Interview with John Garcia
Dublin Core
Title
Subject
Description
Creator
Publisher
Date
Rights
Format
Provenance
Oral History Item Type Metadata
Interviewer
Interviewee
Location
Transcription
0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John Garcia on May 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with John about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
0:00:19 John Garcia: John G. Garcia. J-O-H-N. G. G-A-R-C-I-A.
Franklin: Okay, great. So, John, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site.
0:00:34 Garcia: A friend of mine that I met in Fort Knox, Kentucky, he and his wife moved back out here. They were originally from the Sunnyside area. And he got a job at Hanford, more or less following in his mom’s and dad’s footsteps. He was a welder. So he told me they were going to restart PUREX and PFP and he got me in that good old-fashioned paper application. So I filled it out and mailed it in, and then I drove out here all by myself in August of 1982. I wasn’t here long, and I called the employment office. In the meantime, I found—I had a job picking grapes for Welch’s grape juice and other more or less temporary jobs.
0:01:26 Then they decided to hire people for the restart of PUREX and PFP. It was about 60 or 70 men and women. According to my tribal knowledge, it was the biggest hire of women and minorities in the history of Hanford. They trained us, you know, more or less from the ground up. There were people that were college graduates, there were people that were high school dropouts, and everything in between. So they taught us about safety, about radiological safety, criticality safety, and how to work the process. When our clearances came in—you had to have either an L or a Q, Q being the highest, to work at PFP or at PUREX. When they came in, then you got to go into the building. You had somebody that mentored you for a while.
0:02:33 In December of ’83, that’s when they started the Plutonium Finishing Plant up for real. We were using real life plutonium. What the idea was was extract plutonium from waste products or from the processed fuel rods that came from the reactors, primarily N. And then they would take that to PUREX, separate out some of the uranium from the plutonium and it would go over to PFP and get concentrated. They would make hockey-puck-sized—what we called buttons. It would fit inside of a tuna fish can. About two-thirds of the nuclear arsenal came through PFP in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
0:03:29 So most of us had no clue how it worked. But we learned it. We made lots of mistakes. It was sometimes chaotic. [LAUGHTER] But we got through it.
0:03:34 Franklin: How old were you when you came out?
Garcia: I was 30.
Franklin: What had you been doing before?
0:03:51 Garcia: Back in Kentucky where I met my friends, I worked at like a grocery store for the military. They called them commissaries.
Franklin: Yeah, like a PX.
Garcia: Yeah. Well, a commissary is like the foodstuff. PX is like the hardwares and jewelry. So his wife was in the Army, so they invited me to come out here. I lived with them in Sunnyside for eight or nine months. Then I got the Hanford job and moved to Richland.
0:04:24 Franklin: Where were you from originally?
Garcia: Kentucky. Fort Knox, Kentucky. I grew up all over the country, and a few places in Europe. So moving around was no big deal to me.
Franklin: Were you a military—
Garcia: Brat, yeah.
Franklin: A military brat.
0:04:41 Garcia: I tried to join the Army—that’s another story. I tried to join the Army and the Air Force during the Vietnam War. And I couldn’t see the eye chart well enough to pass the physical. So I decided, go to Plan B, and that was to make nuclear weapons.
[LAUGHTER]
Garcia: As it turned out.
0:05:02 Franklin: Yeah. What did you know about Hanford before you drove out here?
Garcia: Just from what my friends told me and a small article in the World Book Encyclopedia, that it was a World War II project, and that’s pretty much all the article said in the encyclopedia. And what my friends told me is, yeah, this is where they make plutonium. Plutonium! And so they’re going to start it up again and they’re going to hire a lot of people. Not a whole lot. I learned a lot on the fly.
0:05:37 That was the—I wasn’t a science major or any—in school. I never went to college much. But history was my thing. So here we are, surrounded by history at Hanford. All those old buildings. I was looking for an apartment in Richland, and I drove through there, and it was like E.T. Home, home! Because it looked like military housing. So I felt more comfortable there and I never looked in Kennewick or Pasco. It was Richland. And they had a bus system that would get you there no matter what. Rain or shine, sleet or snow. I lived in Richland about 35 years. Just recently moved to Pasco after I retired.
0:06:23 There’s a picture of N that they took when it was running in 1944 that’s got some steam plumes and all the buildings that are there. That was in the article in the World Book Encyclopedia. It was only a paragraph or two about it. It was still running; it was still secret. So they couldn’t say much.
0:06:50 Franklin: Right. Let’s see here. What were your first impressions of the area when you came?
Garcia: Of Hanford?
Franklin: Yeah, of Tri-Cities and Hanford.
