CALLISON: And when you say you were touching things you should never have been touching --

ORICK: Right.

CALLISON: -- do you have any idea what kind of materials?

ORICK: I have some idea at this point; at that time, I did not know. But at this point, I have found out some of the identities of some of the materials, which includes PCBs, radioactive, a lot of materials from other sites like Hanford, Rocky Flats, different sites across the country that were shipped in here. Maybe they had had analysis run on them or they had just come in and maybe the containers had ruptured or they were dirty or they'd be spilled over. And my instructions were, as a clerk, to go get those samples, clean them up, repackage if necessary.

I was sent upstairs to sampling where I would bring the materials downstairs. They may have been broken, dirty, spilled over, no IDs on them whatsoever, carry them downstairs and put them on a large conference table, which is where I had my desk and ate my lunch. And I would clean and repackage and carry them, I would pick them up and gather them up next to my body and carry them. And I would write a sample number on them for ID purposes and I would package them in boxes.

And from that point, I would travel upstairs, up some steps to a pickup truck where I would load them up. When I got the pickup truck full, I would go down inside the plant to one of the closed process buildings where the uranium enrichment actually took place. And I would take them up two flights of stairs and down into the middle of that building to a caged area where I would store them, come back and log everything into the computer as archive samples. And that's how they got by with my duties as a clerk as covering I guess what I was doing.

But I had no protection whatsoever. The janitor finally gave me a pair of her gloves because everything was on my hands, my hands were ruined. A gentleman in Instrumentation gave me a pair of his khaki pants and shirt at one point because I had basically ruined all my clothes from home the way I carried things, by just picking them up and gathering them up next to my body.

I'm real concerned with the fact that I now know that some of that was uranium, some of it was mixed waste of different kinds. Some of it would be things that were supposedly sealed in concrete boxes or in rubber and they hadn't sealed or they were broken open, maybe large boxes of sand with silver flecks in it, you know, just such a variety. I've even had animal parts, all of it mostly radioactive. And at that point, Health Physics wasn't even checking anything out to see what it read.

Just a few months back, I got some FOIA information through the Freedom of Information Act, which showed me that some of the boxes that I had packaged were reading up as high as four and five million counts per minute. The DOE limit for per minute count would be 5,000 for beta gamma or 1,000 for alpha, and these things were reading up in the millions and I had actually handled them, you know, wildly. It's been quite an experience, a learning experience for me, and a very scary one to know now what I did handle.

And the fact that I've had six breast tumors makes me wonder if by carrying them like I did, if that has not been one of the reasons why I've had those tumors. There's no breast tumors in my family on either side, so you know, that's a concern to me.

CALLISON: And you had no one where you were working, you were never told --

ORICK: No. I just knew that they were short of personnel in Sampling and my supervisor left. They sent me up in the clerical position and I was to do DOE and EPA reporting forms and report on samples. When he left, another supervisor took over and he happened to be the supervisor over Sampling, so he took advantage of using me and one more person, they split our duties between the clerical work that we did and actually helping them with the samples that had gathered up over the years. So we had no clue, no clue whatsoever.

CALLISON: There's some kind of curious -- working in a facility like this, you must have had some sort of expectation of the safety --

ORICK: Sure.

CALLISON: -- of your job.

ORICK: Sure we did.

CALLISON: And I guess, where were the boundaries and how they crossed over?

ORICK: I think that's what's so sad about the situation, is that we all knew we went to work at a nuclear facility, that's not a question. But when you go to work and there are laws, which DOE has laws and they have federal codes, the government has federal codes that you're to abide by, and we felt that these things were in place and we felt that DOE was monitoring their contractors in these sites and supervising what went on. There were supposedly health and safety programs, there were health and safety divisions set up.

But I didn't realize until all of this happened and we became ill that these people were not doing their jobs. Nothing was posted. They denied having beryllium and cyanides and uranium and all this stuff, they've actually flat denied, "We've never had any here, you couldn't be exposed." And yet, that's what the facility was, that's what it ran on, so these people all these years did not do their jobs.

For over ten to 15,000 people at that one site at one time in history, there were only like three to four Health Physics people there, so they didn't monitor anything. They didn't know what kind of radiation readings they had. That was the same for Industrial Hygiene, only in one or two areas did they monitor any air or any type of particles coming out.

