Chapter 5

NOVEMBER 5, 1974

On the last day of October, Karen Silkwood swerved off Highway 33 to avoid clipping a cow. Her car spun around, backed off a thirteen-foot embankment, and hit a fencepost. She paid George Martin of the Martin Wrecking Service $13 to tow her back on the highway. Her white Honda Civic had a one-inch dent on the right side of the bumper. The right quarter panel was pushed in, and the right rear tail- and tag lights were smashed. Drew Stephens, who had prepared the $300 damage estimate for Whitfield Volkswagen, noted that there was no damage to the left side of the car. The point was important, because after Silkwood’s death the Oklahoma Highway Patrol would speculate that the dents in the left bumper and fender were the result of the October 31 accident.

The next day, Silkwood complained to her physician, Dr. Shields, about a sore back and a headache. She said she also felt very lethargic. In addition to the Quaaludes and Mellaril (a tranquilizer) he had given her, she had been taking Tylenol No. 3, which her dentist had prescribed and which contained codeine.

Dr. Shields suspected Karen’s lethargy was due to “overlapping” the Tylenol No. 3, Mellaril, and Quaalude. He didn’t think she had mixed the drugs on purpose as a downer, however. “Karen, leave it [the Tylenol and Mellaril] with me,” he said. “I’ll give it back later.” She handed him the prescriptions without objecting.

Silkwood spent the next three days with Donald Gummow, a nonunion Kerr-McGee worker about her own age. Gummow was in love with her, and liked her fiery, passionate personality, as he told the FBI after her death. During her three days with Gummow, Silkwood’s apartment remained unlocked. Her roommate worked the graveyard shift, midnight to eight, and had a hard time with the lock on the door, so she left the door open.

Silkwood returned to Dr. Shields on November 4. She said she was feeling better but still had a headache. Dr. Shields returned the Tylenol No. 3 and the Mellaril, and told her to take only one Quaalude before retiring. But she continued to use the Quaaludes as tranquilizers during the daytime.

Silkwood reported back to work on Tuesday, November 5, the day before the new contract negotiations were scheduled to begin. John Carver, supervisor of the laboratories, was waiting for her. Silkwood and Carver didn’t get along well, and Carver scolded her for taking three days off, allegedly without informing Kerr-McGee. He also handed her a letter of reprimand for taking prescription drugs on the job without notifying him, as K-M rules demanded. A fellow lab worker had seen Silkwood giggling and weaving while on the job. But rather than telling her to go home or reporting her directly to Carver, he had called his wife and told her to phone Carver about Silkwood and the drugs, but not to give her name.

Silkwood felt Carver’s reprimand was unjustified, part of Kerr-McGee’s pattern of harassment of her and Brewer. She toyed with the notion of filing a grievance, but dismissed the idea, since she had clearly broken AEC and K-M rules. Both Carver and the. FBI would speculate after her death that the reprimand drove her to contaminate herself with plutonium to embarrass the company.

At 1:30 P.M., she donned a smock and went to the Metallography Laboratory to catch up on paperwork. Around 2:45, Silkwood and her immediate supervisor took a break. The supervisor monitored herself as she left the work area. Her plastic shoe cover was contaminated. Both women changed shoe covers, called health physics, and waited while the technician checked their feet and the floor with an alpha counter. They were clean and took their break.

Silkwood returned to the Met Lab at 3:30 and finished labeling plutonium samples. Then she slipped into her Kerr-McGee white coveralls, taped lightweight plastic gloves to her wrists, and began to grind plutonium pellets in glove box 6. She handled the pellets with thick rubber gloves that reached from her fingertips to her shoulders. Later, Silkwood switched to boxes 3 and 4 to clean and polish the pellets ultrasonically.

At 5:30, Silkwood removed her coveralls and took another break, checking her hands and lower arms for contamination. She was clean. Fifteen minutes later she was back at glove boxes 3, 4, and 6, grinding, cleaning, and polishing. She was alone in the lab at 6:30, when she slipped out of the huge rubber gloves in box 3 and checked both hands on the monitor mounted on the box. The monitor began to click.