0:07:00 Garcia: I drove with some friends from Tacoma to Pullman. We came down that hill. There used to be a restaurant, the Silver Dollar, and there’s a long stretch of road that comes out of Moxee and Yakima, and it was all lit up. It was at night. I said, what is that? Oh, that’s Hanford. And that’s about all they would say. So little did I know, that would be my future. Like I said, it was that history from World War II and the Cold War. And I knew this area—I’d been through here before—was desert. There was dry, sagebrush, cheatgrass. It wasn’t the spectacular part of the Evergreen State, the green part. I knew it was dry and barren. But I was impressed by the Columbia River going through all of this and it was dry almost right up to the shore.
0:08:00 Franklin: Where all onsite did you work?
Garcia: Let’s see. I worked for 20 years at PFP. I worked about a year or so at PUREX. Worked a few months at Tank Farms, one of the Tank Farms. I worked a little while, a few long months, at what they called True Retrieval. They were digging up waste drums and solid, big, giant boxes full of waste.
Franklin: Was that at one of the burial grounds?
0:08:34 Garcia: Yeah. That’s where they would go and dig up stuff out of the burial grounds and then reprocess it and store it in all those big barns across the street from it. And then my last seven or eight years was with MSA, or its forerunner, doing a lot of things. They’re like the—they take care of the electrical grid, they take care of the cranes that work in the Tank Farms, mostly, surveying offices, roads, vegetation, animals. I did a lot of that at the end. That was a nice job. I had a nice little cubicle all my own and worked at my own pace. It was a good job.
0:09:19 Franklin: Oh, wow. So you started as a nuclear process operator.
Garcia: Yeah.
Franklin: Right? At PFP.
Garcia: Yes.
0:09:24 Franklin: And can you describe a typical work day as a nuclear process operator?
Garcia: Well, not long after they started up, we went to shift. X, Y, Z: days, swings and graveyard. So that was something new to me, although I’d worked nights on the grape harvest. We’d come in and we’d get put on our, what we call SWPs, the white cotton clothes. We’d tape on booties and surgeon’s gloves, two pair. Put on a pair of canvas gloves, and we’d go to our office—or the control room. The manager would tell us, this is what we’re going to do today. This is where you’re assigned. It wasn’t exactly a pre-job, which in later years, really took hold. It was more just the assignments. That was pretty much how they did it every day.
0:10:20 The first part of the PFP experience was the solvent extraction part. Getting the plutonium in nitrate solution concentrated to about 300 grams per liter. Then they would store that. After they got enough of it made, then that’s what they would use to make the buttons. So that was a different thing. They shut down the solvent extraction then we’d concentrate and get some training on the button production. We could make about, on a good shift, about six or eight buttons a shift. If things went wrong, not so many.
0:11:00 But I changed. The first buttons we made, I reached into the glovebox and looked at it. They were about the size of the palm of your hand. They’re a gun metal gray, and they’re warm to the touch. Because there’s so much activity. It’s about 99.9% plutonium, which is what they want. And then eventually they would use that to hone the spheres that went into the weapons. And I looked at this button, and I thought, what have I done? I have sold my soul to the devil. Because this thing could kill millions and billions of people. I put it down.
0:11:41 Then I started looking for another angle. That’s when I got into health physics protection. It’s had a number of different names, but it’s pretty much the same job, setting radiation dose rates for workers, contamination checks, and a million other things. So the snarky answer I made up for my relatives and other people is, I protect workers, the environment, and the public from the detrimental effects of ionizing radiation. Because people asked me what I did, and it could take a long time to explain it without giving away too many secrets. So that was the nutshell answer I came up with.
Franklin: That’s pretty good.
0:12:29 Garcia: Thank you. And then later on, they stole my idea and I read that in a textbook. At first, we were radiation monitors, then we were RPTs, radiation protection technologists. Then we got into health physics technologists.
0:12:43 Franklin: Yeah. And that was your way of kind of distancing yourself from directly participating in the production of the weapons-grade—
0:12:55 Garcia: Yeah. I knew I needed a job that paid well and had benefits. And I took less money to do it. I wasn’t married, so I had nobody to account for. So it fit my political philosophy a lot more. And it wasn’t unheard of for somebody to get out of operations and get into radiation protection. But it wasn’t common. But yeah. I was glad I did it. I felt a lot better. And my radiation exposure went down to next to nothing.
Franklin: Right.
0:13:34 Garcia: The first two-and-a-half years or so, you know, my exposure was—you know, not life-threatening, but enough to—yeah. And we would have a meeting and the boss would say, well, if we don’t stop doing this, and if we don’t get this done, we’re all going down the road. But I think what he meant was, he was going down the road. So we’d do better, and still make mistakes. And I just got tired of hearing it. It didn’t motivate me. So I said, well, I’m going to find a job I could maybe take elsewhere.