And we have found and they have admitted, you know, like molds in the vault areas, for instance, that cause very damaging lung conditions that can even get into the bloodstream and cause problems with the brain and they've known for years that these kinds of molds existed. Yet, they never posted, they never told us to wear a respirator, they never told us to put on a jacket, use gloves, but they sent us in these areas every day to work.

So we feel like we went in there, looking to management to protect us with their health and safety programs and if there was an issue in an area, either it would be posted or it would be printed on our work order, when you go in, wear gloves, wear shoe gloves, wear a respirator, wear a mask, wear a jacket, don't wear anything, but these things didn't happen. These things were just -- the laws were there, the rules were there, but management for some reason saw fit to get around these rules, so -- and we didn't realize that we were being led into areas that were making us sick because they didn't tell us the beryllium and stuff was in these areas. So it's really sad, it didn't have to happen.

CALLISON: What are the health problems that you've had since you --

ORICK: It's really been bizarre, but just major, whole body. It started with things like rashes which erupted just on the exposed areas. And they would erupt like little volcanos and they would bleed or weep and they lasted for months. And the doctors tried everything and they couldn't clear them up. And they knew that they were a type of a chemical rash, a burn type rash, they knew that, but nothing was stopping them because I was still inside the plant.

My heart rate averaged anywhere between 120 and 180 beats a minute sitting in a chair, just like I'm doing now talking with you, it just ran away. I have had lightheadedness to where I've kind of passed out for a second or two because my rate was so high. Of course, I had chest pains. My bones and joints and muscles began to hurt terribly, I mean literally ache like you had just taken a bat and beaten me. My muscles hurt, I didn't want to move, I couldn't stand to move. My joints began to swell and my bones, they're just cold, it's like -- I sit with blankets and things just wrapped around me because I'm so ice cold all the time.

I started having breathing problems, upper respiratory type breathing problems, shortness of breath, raspy voice, which I still have. I lose my voice at times. I will go weeks and have what they say, "Oh, you just have laryngitis," but I wasn't getting over it, I was just having it continually.

I began having severe migraine headaches and I'd never had a migraine in my life. I've had headaches all my life, just tension headaches, but these were so bad that I would be in the bed, sick, couldn't stand to move, couldn't see. My vision was blurry all the time. I knew there was a road sign out there, but I had no clue what it said because it was just all smudged like you had unfocused a camera or the TV was going bad and you had a blurry picture, so I couldn't see.

I was getting tired, just severe cases of fatigue, and that wasn't me at all, because I grew up in a family that really worked. My grandmother cleaned houses and worked and I helped her from the time I was small. My dad was sick and he couldn't do things at home, so I mowed the yard, I mowed the neighbor's yard, I mowed the lady's next door, the widow lady's yard. I did all -- this was me. All the time, I grew flowers. Everything -- I painted, I loved to paint a room. If my grandmother had a house to paint, I helped her.

And now I had two children at home, I did the laundry, I cooked. I had a husband, we went places, we enjoyed life, we went to ball games. But I worked and I started my own business, I had a little travel business on the side and we took groups on cruises and did a lot of fun things. I worked at church, worked with young people, I always loved working with young people.

Suddenly, I was so tired that I couldn't even get up out of the bed and get to a chair. I was exhausted for no reason. It wasn't me at all. And then I began having digestive problems and that progressed to the point to where when they did a scope, they found that I had -- they called it, well, some type of a stricture going from the stomach into the colon. And so they had to go in a couple of years ago and do major surgery and make a new opening, cut a lot out and make a new opening, because my food couldn't go anywhere.

They also found out that my food wasn't digesting any more, my stomach had just literally stopped digesting my food. It would try to chew, but nothing was going anywhere, so that had stopped. My gall bladder just quit. I had never had one pain with it, no problems. Suddenly, it quit and I was vomiting continually until they got that out. Major problems.

My leg drags. My foot dropped two inches, my right foot drops. I couldn't stand to sit for a long period of time, I couldn't stand to sit for a long period of time, stand up, do anything. I was miserable either way that I was.

And so all of these major things, I think at one point, we determined all and all, including tiny, small things, 84 medical things wrong with me at one time. And this was a woman that worked from the time that she was four or five years old, cleaning houses and working gardens and mowing yards and taking care of everybody else and suddenly, I couldn't even take care of myself. I couldn't get up off the couch, I literally lay on the couch for weeks. So many things happened at one time.

