Hello,
everyone! Are you ready for another Tuesday Timeline special?
Today
is the thirteenth of November, and I'll admit that I had a bit of
trouble selecting a topic. Of all the possible topics I could have
chosen, many of them were ones that I had already featured, or ones
that I weren't really interested in. There are also some instances
in which for some of the topics, I couldn't do them justice in a blog
entry.
So,
I ended up getting a little bit creative, choosing a subject that I
wasn't familiar with, and found one that was interesting, yet tragic.
I'll
get into why later on.
Firstly,
why don't we begin by wishing the following famous people a happy
birthday. Celebrating a birthday today are Tom Atkins, Daniel Pilon,
David Green, Mel Stottlemyre, John Hammond, Jay Sigel, Timmy Thomas,
Joe Mantegna, Terry Reid, Mary Lou Metzger, Frances Conroy, Tracy
Scoggins, Chris Noth, Whoopi Goldberg, Ginger Alden, Rex Linn,
Stephen Baxter, Caroline Goodall, Neil Flynn, Vinny Testaverde, Jimmy
Kimmel, Steve Zahn, Noah Hathaway, Ari Hoenig, Chanel Cole, Nikolai
Fraiture (The Strokes), Monique Coleman, and Austin Williams.
And,
for historical events on November 13, we have the following...
1002
– The St. Brice's Day Massacre takes place in England
1160
– The wedding of Louis VII of France and Adele of Champagne
1841
– James Braid observes a demonstration of animal
magnetism,
which leads to his study of what would later be called “hypnotism”
1864
– The new constitution of Greece is adopted
1887
– Bloody Sunday clashes in London
1901
– The 1901 Caister Lifeboat Disaster
1916
– Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes is expelled from the Labor
Party over his support for conscription
1918
– Allied troops occupy Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire capital
1927
– The Holland Tunnel opens to traffic, making it the first Hudson
River vehicle tunnel linking New Jersey and New York
1941
– HMS Ark Royal is torpedoed by U-81, sinking the next day
1947
– Soviet Union completes the development of the AK-47
1950
– General Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, them president of Venezuela is
assassinated in Caracas
1956
– The United States Supreme Court declares Alabama laws requiring
segregation to be illegal, which puts an end to the Montgomery Bus
Boycott
1965
– SS Yarmouth Castle burns and sinks off the coast of Nassau,
killing 90 people
1969
– Thousands of protesters against the Vietnam War stage the “March
Against Death” in Washington D.C.
1970
– A cyclone strikes the Ganges Delta region in Pakistan, killing an
estimated half a million people...the worst natural disaster of the
20th
century
1982
– The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington D.C.
1985
– The eruption of Nevado del Ruiz melts a nearby glacier which
causes a volcanic mudslide that buries the entire town of Armero,
Colombia
1988
– Ethiopian born law student Mulugeta Seraw is beaten to death in
Portland, Oregon by Neo-Nazi group East Side White Pride
1990
– Aramoana Massacre takes place in New Zealand in which David Gray
kills thirteen
2001
– United States President George W. Bush signs executive order
allowing military tribunals against foreigners suspected of planning
terrorist attacks, or being connected to any terrorist attacks
against the United States
2002
– Oil tanker Prestige
sinks off the Galacian coast which causes a huge oil spill
2004
– Russell Tyrone Jones – otherwise known by his stage name Ol'
Dirty Bastard – dies of a drug overdose two days before his
thirty-sixth birthday
2005
– Wrestling star Eddie Guerrero dies at the age of 38 in
Minneapolis, Minnesota
For today's look back through
time, we're going back in time almost 40 years.
November
13, 1974.
On November 13, 1974, a woman,
just twenty-eight years old, was on her way to meet with a man named
David Burnham, then a journalist for the New York Times. Steve
Wodka, an official of the woman's union national office was also
scheduled to be present at the meeting. The meeting was set to take
place in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She had left a union meeting at a
cafe, armed with a bundle of documents and a binder. Whatever the
meeting was going to be about, it had to be something
explosive...something that would make the front page of every
newspaper in the country.
Tragically, Karen Silkwood
never made it to that meeting.
Her body was found inside of
her car later that evening, after the car had veered off the side of
the road and into a culvert. She was pronounced dead on the scene.
What followed were suspicions of foul play, as well as one of the
biggest workplace scandals involving health and safety violations,
concluding with a huge lawsuit.
But, why don't we start at the
very beginning?
I'm going to introduce you to
the late Karen Silkwood. Her picture is above. Quite the beautiful
young woman, wasn't she? She was born on February 19, 1946, which
would make her 66 years old today had she lived. She was born in
Longview, Texas, the daughter of Merle and William Silkwood, and when
she was young, her family moved to Nederland, Texas, where she was
raised. In 1965, she had gotten married to William Meadows and had
three children with him, but the marriage would end seven years
later, in 1972. 1972 would end up being a rather memorable year for
Silkwood. She moved to Oklahoma City, and took on the job that would
be the starting point of what would become her worst nightmare.
1972 was the year that Karen
Silkwood began working at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication
Site just outside of Crescent, Oklahoma where her job was to
manufacture plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods. Shortly
after being hired, she joined the local Oil, Chemical & Atomic
Workers Union, and actively took part in a worker's strike at the
plant. Once the strike was over, Silkwood was elected to the union's
bargaining committee, making history as the first female elected to
the position since the plant opened.