0:14:08 But working at a reactor, a power reactor, like Energy Northwest or somewhere else, that’s a different ballgame. It’s way different. They’re a lot more educated, they’re a lot more talented, and they’re a lot more independent. We were just sort of side-by-side with the operators. At first, in the old days, they looked to the RMs for guidance and protection. But later on, operations sort of ruled the roost. They weren’t interested, so much, in what you had to say. But still it was important what dose rates you were having or the contamination you might encounter.
0:14:53 Franklin: When you said you could produce—was it six to eight buttons a shift—
Garcia: Yeah.
Franklin: --if things went right; you said, fewer if things could go wrong. What kind of things would complicate the process?
0:15:08 Garcia: Valve leaks, pipe leaks, just like counting leaks, like, were we supposed to have this much material? We only have that much, and then they’d have to look for it. Just breakdowns, mostly mechanical breakdowns. Sometimes in the room, there were the constant air monitors. They were sampling the air, and it had an alarm set point. It had a detector inside of it, and if enough plutonium got on the air sample filter, it would alarm. It would be a red flashing light and a ringing bell. It got your attention.
0:15:45 So you’d have to evacuate the room, because nine times out of ten, you weren’t wearing a respirator. So you had to go out of the room, and then go back—make a plan, and go back on respiratory protection and clean it up. Plutonium oxide is real flighty. It’s almost like alive. You’d have a little bit here and you’d wipe it up, and some of it would go over there. So you were chasing it down. And multiply that by a big room. So that was one of the problems. As well as an internal deposition problem. So that was probably the biggest hold up, was if there was a leak in a glovebox or a bag, then they would seal the material out in like an industrial-strength seal-a-meal. If it sprung a leak, then you’d have to clean it up. Because you couldn’t work effectively with a respirator on. You couldn’t see as well, and it’s a real stressor on the human body.
0:16:42 Franklin: Right, and very hot, too.
Garcia: Yeah, you’d sweat up a storm, break your seal and, yeah. You had to pass a physical every year. Part of it was you’d put on a respirator and you had some sensing tubes in it coming out of it. You’d do, turn your head around, read catchy phrases that’d move all the muscles around in your face, to make sure you were getting an adequate seal. And they had you know, just like canisters that would, the particulates, then they had fresh air, then they had SCBA. And the more of that, was more protection.
Franklin: What’s the SCBA?
Garcia: It’s S—well, that’s what we called it. It was like, on your back like you would wear for scuba diving.
Franklin: Oh, right, right.
0:17:33 Garcia: Yeah. That afforded you a lot of protection, but more mobility. The other type was the fresh air, and that was on a hose that connected to your mask. But you know, you had the risk of breaking the connection in the hose, or somebody would step on the hose and things like. And you’d be dragging this hose around wherever you went. So the SCUBA, I don’t know if you could maybe get 45, 50 minutes out of it. But you had mobility. But when the alarm went off, it was time to go and probably get another bottle. But I’d say probably 80% of my time was on the canister. In the old days, they had a single canister, looked like a World War I gas mask. And then later on they got more modern. But it wasn’t the place to—I thought I was bulletproof. Come to find out, I wasn’t bulletproof.
0:18:30 Franklin: So after the being a nuclear process operator at PFP, you moved into being a health physics tech.
Garcia: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Right? And that was mostly at PUREX? Or no, PFP.
Garcia: Most of it was at PFP. PUREX, Tank Farms, and the other MSA job, the True Retrieval.
0:18:52 Franklin: Could you describe a typical work day as an HPT?
Garcia: Just depending on what you were assigned to. You could be assigned to covering the crane maintenance people. You know, those big giant things, that lift up cover blocks that weighed tons or moving equipment around. You had a lot of independence with that. Your boss wasn’t looking over your shoulder all the time. And he would go meet with like the crane operators, and so, what are you guys doing? Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. So it was different enough everyday but it was similar everyday not to be taken by surprise all the time.
0:19:36 The first thing you would do is you’d come in and you’d set up your instruments. You’d make sure they were in calibration, you made sure they worked right. And you would do a source check with radioactive disks and you’d make sure that you were in your parameters for your instrumentation. Because that’s what it was all about. You were nothing without your instruments. My first mentor, he said, John, don’t go anywhere, in a building or anywhere, without some kind of instrument. Because then what good are you? You might as well be a fencepost. So I always, whatever I did, wherever—I always had instruments, then backups to the instruments. Because you could get pretty far afield and you’d break one or it’d go bad somehow and you would, instead of driving ten miles to go get another one, you’d better have another one in your truck.
0:20:31 Franklin: What kinds of instruments would you use for monitoring?
Garcia: There was a homemade invention developed at Hanford called a CP.
Franklin: A cutie pie.