When I left the plant in '95, January -- December '95, January '96 time frame, I was so deathly sick that I couldn't even get up and do anything and I was so discouraged at that point. And they want to blame a lot of this on, you know, "Well, you're just depressed." Of course I am. If you had 84 things at one point wrong with you, would you not be depressed?

And since leaving, some of the things have improved. I have not had a rash of any kind. I haven't had a lot of the major, major headaches, they're better. I have them, but they're not as severe as they were. Some things have tried to improve since I've gotten away from the things that I worked in.

Some things have gotten worse, like my stomach, and now it's completely closed up in the stomach area itself and the doctors say, well, they told me in February I have three to six months to live, without removing the entire stomach cavity and most of the intestines. And I've chosen not to do that because I still have all these other problems to deal with and I'm not healthy enough I don't feel like to go through that, so I'm sure my time is limited.

But if you'd had six breast tumors -- and also, I didn't mention that I'm losing my eyesight. I think they tested 26 of us for peripheral vision. Out of 26 people, 18 or 19 were losing their peripheral vision very rapidly and not in any pattern that meets any type of a medical explanation that they have that they can match the pattern to. The pattern is unique in these 19 people and so we're losing our eyesight. So you're looking at somebody that's combatting a lot of problems that nobody wants to deal with and I've not got a lot of time left and don't have many options. So I'm just trying to use what I do have to the best of my ability and hope that maybe we can get some of this solved.

CALLISON: I'm glad I heard you speak at the hearing (inaudible).

ORICK: Well, I think it's devastating to people more than it is me. It's really odd and I don't know if you'll understand this or not, but I have kind of a peace with this. I'm a very religious person and church has been a major part of our lives, so I don't have a fear of dying and I don't have a fear of living, I can do either one that the Good Lord allows me to do.

I feel like I've been in this five years of war with my body for some reason and if that purpose is to end my life at this time and that these five years that I have tried to fight the government to prove that these people down here are really sick, if that's what it's taken and it takes my life to do that, then I'm fine with that. And I don't have a fear of dying, I know where I'm going, you know, I know there's a heaven waiting for me, that's prepared for me, and so I'm very comfortable with it.

Other people get real upset or real excited about it, "I don't understand why you don't have this surgery." If it's meant to be, I'll know that and I'll have it and it'll work. If it's not meant to be, then I'm satisfied. I'm just hoping and praying that what I've tried to these past five years doesn't look like a woman that just needs to see a psychiatrist, but it looks like a woman that's really dedicated, trying to use what she's gone through, what she sees as similar with all of these other sick people here, to help them in some way. So maybe that makes it a little easier, I hope it does.

CALLISON: No, I don't think people are going to see you as a woman who needs to see a psychiatrist, you've definitely rocked D.C.'s world.

ORICK: Well, I hope that we made some kind of an impression. You know, we went up there to be honest and to be ourselves. And they made us type out the testimony and turn it in and then they said, "We'd rather you didn't say this and we'd rather you didn't say this."

But that isn't fair, you know, I waited five years to get there. I faxed these people every day from the White House down for five years and I wanted to say what I felt like was the most useful for them to understand our true situation, what it really is like to be a person sick and be in this. It's hard, it's very, very difficult, it's been hard. I don't know how we've done it and kept our heads, I really don't. But they had to see us for how we really are, really people with a real problem and not an imaginary one, so I hope they did.

CALLISON: These problems that you've listed here, these 85 medical problems, are they unique to you or are these problems that all the workers are -- ORICK: You would see a pattern in most of it. It may not be as severe in one case as it is another, but I think that could be explained by the different areas that someone may have spent most of their time. We've even got some office people, you know, that are ill and they have nickel in their bodies. And since testing the ventilation systems and the air-conditioning and all, we know that there's nickel in the ventilation system, so we know how they got their exposure.

What you would see that would be unique would probably be the eyes. Sway balance, none of us have any balance, we tip, so none of us have any balance. We have a real problem with standing up without some type of assistance. Most people have that. Most people have gastrointestinal disturbances of one kind or another, not as severe as what mine is, but I've been in more high radiation, I think, than most of them have and I think that may account for some of mine. We never proved that, but I think it probably accounts for the difference. Most all of us have the vocal cord problem and the upper respiratory problems, which they probably will associate to the molds in the vaults and different places, but --

And then a lot of them have the beryllium, either proven in their lungs as chronic beryllium disease or showing in their blood, which shows a sensitivity and shows that they've been exposed. So you see a lot of the -- you see a pattern, I think. And like I say, it may be one may have more of this, one may have more of this, but if you put it down and you just wrote down lung problems, eye problems and mark it down, you'll see a pattern.

