A Long Road to Justice: A Uranium Workers Letter

By Tim Lerew, Cold War Patriots Spokesperson, Emeritus

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, bearing the official address of the U.S. Department of Justice. For an hour, it sat unopened on our kitchen table. My hands, thick and permanently stained around the cuticles with the red dust of the Colorado Plateau, shook too much to tear open the envelope. For more than twenty years, the government’s answer to whether I could receive free health care and compensation due to the illness I developed from working with that red dust had been a cold, bureaucratic wall. Denied. They had said my sickness didn’t count because of a date on a calendar. They said my years in the dust, the heavy air of hauling trucks, and the crushing weight of the ore in the late 1970s fell outside the lines drawn by Congress.

I spent my youth in the belly of those mines and processing mills, breathing in the quiet, invisible poison that eventually took my breath away for good. When the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was passed back in 1990, it felt like a beacon of hope for people like us. But when I applied, the door slammed shut. RECA only covered uranium workers who knelt in that dust up until 1971. I started my first shift in 1974. According to the old law, the radiation apparently became harmless on January 1, 1972. We had a feeling that wasn’t quite the case. The dust didn’t check the calendar. The ventilators didn’t suddenly start working better when the clock struck midnight into the new decade. My lungs, now scarred and rattling with fibrosis, were proof enough.

Meg finally took the letter from my hands, her own fingers steady but her eyes laced with the exhaustion of a lifetime spent caretaking. She sliced the envelope open with a butter knife and read it in silence. I watched her face, bracing myself for the familiar sting of another rejection, another polite notice telling me that my sacrifice for the nation’s Cold War machine was statistically irrelevant.

Then, she gasped, a sound that was half-sob and half-laugh.

“They changed it, Thomas,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “They finally changed the dates.”

She held the paper out to me. The dense legalese of so many previous letters melted away into a single, beautiful truth: the eligibility window really had been expanded. The decades of fighting, the town hall meetings in school gymnasiums, and the relentless screaming into the wind by widows and dying miners had finally broken through. The new amendment recognized the truth we had lived through—that uranium mining, hauling, and milling didn’t stop being deadly after 1971. The rest of the 1970s and the 1980s were finally included.

I looked down at those welcome words: “I am pleased to inform you.” It wasn’t just about the money, though God knows the medical bills had eroded our life savings until there was nothing left but the mortgage. It was the sudden, overwhelming weight of validation, something that decades of denials had never allowed me to feel. Until that letter arrived, it felt like the country I loved and worked for was looking at my failing body and saying, You don’t exist to us.

Now, looking at the letter, I felt a tear cut a clean path through the dry skin of my cheek. I thought of Mike, who worked the crusher next to me in ’78 and died ten years ago without ever seeing this day. I thought of all the nights I lay awake listening to the oxygen machine hum, wondering if my life’s work amounted to nothing more than an early grave and a mountain of debt for my family. The man at the town hall meeting had said that once approved for a covered illness, many workers often had a spouse or family member as part of their paid home health care team, finally being compensated for some of the daily work they had already been doing for years. That could even be Meg, my wife of 42 years.

The government finally admitted that the dust we breathed in the seventies and eighties carried the exact same poison as the decades before. It came too late for many, and it almost came late for me, but as I sat at that kitchen table, I felt a strange, quiet peace. We weren’t invisible anymore.

This dramatic story was recently shared with Cold War Patriots (CWP), with the understanding that we would put it into writing to benefit others who were once denied, but now could be approved under the recent changes to the RECA law.

If you have questions about how you might now be eligible for compensation and health benefits, call CWP today at 855-230-1339 or email us at [email protected].