0:20:43 Garcia: A cutie pie. A lot of the nomenclature for the instruments and almost everything else was secrecy. The CP was pretty much, looked the same from when they invented it. They modified some. It had a cylinder about maybe four or five inches in diameter, about four inches, five inches long. And the radiation would go into the cylinder and it would ionize the air in the cylinder, then it would move a needle.
Franklin: Right, you’d kind of point it at like—
Garcia: Yeah, or do it from the side, yeah.
Franklin: From the side.
0:21:16 Garcia: It had two different kinds, for beta and for gamma, you could take this window off. It made of some plastic-y looking material. Then underneath that was Mylar, it looked a lot like real thin aluminum foil. Then that was for radiation. There were other kinds for that. Then there was what we call a poppy, for alpha. Then there was a GM, a Geiger Mueller. That was for beta-gamma. It looked like a lollipop, only bigger. And it had a screen and the radiation would go through—
Franklin: Right, it had a probe.
Garcia: Right, a probe.
Franklin: We have examples of all of these in our collection.
Garcia: Okay.
0:21:58 Franklin: And so the alpha was used—the poppies were primarily to monitor plutonium.
Garcia: Mm-hmm.
0:22:05 Franklin: Right? What’s the difference between the CP and the GM? Why would one—you know, they both measure beta-gamma. What was each one good at?
Garcia: The saturation point for a GM was pretty low. You could peg it and it wasn’t good anymore to you. It wasn’t made for setting a dose rate; it was to find contamination.
Franklin: I see.
0:22:28 Garcia: The CP was for dose rates. And all the dose rates you set and the contamination found was a legal record. We’d have to write what we call a survey report, after every job or after every day. And the dose rates you wrote down, and you signed your name to it. They’re still on file somewhere, probably in a cold storage place in Seattle. All that stuff is a legal record and it’s been used in litigation. So they really—as time went on, you had to write your survey report correctly, because it had ramifications beyond just that day’s work.
Franklin: Yeah. Yeah.
0:23:11 Garcia: One of the—the coolest job I had was for about six years I surveyed tumbleweeds all over the Site. From Yakima to the Wye Barricade and everywhere in between. Because they would go—the taproot can go about 20 feet, and they would get into contamination, being a very primitive plant. They’re looking for calcium. So cesium and strontium, yeah, that’s just as good to the tumbleweed. And they would soak it up. Because they only live about a year, they would get into the root primarily, and they would break off and roll around. So we would survey the root, the stem, and if they were contaminated—and maybe 3% were—we’d put that in a special truck and then they would take that to ERDF and bury those.
0:24:02 But the rest of them, they would put in a regular old white garbage truck-looking thing and take that to a pit. After they got enough of them, they would burn them. And you’ve never seen a fire till you’ve seen a tumbleweed fire. You could be 100 yards away and still feel the heat. They get pretty hot. I thought maybe they could make starter sticks out of them for campers. They never found anything useful for a tumbleweed.
0:24:32 That was a good job. I got to see a lot of stuff. Especially as an HPT. And in that particular assignment, a lot of places that other people never went to, didn’t have a chance to go to. Because they were stuck in their little facility and couldn’t get out.
Franklin: So you’d kind of go out into the natural environment.
Garcia: Yeah.
0:24:53 Franklin: Did you ever find much evidence, artifacts from the pre-Manhattan Project settlers--
Garcia: Well—
Franklin: --that were evicted?
0:25:00 Garcia: Well, yeah. Yeah. But pretty much that had been cleaned up, and we knew better than to mess with it. We just left it in place. We might tell our manager, he might tell somebody, you know, they found this, this tool or coin or something. But most of it was pretty gone. We never went much into the old town site. A few times, but mostly the tumbleweed search was around Tank Farms. Because they didn’t want contaminated tumbleweeds blowing into the Tank Farms and creating a problem. But yeah we went to a lot of places.
0:25:38 Franklin: What was the most challenging aspect of your work at Hanford?
Garcia: Probably convincing workers that I was there for their best interest. Sometimes they would disagree or want to fight or just were stubborn. And their managers, besides. Because it was production versus safety. Even though they may preach and talk, yeah, safety over production, that wasn’t always the case. They were under pressure to produce the plutonium or to get so much stuff cleaned up or whatever. I could see their point, but at the same time, I never had to put myself between them and harm’s way to protect them. But that was probably the biggest challenge.
0:26:33 Being an introvert, for the most part, I had to have a different personality at Hanford than I did at home or anywhere else. And it was exhausting. I had to like, grr. Some people, it didn’t faze them because they were an extrovert all the time. We even had a few patrolmen, when they cut back on the number of patrolmen, who transferred into radiation protection. They had, for most of them, that worked perfectly, because they were used to chewing people out and trying to straighten people out. And I, you know, I would try to be diplomatic, if not polite, trying to tell people what kind of mistake or what ramifications it might have. Sometimes they would listen sometimes not.