CALLISON: How have you -- you've touched on this a little bit, but how have you been treated by DOE and __________, I guess both in trying to get the story out and also in trying to get (inaudible)?

ORICK: Well, it's a shame to say this, but Washington ignored us for probably four and a half years. They were fed information constantly, so they were updated, they knew the situation. We got very little response. When we did, for instance, the White House would say, "Our schedules are too demanding," but yet, we'd turn the TV on and they'd be off to some country, looking at everybody else's health problems and food problems, and yet, we didn't see them down here saying, "Well, these people need medicine and food. Give them a box of government cheese," se weren't seeing that. We saw them everywhere else doing that and that hurt.

Locally from DOE, it's just been devastating. We've been laughed at, mocked, treated horribly. We met for months with management from the contractor, who at that time was Lockheed Martin. It's changed hands over the years, but we met with other management for three or four months, every week in a row. We set out an agenda that we thought both of us could follow that would lead to health care or lead to some finalization, something that would be helpful. And they agreed to do this, it was an agreement with everybody. We've never seen any of that carried out.

Even just down to a little fact sheet, we said, "Put out a little fact sheet to the plant, 'There is beryllium in this area. If you have questions, call Health Physics or Industrial Hygiene,' or, 'We have barrels of this here. Don't go in,' you know, a fact sheet, 'This could damage your health, it could cause a breathing problem. If you feel you've come in contact, call . . .'" They didn't even do that and how easy would that have been? They have people on staff to do that, that would not have been a major problem for them, but they didn't care to do anything we asked them to.

When we found someone that tried to work with us in upper management, they were shifted out of Oak Ridge, out west to one of the other sites, and left there for a few months. The people that tried to help us were, well, disappearing.

Those that remained were those that criticized and ridiculed. I've been laughed at. I've been told that, "Well, I don't know why you have a problem. You're just laying at home, drawing a disability check. What's your problem?" Well, I don't want to lay at home and draw a disability check. I wanted to work, I like to work. I didn't want to lay at home and do anything. I was sick, I couldn't do anything else but lay at home. So you know, it hurt, we've been treated roughly.

In July when Secretary of Energy Richardson announced the $100,000.00 proposal for some beryllium workers and some nuclear facility workers, that really hurt. We haven't seen anything come from that yet, that's still up on the Hill I think, probably still in the White House being mulled over. The internal memo that we saw from the White House said that, "If we can make just a few people help, just a few people, then it's going to look like we did a lot for a lot of people." That hurt, too.

We're not after money. We have lost everything we ever had. Most of us have lost our homes, had to sell our homes. Our medicines are out of reach. I looked up the other day, just for the past ten years, my husband and I have spent out of pocket probably 30 to $40,000.00 worth of medicine and doctor bills that nobody wants to cover because of these bizarre illnesses and tests that we have to have. But yet, when he announced that proposal, it made people think that everything was okay and we were taken care of. And nobody has received anything from anybody, no kind of help yet, so we're still looking for that.

Back when I was at work, right before I left work in December of '95, I had been out sick, that's when my gall bladder had shut down and they did an emergency thing to take the gall bladder out. And I was out for a couple of weeks, went back to work. And when you leave and you're out for so many days, they take your badge off of reader, so when you go in, you have to call ahead, they reprogram your badge to the reader so you can get in the plant.

So when I went in down there, they gave me just a temporary pink badge, or so I thought that's what I had. And I went on in to work and they had put me in a little room that used to be used for a storage closet and had put me on a computer. Because prior to that, I had had a breast tumor removed, which was number five or six, I don't really remember at that point. So I had been out for a few weeks then, so the doctor told me, "If you miss any more work, we're going to put you out of here on a medical. You can't keep missing work." Well, I couldn't help these things that were happening to me.

But we were in the middle of a new DOE mandatory training program for Health Physics technicians, which is what I was. And it was required that you pass both the schooling, the educational part, plus the on-the-job training, which they put you in a room and you would just walk through and say what you would do if you were going through this area, what you saw, what you thought you should dress out in and so forth.

