Steve Wodka
speaker
46 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Steve Wodka’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They open up the garage. And these three people show up. Well, only two of them were with the AEC.
In order to survey things for plutonium, like a spiral notebook with 50 pages in it, you just can't just wand around. the top of it and say it's clean. You've got to go page by page by page to see if there's any contamination in it.
Fagan tells me right off the bat that she fell asleep and went off the side of the road. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you don't understand. She was just on the highway for a few minutes.
And I'll never forget Fagan saying, look, In my mind, she fell asleep at the wheel of the car unless you can prove it differently. And that started in my mind the fact that, now wait a minute, the fix is in. Something is going on here. How could this guy just shut the door in my face? He's supposed to be an investigating officer.
And we ripped the box open and went through everything and there was nothing in there about quality control.
Now, this car had hit this concrete wing wall going 40 to 45 miles an hour. Silkwood was impaled on the steering wheel. But yet, he says there's these two piles of paper sitting on the back seat. It defies the law of gravity.
This is a muddy craft site. There is this reddish Oklahoma mud on the left-hand driver's side of the car. You got these three guys sitting there, papers scattered all over the place. Not one piece of the papers that were given to us had any mud on them. No mud whatsoever on the stuff that was given to us.
If she truly had fallen asleep at the wheel, she'd be alive. She would have lived. So only by being awake... and trying to hold this car on course, which you have the trajectory that she did.
To me, it was more like an amateur job. Somebody else who, much, much lower, someone who didn't have access to the corporate power, someone whose job would have been directly on the line, realized what was going on with the documents. I think that they probably had the most to lose.
operation.
They didn't seek to negotiate with its unions. They sought to impose a contract on the workers. And if the workers didn't like the contract, they could go out and strike. And in fact, from late 72 to early 73, there was a nine-week strike.
And if you run a safe plant, if you really take the precautions, it cuts into profit.
The OCAW was, in the early 70s, was a very male-dominated union. The industries that we represent, oil refining, chemical plants, huge nuclear facilities, these were all male-dominated plants. And it was highly unusual that women worked anywhere and that a woman had risen to to a position of leadership in the local union.
Because the company's handling of plutonium were governed by the Atomic Energy Commission. This agency had regulations. It had the power to take...
So part of the whole issue was not only was the company doing bad things, but that the Atomic Energy Commission itself hadn't been enforcing the law, hadn't been protecting the workers. And this was the problem. with the Atomic Energy Commission in that they had not come down on this company, even though it was clear that this company was routinely violating the conditions of its license.
You have to understand, there were all these contamination incidents at the plant leading up through to 1974. Kerbegee was never fined a dollar.
So I'm working with them and we're going over everything. And then this whole issue of quality control starts coming up. And it's something we had never heard of before and something we had never dealt with before.
They said, Material and rods that should have failed were being passed. And we think you should know about that.
The more we thought about this, it was, you know, there could be a meltdown.
We said, okay, look, we've never heard of something like this before. And if you're going to level a charge like this against Kern-McGee, it's got to be documented. People have got to see it. how and where the quality control tests and checks were falsified.
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