0:27:21 So it was—because from what I understand, people that are from 18 to 25—don’t take this personally—they think they are bulletproof. That’s why a young man will get off a landing craft and run onto the beach in northern France. Because they don’t think anything’s going to happen to them. And peer pressure. And a lot of these guys I worked with, that was their age frame, and they thought they were bulletproof. They weren’t going to get contaminated, they weren’t going to get internal deposition. But a lot of them did.
Franklin: Right, they just wanted to make some money.
Garcia: Yeah.
Franklin: Right?
0:27:54 Garcia: They wanted to make money and they didn’t think there was anything to worry about.
Franklin: Yeah.
Garcia: Maybe that was a defense mechanism; I don’t know. But I had healthy respect for it. But then I was a little older.
0:28:04 Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. What was the most rewarding aspect of your work at Hanford?
Garcia: Probably bailing people out of dicey situations. Decontaminating their skin. Checking their nose for contamination, and just occasionally pulling them out of the fire. Some of them thanked me, and some of them didn’t. I’d almost—I didn’t live for it, but I didn’t back away from it. Sometimes one of those cam alarms would go off and there’s a room full of people. Then you’ve really got a situation. And I liked doing it. I just wanted to help them out. I knew how they felt: it happened to me. I wanted to make sure that they went home in good shape. And I never had anybody get hurt or really get into a bad situation.
0:29:04 Franklin: Right on. What were some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history such as plants shutting down?
Garcia: I think 100-N, when that shut down, it had a ripple effect. You could kind of tell things weren’t going to be the same. And then when they decided they couldn’t run the Plutonium Finishing Plant anymore, they had a lot of excess material that they needed to stabilize. The biggest problem was carbon tetrachloride. They couldn’t find a substitute for it that worked as well in their system. So they tried a number of things and when they came to the realization that they couldn’t do it again, then they shut PFP down. They stabilized the material as best they could, and then shut it down. But that took like about ten years to finally realize, yeah, this isn’t going to work anymore.
Franklin: Ten years after--?
Garcia: After the initial shutdown. After the Cold War shut down.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
0:30:17 Garcia: I never thought it would happen. I thought, you know, the Soviet Union would exist forever, and we’d be making plutonium and nuclear weapons—forever. I read a book earlier this year by Daniel Ellsberg. When that movie came out about the Pentagon Papers? He was also a nuclear war planner. And not only did he steal the Pentagon Papers, he stole a lot of material about weapons and nuclear war. He said that this mutually assured destruction was the craziest idea in the history of the human race, because nobody was going to win. The planet would be destroyed. Every body and every thing would die. Because of the power of those weapons and everything, we would create the nuclear winter. It gave me another perspective. I’m like, God! I really sold my soul to the devil. And his dad was an engineer and a plant designer, and he helped design PUREX and a few of the other places. I never heard that till I read his book.
Franklin: Huh.
Garcia: So, yeah, that was quite an awakening, too.
Franklin: Oh, I bet.
Garcia: But I was retired, so I was innocent after that. No, I did my share.
Franklin: Wow.
0:31:43 Garcia: But I would talk to people and said, hey, what do you think of this? Don’t you think this is bad? And I would pick my subjects very carefully. Because you didn’t know. There were still, you know—secrecy; the FBI would send you questionnaires and things like that. And it got worse as time went on. And most people said, yeah, there’s a thousand other people that would take my job tomorrow. So it doesn’t matter that I’m doing it, because somebody else will do it. So I pretty much left it at that. I only tried that question two or three times.
0:32:22 The secrecy got changed. At first it was like, you didn’t say a word. The old days, you didn’t tell your wife and kids or relatives what you did. And that pretty much stayed the same until the Cold War had been over for a little while. After some time, they had another level of security and you had to take a psychological test on paper and on a computer and fill out more forms and answer more questions. You know, you had to live pretty much a boy scout lifestyle. But the Tri-Cities always had this squeaky-clean reputation to some people. But underneath the surface. [LAUGHTER] Not so much. There’s a lot of stuff going on. So that was at my time at PFP.
0:33:22 Then when I left that, I got out of that program. Where I worked wasn’t as secure. I didn’t have gates to go through. You had the Wye or the Yakima gate. And then there was another gate, closer in 200-West, 200-East and they would search your trunk, open up your glovebox—or from Idaho, jockey box. You couldn’t say, no. Because otherwise, adios. And that died off. They got rid of those 2-East and 2-West gates and it was just the one, and that was mostly a guy looking at your badge and waving you through.
Franklin: Yeah, looking at your badge and then—
Garcia: Yeah.