So the worst part was the first part, going to school. You had the physics and you had the mathematics, you know, with all the calculations and the scientific notations and all this to go through. So I got through all that, passed out of that with flying colors, made one of the highest scores on the final test, and they came and told me that I wasn't going any further, they were going to pull me out of school because I'd been sick. And I said, "Well, you know, I just lack the walk-through and I'll be certified." "No, we're not going to let you do that, we can't allow you to do that, you've been sick." But they'd let me go through all the hard part of sitting up and studying and doing the math and all this.

So I didn't say anything, they pulled me out. I was the only Health Physics technician in all three of the Oak Ridge plants, which at that time we would have had about a hundred at K-25 and probably a hundred at

Y-12 and close to that at X-10, so I'm going to say close to 300 people got to go through that program and I was the only exception. I wasn't allowed to complete that, which meant they could change my job title, I could be put back to a clerk, anything they wanted to put me at, and my money would have changed because my job classification would have changed.

Now after they did that, I was out with my gall bladder and I went back in. I kept wondering why I didn't have my blue badge back, my Q clearance back, and got to waiting and waiting. One morning, the phone rang and I answered the phone and it was Security and she said, "You need to come down and pick up your new pink badge." And pink means uncleared and I said, "No, I don't have a pink badge," I said, "I've been waiting for my badge back, but I don't have a pink badge, I have a clearance." She said, "Oh, no, you don't have a clearance any more, they had your clearance pulled." And I said, "Who had my clearance pulled," and she said, "Your division." And I said, "Why," and she said, "Well, because you were out sick." Well, they never pulled anybody's clearance for being out sick. If you have a clearance pulled, you have done something and usually wound uptown at DOE with the FBI and everybody, you know, giving you a debriefing and questioning you.

So I had no clue what was happening. So I got my new pink badge and I went to my department head and I said, you know, "Is there a problem? I think they've messed up, I've got a pink badge." "No, we decided that since you were sick so much, we'd just take your clearance, it could save us a lot of money." Well, a clearance only costs one time and that's when they reinvestigate every five years and I had just recently had that done, so they done paid the money for my clearance, that was paid. It didn't matter if I wore it five years or not, it was paid, so that didn't add up.

And I said, "Well, how many others did you..." you know, "How many other badges have you pulled?" "Oh, we didn't pull any." And I said, "Well, there's like a hundred people in this building that never get out of this building, there's people in this building that have clearances that's never been beyond the fence, where I've been. I've been all over this plant, in every cubbyhole, in every vault, in every building. I've worked this entire plant, that's why I had the clearance. I've escorted DOE, I've done it all, and there's people in this building that have never been outside of this building and you didn't take theirs to save money?" "No, no, we just took yours."

So my clearance was taken, my training was taken. I was the only person with a clearance pulled, the only person with the training pulled, and I was in a closet with no ventilation, no window, no nothing, and I was deathly sick and nobody ever came to see if I was living or dead. That's when my heart rate was so high, that's when I broke out, that's when I passed out. They finally took me to the hospital in an ambulance because I was so sick and my chest was hurting so bad. But I was treated like dirt and it was very humiliating, because here I'd been that person that every time they needed somebody to work over, I was there. Every time they needed somebody to escort DOE or somebody big, I was there.

I was there when my children had things at school or something at home and I couldn't get there because they'd run in, "We can't get anybody to work. This is an emergency, please stay," and good old me stayed. And then what did I get? I became the laughing stock of that end of the building. People didn't want to associate with me, they didn't want to talk to me. They wouldn't have anything to do with me because my clearance had been pulled and they felt like there was a reason for it and they didn't know what that was, so they didn't want to have anything to do with me.

So my last few weeks and months on that site were very hurtful, I've cried many, many tears over that, and I don't feel like I deserved it because I was a good worker.

CALLISON: Kind of going back to (inaudible) and the hearings that Dr. Michaels has conducted.

ORICK: Yes.

CALLISON: What is your feeling about these __________ and the hearings that (inaudible)?

ORICK: Well, I think when Dr. Michaels came down here the first time, we were very impressed with him. I'll back up just a little bit and say that we did have a brief meetings with Secretary of Energy Richardson. He was in a hurry, he left quite abruptly, saying that he had to get back to the White House, and he left some of his staff people here. Well, we were happy with that and we tried to relate to them with the small amount of time that they had, you know, what our concerns were. And we gave them a little bit of documentation to back up, you know, what our feelings were and they left with it and they promised somebody would come back.

