kind of like ‘City Kid Gone West,'” says the youngest of Vallario's two sons, Robert, who was four years old on that January night. “He was a city slicker.”
But Ed Vallario also had an unquenchable curiosity about life. He later told his son that he'd found the valley's rhythms and customs interesting. “He had some friends who took him hunting,” recalls Robert, “and I remember he told me he kind of got lost one day out in the hills. For several hours he followed the smoke from the fire and finally showed up in camp. The guys were pretty worried about him. In Idaho, he said, unlike some rugged country, one hill looks pretty much the same as the next. There aren't any distinguishing landmarks. Tumbleweed looks like tumbleweed, no matter what hill you're standing on.”
If tumbleweed was foreign to Vallario, so too was the slide-rule view of life shared by many of the engineers and scientists he worked with in Idaho. “He was a romanticist,” Robert says. “He was no nerdy engineer. He was in the midst of a community of engineers, but engineering was not his background.”
After graduating from Brooklyn College, Vallario's first real job was dressing the windows of a large New York City department store. The work appealed to his sensibilities. He was an accomplished artist. He collected art—mostly commercial sketches—and scoured auction houses for antique furniture. His son remembers helping load heavy pieces of furniture into the back of Vallario's open-top Thunderbird. Searching for a career, Ed Vallario stumbled onto the then emerging field of health physics. Jobs were plentiful in the budding nuclear industry. Specialized degrees weren't required. Frontiers were being breached, rules written on the spot. It was a challenge that appealed to Vallario's quick, creative mind. He soon began working for Connecticut-based Combustion Engineering Inc. When the firm won the contract in December 1958 to take over the day-to-day operation of the SL-1 reactor from its designer, Argonne National Laboratory, the quintessential city boy decided to move west. Vallario spent the next two years setting up safety guidelines, working out emergency plans, and teaching young servicemen about the unfriendly health consequences of radiation exposure.
* * *
Minutes after Vallario received the emergency call on January 3, another health physicist, Syd Cohen, picked him up in a government Studebaker. The two then drove to the home of Paul Duckworth, the SL-1 supervisor for Combustion Engineering. Soon, the three were rocketing west across undulating Highway 20. At some point, Vallario turned to the other men and told them there weren't many options once they got to the reactor, and both Cohen and Duckworth agreed: “When we arrived at the plant site,” Vallario later told investigators, “everyone was in agreement with me that we would attempt to go in there and find the men, regardless of the fact we had notice of high radiation levels.”
As they approached the compound, the men found a makeshift checkpoint set up at the intersection of Highway 20—the only public highway to cut through the classified Testing Station—and Fillmore Avenue, a half-mile-long road with an oddly suburban-sounding name that headed north to the SL-1 reactor building. By then, a Class I disaster signal was being broadcast over the National Reactor Testing Station's radio networks, and buses carrying workers to the midnight shift at the various reactors on the site were being sent back to Idaho Falls. Simultaneously, top bureaucrats, generals, and admirals in Washington, DC, the men responsible for directing the country's burgeoning atomic industry, were being roused from their sleep with news that something bizarre was happening at a small, obscure reactor in Idaho.
While Moshberger and the two health physicists were in the SL-1 building, a security lieutenant, armed with a detector, noticed that radiation levels were escalating near a car by the compound's guardhouse. Those waiting for the entry team's return donned respirators, and when the men emerged from the building, all personnel relocated to the checkpoint that had been hastily set up. When Vallario and Duckworth got out of their car at the checkpoint, they were greeted with the news that the radiation detectors of the first men who had climbed the stairs to the reactor floor had “gone off-scale.” Vallario's resolve didn't waver.
Vallario and Duckworth, who must already have grasped that the accident was going to devastate them professionally, grabbed high-level radiation detectors and film badges that would record their own exposures. The two men were then driven in a security car to the now deserted gravel yard encircling the reactor. As the car sped back to safety, each man donned a Scott Air-Pak respirator from the pile that had been left lying along the road. The men didn't take the time to don anticonta
mination suits or even gloves.