A lab analyst in another room called a health physics technician for her. The right sleeve and shoulder of her coveralls were contaminated forty times more than the level deemed safe by the AEC. Contamination is measured in disintegrations per minute (d/m). The AEC safe limit is 500 d/m; Silkwood, in her clothes, read 20,000 d/m.

The health physics office sent Mary Smith, a safeguards clerk, to help her, because there were no female health physics technicians on duty. Silkwood stripped in the decontamination room across the hall from the Met Lab so that Smith could check to see if her skin was contaminated, too. Smith found contamination on Karen’s left hand, right wrist and upper arm, neck, face, and hair. The highest level was on the right wrist—10,000 d/m, or twenty times over the limit declared safe by the AEC.

The health physics office took nasal smears with two cotton swabs, dried them under a heat lamp, and tested them with a low-level counter. As Dr. Abrahamson had told her three weeks earlier, a positive reading indicates plutonium probably has got into the lungs, but a negative reading doesn’t mean it hasn’t. Thus, any nasal contamination is potentially serious.

Silkwood’s reading was positive, and high for a nasal smear. The right nostril showed 150 d/m; the left, which had been blocked ever since she had broken her nose as a child, showed 9 d/m. Whenever the nasal smear was higher than 50 d/m, K-M routinely used DPTA, a chellating aerosol chemical that acts as a catalyst to combine with the soluble plutonium in the body and is excreted in the urine or feces. To be effective, DPTA has to be used within a few hours after the contamination, before the plutonium settles in bones, tissues, or organs.

No one in the health physics office gave Silkwood DPTA. She had been working with pellets of plutonium oxide—the insoluble kind. Because DPTA combines only with soluble plutonium, whatever she had in her lungs would stay there.

Silkwood showered and washed in a mixture of Clorox and Tide to remove skin contamination. After she had spent thirty minutes under the hair dryer, her skin was surveyed again. No contamination above 500 d/m.

A health physics technician labeled a urine and fecal kit with her name and K-M badge number. The AEC required collection for five days after a contamination with airborne plutonium to see how much had got into the body. Workers picked up the home testing kits in the hallway between the health physics office and the Metallography Lab. At each end of the corridor was an air lock to keep any airborne plutonium inside the plant. The hallway was heavily used. Everyone passed through it going to and from their lockers, the lunch room, and the parking lot.

The health physics office placed the Met Lab on respirator status—everyone who entered had to wear respirators just in case—while they searched for the source of the contamination. The air did not appear to be contaminated, for the air filters were not radioactive, and the monitor buzzer, which is supposed to sound when it detects airborne plutonium, hadn’t gone off. Had someone spilled something or tracked in radiation from another room?

Health physics technician Dennis Ford found two contaminated gloves in glove box 3, where Silkwood had been working. He changed the gloves and filled the ones Silkwood had used with water. They didn’t leak. How had they got contaminated? No one could tell.

Kerr-McGee never discovered how Karen Silkwood was contaminated on Tuesday, November 5, just as it never learned how she had been contaminated on July 31. John Carver told the FBI after her death: “There are many possible contamination sources in the plutonium plant. Silkwood would not be limited to having become contaminated in the area in which she worked.” He said she could have “obtained the source material” from any number of places, implying that she may have contaminated herself.

After she showered, Silkwood returned to the Met Lab, finished her paperwork, and developed quality-control film in the darkroom next door. She stayed away from the glove boxes. Shortly after 1:00 A.M., she stopped working, picked up her specimen kits, and monitored herself before leaving the women’s locker room behind the health physics office. She was clean. It had been another twelve-hour day at K-M.

“Well, it happened again,” she told Drew Stephens after work. She wasn’t terribly upset. Drew had been contaminated several times himself, and he just passed it over.