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Former wife of deceased nuclear worker seeks benefits
By THOMAS MICHALSKI
Article published on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 |
TREASURE ISLAND – Marjorie O. Breton now lives alone in a modest house off of Gulf Boulevard.
It’s the same place where she took care of her husband, Richard, a former hazmat employee at Largo’s Pinellas Plant where nuclear weapon parts were manufactured from 1957 through the early 1990s.
She took care of him as various forms of cancer robbed him of his life.
And now the U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Energy Employees’ Occupational Illness Compensation, claims that his cancers were not job-related.
“I still miss him, and I will always miss him,” Breton said as she leafed through an album of photographs that were taken in better times.
Described as a vibrant man, he lifted weights to stay in shape. Richard Breton worked at Pinellas Plant for nearly 20 years. He worked in the waste management division and was a member of the hazmat or Hazardous Materials Team.
His wife said one of his jobs was clearing contaminants from the 97-acre plant property that today is the Pinellas County-owned and operated Young-Rainey STAR Center at 7887 Bryan Dairy Road.
Between 250 and 300 55-gallon drums of contaminated materials, reportedly both solids and liquids, allegedly were buried up to 30 feet below the surface.
“It was a very high security area in those days,” Breton said. “He worked in short sleeves with no protection at all when he was excavating those barrels.”
Indeed, Breton still has her husband’s flimsy yellow work coat he sometimes wore at work. He didn’t talk much about what he did at Pinellas Plant because it was all top secret.
One day Richard Breton went to the dentist. A small growth was discovered inside his cheek. It was removed. Then other growths were discovered in his nose, and then in his throat, and later on his neck and chest.
“We were so happy together,” his wife said. “Then he became sicker and sicker.”
She took care of him to the end when it came on Jan. 9, 2004.
Richard Breton was only 56 years old.
“At the end he couldn’t even eat,” she said. “The saliva glands were gone. He had to constantly drink liquids to prevent complete dryness of the mouth.”
It was Richard Breton himself who started the ball rolling for federal benefits. Final word came on April 14, 2007.
“I regret that I could not provide a favorable decision,” wrote Rhonda Robertson-Chappelle, hearing representative for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Final Adjudication Branch.
In an accompanying “statement of the case,” the government said the survivor claims were denied because it was not “at least as likely as not that your husband’s throat cancer, cancer of the maxillary sinus and skin cancer were related to his employment at a DOE (Department of Energy) facility.”
Marjorie Breton submitted information that said her husband’s exposure was related to “removing old buried waste material that most likely was in the ground much longer than records of its composition were available.”
She did not submit requested medical evidence that her husband’s workplace was a significant factor in causing, aggravating or contribution to his cancers.
Part of the problem is that Pinellas Plant workers were disallowed from talking about what they did at work. Thus, some of the information requested by the government went with Richard Breton to his grave.
That means wives and children of victims don’t even know in what parts of the Pinellas Plant campus their loved ones worked in, let alone describe their actual jobs.
So Marjorie Breton and many in her position are left with nothing. In her case Richard left a mortgage-free house and a small savings so his wife could live in some semblance of comfort.
Some survivors don’t even have that.
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Article published on Tuesday, March 11, 2008
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