At about 10:35 P.M., Vallario and Duckworth barreled through the innocuous-looking administration building and made their way down the long hallway that led to the control room and the stairs that accessed the mangled reactor. Vallario would later remember those moments.
“As I was going up the stairs, I had the instruments in front of me, and as I got to the mid-landing of the stairs to the reactor, I heard a moaning. The plant was extremely still. There was no noise except for this moaning. I looked into the operating floor and observed Jack Byrnes near the motor-control panel . . . He was moaning, and he was moving. The top part of his body was twisting in an attempt to get closer to the motor-control panel. I have no idea whether or not he was aware of what he was doing, whether he was conscious. It may have been just reflex to get away from something.”
The two men also saw another body—they figured it was Dick Legg—lying next to one of the concrete shields that had been moved away from the top of the reactor in preparation for the night's maintenance work. He appeared to be dead, but the two didn't have the time to verify; the needles on their radiation detectors hadn't budged from maximum levels, and they knew they'd have to come back with help to retrieve Byrnes. There was no sign of the third crew member, the trainee Richard McKinley.
“The two of us weren't sufficient to rescue Byrnes,” Vallario said. “He looked like he had lost a considerable amount of blood. I immediately shouted to Duckworth, ‘Let's go get some help.'”
The men ran down the stairs and out into the yard to the guardhouse, where a small group of health physicists had gathered after following them to the building. Even though they'd been warned about the high radiation levels, Vallario and Duckworth were shocked at how quickly their detectors had pegged at five hundred roentgens per hour. Vallario and other experts later estimated the true level of radiation in the center of the reactor operating room was at least one thousand roentgens per hour, perhaps even fifteen hundred, a level that would be fatal after a mere twenty minutes of exposure and that would do nasty damage to internal organs long before that.
Vallario and Duckworth's training told them that the injured man had been in the intense gamma radiation field for far too long—more than an hour and a half. Technically he was a dead man, even if he was still breathing. They also knew that they had just been exposed to the same dangerous waves of penetrating gamma and hard beta radiation that were attacking Byrnes. They hadn't worn anticontamination suits, but it hardly mattered; that kind of radiation would have passed right through the coveralls. The men's respirators were all that had kept them from breathing in alpha and beta radiation, essentially microscopic time bombs. Unlike gamma rays, alpha radiation can be blocked by a sheet of paper or even skin. Beta radiation can cause external burns but doesn't have great penetrating power. But inhaled into the lungs, alpha and beta particles are deadly, wreaking havoc on cells, bone, and blood.
All things considered, entering SL-1 again wasn't wise. Vallario and Duckworth might have made quick calculations in their heads—exposure is all about time and distance—and decided that a minute or two more in the reactor wouldn't make much of a difference. But in reality, there was no choice to make: they'd made a pact in the Studebaker as they rushed across the desert. One of the young crewmen, a man they were responsible for, was still breathing. Standing in subzero temperatures, Vallario and Duckworth knew they had to go back in. Within five minutes, they had gathered three volunteers from the group of health physicists, ran through the administration building grabbing a stowed stretcher along the way, and climbed the enclosed stairway. They did it blindly, Vallario remembered.
“We had extreme difficulty with the Scott Air-Pack units. Visibility was almost zero. All of us were more or less groping our way up the stairs. The temperature difference between outside and inside was so great that it fogged up the masks completely.”
As Vallario stepped through the doorway of the reactor room and moved toward the bleeding man closest to the door, he could see that the young soldier was still alive despite the toxic environment and a horrific head wound.
“He was moaning,” Vallario said. “He was not flat on the floor but seemed somewhat raised on one side with his arms, just a heaving, moaning sort of thing. If I recollect, his face was looking toward the ceiling—an entirely different position than he was in initially.”
As the men hefted the crewman and carried him to the waiting stretcher, Duckworth's respirator stopped working. Fighting back a wave of panic, he made a frantic dash down the enclosed stairway, desperately trying to outdistance the alpha and beta radiation. But his lungs ran out of air, forcing him to lift his mask and inhale. With that breath, he invited a host of poison into his body; it would be years before he'd know what kind of damage it would do.
