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| | | published Wednesday, December 02, 2009 | 1423 Views :: 0 Comments | |  |
By Nadia Pflaum
A week ago, Sen. Claire McCaskill's Westport office received a visit fromMaurice Copeland and Ivory Mae Thomas, retired employees of theHoneywell-operated Kansas City Plant, along with representatives from PeaceWorks KC and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The visit came one week after The Pitchpublished this feature story on former Honeywell workers suffering from job-related illnesses.
The activists received an audience with McCaskill's aides, not the senator herself. They asked that McCaskill consider calling for a federal investigation into worker safety issues and contamination at the Honeywell site, located in south Kansas City on Bannister Road. The plant manufactures non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons under contract with the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Services Administration.
According to Terrie Barrie with the Alliance of Nuclear Worker Advocacy Groups, "We are asking that the Department of Labor take the burden of proof off the claimants. At this point in time, a claimant needs to prove that if he is sick from a lung condition, for example, he has to prove where he got it, what time he got it, that type of thing ... if we had the documentation to prove these things, the government wouldn't need a program (like the EEIOCP)." Barrie says her group also wants the government to review the EEIOCP's denied claims.
"We also asked that the Plant be completely cleaned up and noted that this year the KC Plant received no funds for this, whereas other sites received millions in stimulus money for cleanup this year," writes Ann Suellentrop of the Physicians for Social Responsibility in an e-mail to The Pitch. "For example, Los Alamos received $210 million, not to mention the jobs created."
Suellentrop says that her group has already met with Kansas Senators Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, who both indicated that they are also interested in helping the Kansas City plant's former workers.
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