Fires and Those Who Fight Them

I can say I likely owe my life to some brave firefighters. I want to tell you about three of them: Bill Dennison, Stan Skinger, and Randy Sullivan.

Until I moved to California in 2000 for a university teaching job, I had spent my entire life just a few miles from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant near Denver, Colorado. Decades, to be precise. There was extensive toxic and radioactive contamination in the air, water, and soil. We didn’t know. The public was consistently lied to, and local residents – even workers at the plant – did not know at the time the extent of the environmental damage and the unavoidable, inevitable health risks.

There were radioactive spills, leaks, accidents, releases. But the most terrifying events were the fires. From 1952 to 2003 (yes, as recent as 2003!), Rocky Flats had hundreds of fires. Lots of little ones, some big ones. This is a big challenge because plutonium fires are particularly dangerous. You can’t use water to try to extinguish a plutonium fire without risking a nuclear criticality (an uncontrolled nuclear fission chain reaction), and a radioactive cloud usually travels for miles.

My family had a very up-close-and-personal experience with this on Mother’s Day, June 11, 1969. We were at a local restaurant having brunch on an outdoor patio. I was eleven, with three younger siblings. We had no idea there was a fire at the secret nuclear weapons plant, and a radioactive cloud was traveling over our heads.

The first major fire had been in 1957, a fire so extreme that it burned through all the filters (designed to keep contaminated air out of the environment) as well as measuring equipment. We will never know the full extent of contamination, and of course, the public was not informed. Cold war secrecy kept everything under wraps. By the time my family moved into our new home, that contamination was already there.

We were soon to get another dose. The Mother’s Day fire in 1969 started in a glovebox in Building 776 and quickly spread through the conveyor line system to Building 777, the primary plutonium production buildings. The fire was out of control. There were no warnings, no roadblocks, no evacuations of local neighborhoods. No one contacted or informed local authorities. No news crews.

Did I tell you we were having brunch? Outside?

Bill Dennison and Stan Skinger were security guards, not trained firefighters. It just happened that when they arrived for their Sunday morning shift, the guard at the gate told them to head down to Building 776. “It’s bad,” he said. What they saw was unimaginable. Only a handful of responders were on the scene, and it was chaotic. Bill and Stan pulled on tanks and protective gear and entered the building. The heat was unbearable, and there was almost no visibility. This was a plutonium fire. Each man thought privately it was unlikely they would get out alive.

They went in anyway. The intense heat melted the roof of the building and it began to rise like a roasted marshmallow. The fire was raging. A breach would have meant certain disaster for Denver. It came close. A combination of quick thinking, dogged determination, and pure luck led to Bill and Stan, with the help of others, to calm the fire and – barely – save the roof. A Department of Energy memo would later compare the potential of that fire to the disaster at Chernobyl.

It was bad, very bad, but the city of Denver was saved. And the residents of Arvada. My family. Me.

I was lucky to be able to listen to Bill Dennison’s interview tapes, as he had already passed. Stan made tapes as well, but he also agreed to meet me in person. His health was not great. He lived in Lakewood, near Dino’s, my family’s favorite Italian restaurant. He was warm, funny, and talked about how much he loved animals. We spent a long afternoon over homemade spaghetti and he described how he had lost his face mask during the fire and been contaminated. He described the scrub down and the subsequent health checks. He wasn’t sure how much time he had left. Stan didn’t consider himself a hero. He was a tough-looking guy, but his eyes filled with tears when he talked about Bill Dennison and their teamwork that day. Thirty-three incredible firefighters and security guards fought that 1969 fire, and Bill and Stan were on the front line.

I will conclude with the remarkable story of Randy Sullivan.

Randy lived in my neighborhood, just a few blocks over. We met in grade school. He was kind of a tall and wiry kid, dark hair, warm brown eyes. Great sense of humor. I admit it. I had a crush on him all the way through high school. But I was too shy to say anything.

What I didn’t know was that Randy had a crush on me, too. Our families both had horses, as did many people in our neighborhood. I would ride my pinto pony, Tonka, past Randy’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When Randy went out to feed his horse in the evening, a beautiful palomino named Cocoa, he would look over toward my house. Was I feeding Tonka, too? He hoped for a chance to yell, “I love you, Kris!”

But that didn’t come to pass. What did happen was that both of us eventually ended up working at Rocky Flats. I worked there for just a year. Randy started at Rocky Flats in 1992, got a “Q” clearance, and trained to become a firefighter. Of all the fires he fought at Rocky Flats, the biggest surprise was in 2003. Rocky Flats had ended production and was in “cleanup” mode. Fires weren’t supposed to happen. One early morning, as Randy was bringing in two breakfast burritos, one for himself and one for the other captain, the alarm went off: a fire in Building 371, a multilevel plutonium recovery facility with much of the building underground. Randy faced the same problems as Bill and Stan: poor visibility, poor accessibility, and the fact that this out-of-control fire was not responding to efforts to extinguish it. Never mind the risk of having to use water on a plutonium fire and its potential deadly consequences.

Hours later, when the fire was finally tamed and Randy was able to pull off his SBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) and protective gear, he was, in Rocky Flats lingo, “crapped up.” His fire-retardant pants, shirt, t-shirt, equipment, hair, skin, everything, measured at “infinity” levels. He had to scrub and scan and scrub and scan. He would spend the rest of his life being tested, waiting, and watching. Plutonium has a very long half-life.

Randy Sullivan, along with other Rocky Flats personnel, was interviewed by the DOD (Department of Defense), the DOE (Department of Energy), and members of Congress. In its final report, the DOE declined to call the 2003 incident a “fire” but rather a “pyrophoric event.” “Which is political speak for fire,” Randy noted. In the interview for our forthcoming documentary, when director Nathan Church asked Randy if there were any takeaway lessons from that 2003 fire, Randy said ruefully, “Well, number one, I’m a full member of the Cherokee Nation, and number two, I worked for the DOE. So basically, what I learned personally was never trust the government.”

HaveyPro is in final edits for the documentary, which will premiere this summer. I’ll keep you posted! You can see a sneak peek of the trailer HERE.

Check out my book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats to learn more about Rocky Flats and the people who lived (and are still living) the story.

For more information on the 1957 fire, read this interview in The Atlantic: A September 11th Catastrophe You've Probably Never Heard About by Andrew Cohen.

For more information on both fires, read The Day They Almost Lost Denver by Len Ackland.

And, as always, thanks for reading! If you’d like to comment or gain access to all my archives as well as find specific content just for writers, consider upgrading to a premium subscription.