Well, somebody did, Dr. Michaels came back. And quite frankly, I like Dr. Michaels. I think that he's a very concerned person. I think the Secretary of Energy's a very concerned person. Whether or not they can do anything with this situation I'm not sure, it's going to take more than one or two people. I don't feel like Secretary of Energy Richardson has followed it through as much as he should, personally.

I feel like Dr. Michaels keeps trying to look into things, but he's like the new kid on the block at DOE and I think it's going to be hard for him to run back with his feelings and just think that's going to be accepted, because it's not going to be up there. You still have the old people, the hard-nosed people, the people that don't want to face the facts and the people that don't want to say we're sick, and I think he's running into stone walls.

I think if it weren't for that, we may have possibly seen something happen by now. I would like to feel like he's as much on our side as he is on the side of the Department of Energy. But as to, you know, what comes from that, I'm not quite sure at this point.

CALLISON: What would you like to see happen?

ORICK: What I would like to see happen is first of all, I would like to see people have a way of going after their medications. We can't afford most of our medications, it's just too expensive. We don't get all of our medicines each month, we choose. Most of the sick workers that I know of don't get all of the medicines that the doctors want them to have each month. So that would be my first concern, a way for us to go get our prescriptions filled and then be covered, that we don't have to worry about $48.00 a bottle for this one after insurance and $50.00 a bottle for this one after insurance. We shouldn't have to pay something like that.

And the second thing I would like to see is treatment, if there is any, and I do believe that there's some out there for some of these things. Now there is a chelation which will rid heavy metals and things from your body. It has to be done properly. It can kill you, it can overload your kidneys. But it can also, if you do it slowly and correctly, it can rid nickel and lead and things from your body and can be a benefit. And I think there's people out there that can do that for us, but we don't have the finances to do it, it's quite expensive. So I would like to see treatment of some kind. That may not be the only answer, that's just one method that I see that may help.

And then thirdly, it's not the money and that we want gobs of money just handed to us because we're sick, that's not it. And people really have the idea that we're just after money. But if you had worked all your life in a facility, like my husband worked 28 years and I worked 14, is it right that we get to the ages of 54 and 57 years old and have nothing to account for it, is that right? I mean I would love to have a four-room cottage somewhere that was my home. We lost our home, we had to sell it, because we couldn't keep it up, number one, we were too sick for maintenance, and number two, our incomes were cut drastically and we couldn't afford it.

The same way with all these people. We've had people to file bankruptcy. We have people that have zero automobiles, can't get anywhere unless somebody runs to take them. We were in that situation a couple of years back from all this, we were down to one little '65 Volkswagen and it ran when we coasted off the hill and that's the way we got around. That's fine, we love them, but we need something that runs to get us back and forth. We should not be in these situations. So financially, I think we should have something more than just a disability check.

And another thing that we have to watch here, the way that the disability incomes are set up. And no one believes this, but it's true, you can check this out. With the Lockheed Martin benefit plan with Met Life's disability coverage, if we get one dollar, they get the one dollar. That's recuperating their cost of having us on their disability.

So let's say Secretary of Energy's $100,000.00 proposal for beryllium workers went through, and my husband has chronic beryllium disease, and they gave him a check for $100,000.00. Do you know what happens to that $100,000.00 for us? Lockheed Martin and Met Life get it, they've already notified us, "It's ours, one hundred percent of that is ours, you owe it to us. Your checks will stop. We will take the $100,000.00." So what do we have? Zero.

So the plan is going to have to be written up in some way to bypass the fact that that would be considered some type of an income. It's going to have to be written in some way that we're allowed to keep that money. We owe a lot of money out there to hospitals and doctors and we can't get our medications and we've lost our home and we've lost our vehicles and we've lost our jobs and we've lost our health and we've lost family and friends that worked out there that's died already. So we deserve something and it doesn't have to be $100,000.00 to me, but my goodness, you give me an extra hundred or $200.00 a month and you wouldn't believe what I could -- I could go to the grocery store and get what I wanted and I could get my medicine. That's a shame that we can't do that, that is pathetic, but yet we --

And I'm not downing going overseas and helping people, don't take this wrong. But we turn on our TV on the nightly news and what do we see? They're over there with food, they're over there with money, and they don't take months and years to appropriate that money. If something comes up and they feel these people over here are malnourished, they need medicine, that money's out of there in just a snap of a finger, that money's appropriated and gone. We're having to beg, we're having to beg and plead for help.