0:34:00 Franklin: Yeah, yeah, because when I go on Site to do artifact evaluations, it’s always—I think that’s a lot of security, but I mean, I wasn’t here in the Cold War days, you know. Because also to get into PFP there was also security at the entrance, too, right?
Garcia: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Where they checked your bags, you had to go through like a metal detector and everything.
Garcia: Yup.
Franklin: So there were several layers. And PFP was also surrounded by, like, anti-tank, there were some anti-tank things and like guard shacks and things like that.
0:34:40 Garcia: Yeah. Yeah, I was going to get to that. Yeah, there were two fences, barbed wire. There were sensors on wires or in the ground. And then the rooms were locked. You couldn’t just go in because you wanted to, in most areas. You had to have somebody open the combination or with a key, and most often you had to have another person with you. You had to have a reason to be there, and you had to have your badge on. Once in a while you’d find somebody that left it behind somewhere. And there were cameras on the outside and on the inside. And PUREX was pretty much the same way. You know, the fences and the guards and the cameras. So yeah. The other places, not so much.
0:35:27 Franklin: It’s funny you mentioned that question that you asked, that kind of tricky question. It’s a question I myself wrestle with. I’m also not from here, and I’ve always—it’s a question I’m always very interested to ask but don’t ask very often. You know? But I’m curious to ask you later about it, if you want to answer it.
Garcia: Okay. No problem. I haven’t asked anyone that question in a long time.
0:35:58 Franklin: I bet. I bet not. I mean, my last question I ask is, what do you want future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? And usually the answer I get is about World War II, the bomb won the war. I didn’t ask them about World War II. I’ve always found that was a very interesting way of viewing the Cold War through the lens of the “good” war. But anyway. So I guess that gives you a little time to think about how you want to answer that question, too. I’ll ask that one later; I like to conclude with that.
Garcia: Okay, cool.
Franklin: I’m just foreshadowing, I guess, for you now.
Garcia: All right. I’ll use part of my brain to think about that.
0:36:45 Franklin: I wanted to ask you about, so you had been working out at PFP during the Chernobyl incident.
Garcia: Oh, I was at PUREX then.
Franklin: PUREX, sorry, okay.
Garcia: Which has its own story.
Franklin: You were out on Site.
Garcia: Yeah.
Franklin: How did that affect Hanford, and how did that affect the community?
0:37:04 Garcia: That was one factor in the shutting down N. Because they were similar, but not identical. Though, somehow, I understand that the Russians would pull the fuel from the top. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I’m wrong. But at B and all the other reactors, N, they would push the fuel out the back. It would fall in a big water basin. So, when that problem erupted, literally, they said, well, you know, these are too similar. They had shut it down to do some maintenance—long-term maintenance, and then they never started it up again. That was a ripple effect from Chernobyl.
0:37:47 When I was at PUREX, we had these about half-a-meter square tables. They were about a meter off the ground and had plastic coating on them. There were a couple dozen of those. So we would take a technical smear that was on this funny paper. And then you would check it with your instrument. And my manager said, well, when you’re outside doing that routine, be sure you check all those tables, because Chernobyl fallout is predicted to come this way. I never found any. The tables were really there for stuff coming out of the PUREX stack. But I never found anything from Chernobyl. That only lasted a few weeks, and then we never did that again.
0:38:37 Franklin: Was it a flashpoint in how people viewed Hanford?
Garcia: Not that I recall. Most people were there to do their job, and they just wanted to get through the day, through the year, through their career. It never—there may have been other parts of the community that really got excited about Chernobyl and how Hanford was similar, but not to my knowledge.
Franklin: Hmm. Were there any events or incidences that happened at Hanford while you were working out there that stand out to you?
Garcia: Hanford-wise?
Franklin: Yeah.
0:39:26 Garcia: There were so many. Where to—[LAUGHTER] What to choose? Not so much. I think one—it wasn’t Hanford-related but it was another turning point. When the Russians shot down that Korean airplane that had wandered into their airspace. That gave me a little more resolve and understanding why all of this had to be, like it or not. I guess, just shutting down PFP, shutting down PUREX and the last reactor, N. Those were big dominoes that fell. But I knew, being higher on the seniority list and having a job that was pretty necessary that it wasn’t going to affect me.
Franklin: What—oh, sorry.
0:40:25 Garcia: Oh, when people would get laid off from other crafts, it did bother me. You know, people that you knew or just remotely knew. I knew that their lives were going to be turned upside-down. And it bothered me.
Franklin: Was there a general feeling of anxiety during the shut down or the change, the switch from production to clean up?