Another rescuer departed the scene soon after Duckworth to summon an ambulance. Vallario, after dashing across the twisted reactor top to confirm the second crewman was indeed dead, skittered over the debris and joined the remaining two rescuers. The three men lifted the stretcher and began to move toward the opposite side of the circular room, where an open stairway offered the promise of an easier exit. But halfway across the room, on the hottest spot on the reactor room floor, Vallario's respirator also stopped functioning.
The health physicist understood immediately the consequences. He was standing in an effluvium of gamma, alpha, and beta radiation, radioactive gas, and a dozen other radioactive by-products of the fission process. He was in nuclear hell, where enriched uranium atoms—each and every one of them an assassin—ran rampant.
Vallario's son Robert recalls his father's account of what happened next. “He said, ‘I went to take a breath and it was like there was no more oxygen in the tank. There was absolutely nothing to do but take the mask off and take a breath of everything that was in the reactor containment. My best guess was to take one large breath and not to keep breathing. I basically exhaled, took the mask off, took a horrendous breath, and I did the best I could to get the hell out of there on one breath.'”
With the help of his two colleagues, Vallario, his lungs straining, hoisted the stretcher and moved quickly toward the far emergency exit. Upon reaching it, the three found the door had been blocked on the other side by machinery, preventing them from maneuvering the stretcher down the stairs. They turned, stumbled over the debris scattered across the floor, and with desperation overtaking them, bolted back to the enclosed stairway. Vallario felt as if his chest was going to burst as he helped navigate the stretcher down the stairs.
Breaking out of the stairway and into the control room, which was also contaminated, Vallario exhaled explosively and then drew in a ragged breath. He knew, though, that he couldn't expel the alpha and beta particles he'd just taken in. And then there were the penetrating gamma rays—the rays that can be stopped only by lead—that had bombarded his skin during his two forays onto the reactor operating floor.
Vallario later told investigators he had done some mental math on radiation levels in the reactor and the time it would take to get Byrnes out. He understood the risk, he said matter-of-factly, and he felt it was worth taking. The thought of abandoning the crewman never once crossed his mind. Said Vallario, “I felt he was alive, and it was necessary to go in and get him. This was essentially the thing to do.”
“He often compared it to being like a fireman going into a burning building,” says Vallario's fourth wife, Bette, herself a health physicist. “He felt like it was his job, his responsibility. He was focusing on the men inside.” Vallario's son, a bit more crudely but with no less pride, says of his dad: “He always had big balls.”
Once Vallario and the other rescuers broke out into the frigid air, they hurried the stretcher to a Dodge panel truck. One of the rescuers hopped into the driver's seat and popped the clutch, spraying gravel in the yard. A few hundred yards down Fillmore Avenue, the truck was met by a Pontiac ambulance that had come up the road from nearby Highway 20. The stretcher wa
s transferred to the back of the ambulance and an on-call site nurse climbed in beside Byrnes. Helen Leisen, clad in a traditional white nurse's dress and shoes, leaned close to the soldier. She thought she heard a breath, ragged and shallow. She conceded later it may have been the soldier's last one. As the ambulance made a U-turn and approached the highway, Leisen slipped a respirator over Byrnes's mouth. He looked small, frail, and pale, soaked from the water that had sprayed from the reactor core. The right side of his face was destroyed.
As the ambulance sped down Fillmore Avenue, C. Wayne Bills, the deputy director of health and safety at the Testing Station, was just arriving at the checkpoint. The nuclear veteran and father of three was in choir practice that Tuesday night when a telephone call came from the site's command center. Bills immediately left the church and picked up an on-call AEC doctor, John Spickard, before heading east on Highway 20, flogging his ungainly government-issued Studebaker to its topmost speed. As the ambulance carrying Byrnes approached the checkpoint, Bills, who had just arrived, got out of his car and held up one hand to stop it. His other hand held a high-level radiation detector.