So I don't want to beg any more, I don't want to plead with anybody. I just want to face the facts. I'd like to face the facts, admit what we've done and see if we can't work out a justified type of a settlement for sick people.

CALLISON: Do you think that the way things are set up now the government is pretty much immune to __________?

ORICK: Yes, yes, they are. We have not been able to bring a suit against you government. The beryllium workers' suit in this area was recently barred by a federal judge saying that the government was immune, they have sovereign immunity due to what they call a discretionary function ruling, which they means that they have the right to work us on these sites under the laws that existed, but ignoring the laws that existed because of national security purposes. And therefore, that gave them the right to let us go in these areas, not knowing what we were going into, and making us sick, even though they knew it all the time, and we can't do anything about it.

Our understanding is that we have to have permission from the government to sue them, so we have not been able to go anywhere with our federal tort suits, they're just hanging in limbo and we're just waiting on denial to come back to us that we have no rights.

This government was established, you know, under a sovereignty, the king and queen of England. But we don't have a king and queen here and we established this country differently. We established this country that everybody was free and equal, there was opportunity for anybody that came here and you could build a business, you could work, you could build a home, you could have land, you could have all these good things and you could have them freely. That's what we established this country on.

But yet, we haven't seen any freedom in anything we've tried to do, we've just been literally sit on and things have just been bottle capped and we haven't seen that freedom. We don't understand what's happened. Because you know, we're not living under a king and a queen and if these laws are the problem, then maybe we need to change them, the basics.

CALLISON: What's your view of secrecy versus __________ and how -- I guess I'll just leave it there and see where you go with it.

ORICK: I can understand there's secrecy to a point, I honestly can, and there are things I won't talk to you about about what I did, about what I saw. I won't do it, I would never do it. But it's not going to hurt you that I don't do it.

And they haven't been open and the part they should be open is just the part as to what maybe you were exposed to, just the item that you were exposed to, the chemical, the metal. That part should be open to you because this whole world knows now what it takes to make components for warheads or whatever. So the secrecy, to me, has been carried a little bit too far in this day and age.

I don't want our government to divulge any secret to me or to you or to the world about how we made something or how we developed something or what we're doing now. I don't expect that to happen, I expect that to still continue to be secret.

But I don't expect having my phone tapped. I'm an ordinary person, I should have rights. I should be able to pick up my phone and discuss something, as long as I'm not talking about a national secret. I really don't even know a national secret because they didn't even tell us as workers, "This is a secret, you can't tell." They would just tell us, "We'll tell you something if you need to know," it was need to know, need to know, need to know. That's been programmed in us since the '40s. Nobody talked about their work, nobody discussed it with their coworkers or anything. Need to know.

So yes, there needs to be secrets, I understand that, I honor that, I do, I uphold it. If that's what it takes to keep this country strong, that's fine. But when you have people as sick as my husband and you have marked out their medical records when it says, "He was exposed to . . .," and you maliciously mark that out, then I think that's where the line should be drawn. If anything was there that should have been marked out, maybe the area or whatever, but just give the gentleman the one sentence, "You were exposed to . . .," whatever.

Now that's gone forever, we don't know. They're trying to say, "Oh, it was this, it was this." How do we know? They said the original was cut up and it's gone, so we don't know that. We just know they're covering their tracks. We asked for listings, hazardous material listings that were typed into the computer for each area of that plant over the years. I used to type those, I know they exist. I even told them where to find them. We got a few of those and guess what. Probably 65, 70 percent of it whited out, whited out. Why would you want to give somebody just a blank list of stuff and white it out? That's not helping us at all. We need those items to be on there. We don't care where they were used, what they were used for, but we need those items, they need to be open and give us those items. That's where the lines have crossed and it's gone too far the wrong way.

CALLISON: That was my last question. Do you have anything else you want to add?