0:40:49 Garcia: Yeah, because you didn’t know what to expect. When it was in production days, you know, you had this goal to make as much plutonium as you could. But after that was over, the clean up days, it was a rollercoaster. You didn’t know what to expect from one day, one month, one year to the next. And maybe they didn’t either. If the funding was different from year to year. You just didn’t exactly know what to do or what they expected. So, yeah, that was—there was a change. And I used to tell people, you know, it was more fun making bombs than it was cleaning up. Because the regs were all different, the goals were all different. But you knew in the button production days that, yeah, that was what you were here for, whether you agreed or disagreed or not.
Franklin: Right, it’s kind of like, where to start? Right? Like, where do you—spent 40 years making this big mess.
Garcia: Yeah.
Franklin: 45 years.
0:42:02 Garcia: They’ve still got a ways to go. I’m not sure how the Vit Plant’s going to turn out. I mean, there’s three or four big, huge buildings, 88 feet tall, 90 feet long, four, five feet of concrete where the chemical separations was done. Like PUREX, B and T Plant. Good luck!
Franklin: Well, and you heard about the recent teardown of PFP, right? A building you worked at, where they found contamination well outside—not high levels—but contamination well outside the projected footprint of where it would be.
0:42:46 Garcia: I was a little angry and a little disappointed, and I just couldn’t understand why they could take down a plutonium facility out in the open air. Maybe they could’ve put a big tent over it or something. Whoever sees this, yeah. [LAUGHTER] You’re crazy! You know, they did the best they could, I guess. They would put blue goo on it to hold the contamination down. They would use big water cannons to water it down. And it just got away from them because of production and money pressure, in my way of thinking. When they first started tearing it down, I was long gone, because I could see the handwriting n the wall. They thought they could turn it into another Rocky Flats. And that’s pretty much how they did Rocky Flats, which--
Franklin: What would that involve? Sorry, I’m not—
0:43:47 Garcia: You know, the blue goo, the water cannons, and just a big crane with a great big chomping device. Chomp down the walls, the pipes, anything inside, and then put it in these big, long semi, like a semi trailer-size containers, and then take that to the ERDF place and put it in the ground.
And I think they pretty much did something similar at Rocky Flats, and that was a real small facility compared to Hanford. I think Rocky Flats was about the size of the 300 Area. They got that done quickly but maybe not so successfully. So a lot of those guys, managers and workers, came to Hanford from Rocky when the things wound down, and they thought they could do the same thing here as they did there. And it was just a different way of thinking. Everything was just too different to fit into their mold. So yeah.
0:44:55 It was not a good idea. It really makes me sad. Especially for those workers that inhaled it. My goal always was on any job, that was a failure point to me, if anyone got internal deposition. It happened a couple times and I felt awful for months. It does damage to your body. There’s ways to get it out, but I just didn’t want to look that person in the eye and say, I’m sorry, but—
0:45:27 There for a while, the training philosophy was a rem is a rem—a rem is a measurement of radiation. And whether it’s inside your body or goes through you, like an x-ray or a gamma ray or neutrons. Any body, having it in your body is a different mindset. Even though they can give you the DTPA shot and get most of it out of you, or you can drink a lot of beer and get a lot of it out of you. Just, that’s a different way of thinking.
Franklin: Is there something special about beer? Or it’s just a fluid?
Garcia: Diuretic.
Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah.
0:46:12 Garcia: When I first got to PFP as an HPT, we had a meeting with the dosimetry boss and he said, everybody in here has plutonium in them. Well, yeah, that’s the first name of the place, Plutonium Finishing Plant. So it wasn’t a surprise, but it was just another reality check. Because you know you go into a room, do a job, even if the cam didn’t go off, there’s still some in there. Your instruments are only so sensitive. Otherwise, you could make them more sensitive but they’d be useless. You might say something is clean, but it might be just below the threshold. So he told us different ways to avoid a problem.
0:47:01 But, yeah, I’m—They would give us a lung count, these sensitive devices, sensors on your chest or you’d lean up against the sensors. And then the real fun was your annual bioassay. [LAUGHTER] They’d drop this kit of five, six bottles, and you would urinate in them and turn them in in a few days. And if things really went bad, the fecal sample kit. I only had to do that a couple times. But, you know, they boil it down, cook it down, and then use really sensitive instruments to count how much you encountered. But, yeah. [LAUGHTER] I’d almost forgotten about those things!
Franklin: We have a couple examples of those, unused in our collection.
Garcia: Okay.
Franklin: Yeah, when we do exhibitions or bring them out, they always get a—people will be like, oh yeah! I forgot about that thing.
0:48:00 Garcia: Yeah, I’m sure. You kind of have to delete some of your files. And then those people that had the problem at PFP, they had to do that. The urine and the fecal. But we’ll see, we’ll see, who reaps the whirlwind. That’s from some classic book. And I’m afraid some of the workers are going to pay the price. Because I’ve read articles and books about workers from Oak Ridge and other places. The guy’s got a table full of medicine, and most of it’s related to his work in the nuclear industry. So some of these guys, as bulletproof as they may think they are, they will, down the road, something’s going to give. And I feel bad about that.