One of her main duties that
Karen held as part of that position was to investigate any and all
health and safety issues within the plant. It didn't take long for
Silkwood to find all sorts of violations within the company,
including exposing workers to contaminated substances, workers using
faulty or damaged respiratory equipment, and improper storage of
samples. She also had the belief that the lack of adequate shower
facilities could cause a negative impact on the health of its
employees, putting them at risk of contamination.
In the summer of 1974, Silkwood
testified to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about having been
contaminated, alleging that the safety standards had been slipping
due to an increase in the production speed. Prior to that, the Oil,
Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union had come to the conclusion that
the plant had been manipulating product inspection records, had been
manufacturing faulty fuel rods, and risked employee safety, and was
threatening to file charges against the company.
Just a few months later, on
November 5, 1974, a frightening event took place. On that day,
Silkwood was performing a routine self-check and was alarmed to
realize that she had 400 times the allowed limit for plutonium
contamination inside her body! She underwent immediate
decontamination at the plant, and when she went back home, she was
given a testing kit so that she could collect bodily fluids for
further tests. Tests done at the facility proved that there was
plutonium present on the surfaces that she touched with the gloves
that she had been using, but there were no holes inside the gloves.
The only conclusion that could be made was that the contamination had
come from a source outside of the glovebox.
The next day, she tested
positive for contamination again, despite the fact that her duties
only involved filing paperwork, and was given a more intense
decontamination. The next day after that, she entered the plant and
once more tested positive for contamination. This time, the
contamination was so severe, she was actually expelling traces of
plutonium from her breath. A team of health physicists accompanied
her back home where they discovered traces of plutonium in her
refrigerator and bathroom. The entire house was stripped of its
furnishings and decontaminated, some of Silkwood's belongings having
to be completely destroyed, and Silkwood, her partner Drew Stephens,
and her housemate were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for
further tests.
All the while, the question of
how Silkwood ended up becoming contaminated between November 5 and 7,
1974 was still lingering. Silkwood did offer a possible explanation
for the traces found in her bathroom on the morning of November 7, as
she believed that it may have come from her accidentally spilling the
urine sample that she had collected the day before. The tests also
showed that the samples from her home had a higher level on
concentration than the samples taken at Los Alamos.
The only conclusion that
Silkwood could draw was that she had gotten contaminated at the
plant. But she wasn't prepared for the statement that Kerr-McGee had
issued, claiming that she had made herself sick on purpose to portray
the company in a negative light. It was an allegation that Silkwood
would not accept.
Over the next few days,
Silkwood compiled a bunch of documentation that included company
papers to support her claims. And part of the reason why she called
the reporter from the New York Times was because she was ready to go
public with her claims in regards to her own theories as to how she
really ended up contaminated.
The meeting was scheduled to
take place November 13. She never made it.
Upon examination of her body,
the police report had stated that Silkwood had fallen asleep at the
wheel, and a state trooper had remembered seeing a couple of
sedatives inside the car, as well as some marijuana. An autopsy on
her body later proved that she had traces of the sedatives inside her
bloodstream at the time of her death...at least twice the recommended
dosage.
Still, the crash site was
suspicious enough for people to speculate about how the accident
really happened. It was speculated that Silkwood's car was forced
off the road in an attempt to keep her from talking. Skid marks from
Silkwood's car were also present on the road, which suggested that
she was trying to stay on the road after she was rammed from behind.
Perhaps the most glaring piece
of evidence that suggested that Silkwood's death was no accident was
the fact that the documents that she had reportedly taken with her in
the car were nowhere in sight, and according to Silkwood's family,
she had received several threatening and menacing calls in the days
leading up to the accident.
Silkwood's organs were examined
by AEC and the State Medical Examiner, and the findings showed high
levels of radiation in her lungs and gastrointestinal system. Her
death inspired a lot of public suspicions, which in turn lead to a
police investigation into the plant. The National Public Radio
reported that as much as sixty-six pounds of plutonium had been
misplaced or had gone missing at the plant.
The ultimate result ended with
the closure of the Cimarron plant one year later, in 1975. Almost
twenty years later, the Department of Energy had declared the plant
decommissioned and decontaminated.
The epilogue of this story is
this. Silkwood's family eventually launched a lawsuit against
Kerr-McGee for negligence on behalf of her estate. The jury
eventually rendered a verdict of over half a million dollars in
damages, and ten million dollars in punitive damages. The settlement
was appealed, which reduced the monies awarded to just five thousand,
and completely voided the punitive damages. It wouldn't be until
1984 that the decision was reversed, and Kerr-McGee settled out of
court for $1,380,000, the whole time maintaining that they had done
nothing wrong.
In the end though, a
whistleblower ended up losing her life...all in the name of ensuring
that everyone that she was working with was entitled to a safe
workplace. Regardless of your opinions on the case, you have to
admit that the case of Karen Silkwood had opened up the eyes of many
people, and exposed a company's shortcomings in the process.
If you want to learn more about
this case, there's a couple of sources that you can look into. In
1983, a movie adaptation was released entitled “Silkwood”, which
starred Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood. The film also starred Cher
and Kurt Russell. I'd definitely watch this movie, as Streep's
performance is outstanding.
Or, if you want a more in-depth
look, check out Richard L. Rashke's book, The Killing of Karen
Silkwood.
And that's what happened on
November 13, 1974.
Thank you for this...
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