ORICK: That's a serious situation for us, the Met Life thing is, and I don't know if we can -- you all may not even want to say those names, I don't know, but it's a true situation. It's unique to Oak Ridge, I understand, and it's a shame. When I got my Social Security back pay where I'd been off for so long, I had to go before the judge. I had three denials and I had five specialists writing Social Security that I couldn't work and how sick I was. I had three denials, had to go before a federal judge and he was mad. He said, "I've never seen anybody's file as thick in my life. You shouldn't come here and waste my time, you're disabled, they knew that."

But when I got my back pay, they took $8,000.00 away from me. I could have used that and paid National Jewish Hospital off. They took it, "Oh, you owe us that, we need to recuperate." We need to recuperate, too. It's not like a second income to us, extra money. We're losing our income, we could never make up what we've lost in salary all these years now, we could never make that up. If they just gave us two lump sums, we wouldn't make up what our salaries would have been. So that's a very, very tedious and special issue for us.

I guess the main thing that maybe I'd like to say is that, you know, I've worked with all these little people as best I can, it's been real difficult. It's a fine group of people, dedicated workers. My dad worked out there, my dad worked at Y-12 plant. And I never knew what he did, except that he was a welder, because my dad never told you, "I'm just a welder, just a welder," and my dad was dead at 47 years old. And as a little girl, I would stand up and he and mom had a big four-poster bed and I would stand up and I'd look over and I'd see if daddy was still breathing because they'd bring him home

-- back then, there were no interstates. They'd bring him home in the carpool where he'd had another heart attack. He had 13 major heart attacks and 20 some what they were called minor, that didn't hurt anything. They'd bring him home and we'd have to take him to a local hospital ten miles further up the road in a little old car.

But my dad died at 47 and all I knew was that growing up, I'd wash his clothes. We had a Maytag wringer washer and you'd wash the clothes in hot water and you'd run them through the wringers and you'd dip them in a big old galvanized pan and rinse them out and then you'd put the wringers around, you'd rinse them again, then you'd hang them on the line to dry and I did that. And I would wash dad's clothes and his white tee shirts and underclothes and handkerchiefs would be hot pink. And I always thought as a little girl I'd ruined my daddy's clothes. And we didn't have a lot of money and my dad didn't have many things to wear, my dad was always last to get something, but back then, they wore their clothes to work, they didn't give them anything, so I don't know what he carried home to us.

But I always thought I'd ruined my daddy's clothes and my dad doesn't really have that much. So just about two years ago, I found out that what was coming out of my daddy's clothes was red welder dye, where he would take the red dye in his hands and whatever he had welded, they would rub it across, then they would x-ray it to see if there was a pinhole of any kind of a leak, because there could not be any leaks in what they welded because it was special. And that's how he would soak that up in his skin and he would sweat it out in his clothes.

Right before he died, we took him to Florida, he wanted to go to Florida, and he wanted to go to NASA and nobody knew why. We took him and we walked upon the first capsule that took the men up to the moon and my dad looked at that and he started crying and we didn't know what in the world was wrong. And mom said, "What's wrong, Charlie, are you sick?" He said, "No," he said, "You see this right here," he said, "I welded that," and he said, "You know, it really liked to worry me to death," he said, "I just liked to lost my mind because..." he said, "...I knew that if I missed one little place in that weld and they got up there too close to the sun and that heat got too strong, that they'd burn up," and he said, "It liked to worry me to death." So that's the only thing I know for sure that my daddy did.

They know the names of the men that went up in that capsule and they know what they did. They don't know my daddy's name that helped put it together and helped get them there safely. And that's what they don't know about us, that's what they don't know about the people here at Oak Ridge that are now sick. We're not greedy people and we're not trouble makers. We're just people that's dedicated ourselves to working to protect this entire nation in any way we could protect it, to keep it free, so people's kids could grow up and go to school and have a good job and people could have their fine homes and their big cars and be able to go to the movies and go to the ball game or whatever they wanted to do. They were protected and are protected, still do that.

But we're sick and nobody wants to admit it, that we're sick, they don't want to admit why we're sick and they don't want to help us. They don't want to hear about it, they don't want to be involved. So somebody's going to have to take a stand and hopefully, these hearings have turned things around a little bit to where somebody will stand up for us. And then we'll know what America's all about. It will mean to me then that we really do have a nation with freedom and justice for all of us and not just a few.

I guess that's about all I want to say. I hope I've made a little dent in the problem for some people. It may not benefit me, but I see a lot of people here that I hope it does, I really hope it does.