0:48:54 Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Garcia: The rooms were locked up for the most part. You know, all the gates and fences and stuff, you had to fill out a questionnaire every five years or at random. They’d call your boss up, say, send so-and-so over. You had to give another drug screening sample. Or fill out the questionnaire, or just, if somebody had run into a security problem, they would ask you what kind of person is this? Has he ever said anything threatening to the country or to the plant?
0:49:42 And it wasn’t with the FBI, but I had some problems in my younger years and I sought counseling and I didn’t disclose that. Because I knew what they would do, what they would think. So somehow or another I thought they found out. [LAUGHTER] And they put me in this little room, and, yeah. That was another tough hour. But nothing came of it, but I told them, I said, I understand why you think this, but there’s a long line of people that have marital problems, psychological problems, drug and alcohol problems that you should worry about more than me. I was just, you know. I had some emotional issues. I never heard any more about it. After I signed the papers and got out of that little tiny room, I never heard any more about it.
0:50:41 But, yeah, the security was always on your mind. People, unless you were another Hanford person, you really didn’t talk to other people much about it. I know one of my first bosses when we first started up PFP, he said, don’t say anything. It was like the World War II days, almost. So I got on a bus to come to PFP, the whole bus was talking about it. That had just worn off; they didn’t understand the significance from the old days. So that was okay.
0:51:17 Franklin: Were there any old-timers there when you started work?
Garcia: A few. A few that had worked at the reactors. I don’t think anybody from the World War II days was still around. They’d either retired or died. But I had a couple guys I worked with that were pretty close to retirement that had worked at the other reactors in the Cold War days. They had some stories. And if they had a story to tell, I wanted to listen to it. Because they had a vast amount of experience and knowledge. And even if I’d heard the story before, I wanted to hear it again. But for the most part, they kept us away from the old-timers, because they didn’t want us to learn their tricks and their bad habits. They wanted us to be a new generation that followed the procedures, did what our managers said, and weren’t going too cowboy. Later on, we did. But at first they didn’t want their bad habits to rub off on us.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s funny, because I’ve heard a lot of stories, too. I mean, that’s the nature of doing oral history, but, yeah.
0:52:25 Garcia: Did anyone ever tell you about this guy named Don, who was a control room operator at PFP? And a DOE tour came. So Don is sitting there at the console with his feet up, reading the newspaper, which was a no-no, twice. So his manager was leading the tour and he said, Don, what are you doing? Shouldn’t you be paying attention? And he said, you know, if I’m up here calling down valve changes to the floors below in the gloveboxes and the dials are going crazy, you’re losing money. But when things are calm and running smooth and I can read my newspaper, you’re making money. [LAUGHTER] And they left him alone.
He was one of those guys, you could call up in the dead of night and say, Don, this is doing that, and that’s doing this, what do we do? And he would know. He probably should’ve been something more than just a nuclear process operator, but he had years of experience and he knew what it was all about. So, yeah.
Franklin: Wow.
Garcia: He was pretty cool.
Franklin: That’s crazy. That’s a good story. So we’re at the last question now.
Garcia: Okay.
0:53:36 Franklin: And that is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War?
Garcia: [SIGH] That it was a dangerous job, a crazy job, but a job that could be done safely. For whatever detrimental effects it was to the workers and obviously to the environment. I’m sorry. But I think Hanford was run better than maybe in North Korea or in the Soviet Union. They respected the life and the health and the skills of the workers at Hanford more than at other places. Places, not ever having seen or encountered anybody; I just have that notion. And the legacy that Hanford has left, in terms of all the nuclear weapons, all the contaminated ground and water. I’m sorry it happened, but it had to be done for its own reasons and in its own way.
0:54:45 But I didn’t feel any more patriotic when I was doing it and I don’t feel anymore patriotic about it now. But, yeah, the men and women that worked out there, a lot of them I still remember, still talk to, and they worked hard. It was a dangerous, sometimes crazy job. I don’t want any flowers or trumpets; it was just a job and everybody tried to do it—well, almost everybody tried to do it well and safely. And if we’ve left some problems behind, well, sorry, good luck. That’ll be your thing to handle.
Franklin: Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to come and interview with us today. I really enjoyed your very thoughtful responses.
Garcia: Well, thank you.
Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to say before we turn the camera off?
Garcia: No. I think I’ve about said it all. I gave this—I even had some time to give it a lot of thought, and I’ve pretty much said everything I thought of.
Franklin: Great. Awesome. Well, thank you.
Duration
Bit Rate/Frequency
Hanford Sites
Plutonium Finishing Plant
PUREX
Tank Farms
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Years on Hanford Site
Files
