Karen Silkwood

Education and personal life

Karen Gay Silkwood was born in 1946 in Longview, Texas, and raised in Nederland, Texas. She lived with her mother Merle, father Bill, and sisters Rosemary and Linda. In high school, Karen was a straight 'A' student and a member of the National Honor Society. Chemistry was her best subject. In the fall of 1964, she enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas on a scholarship from the Business and Professional Women's Club.

In 1965, Silkwood dropped out of college and eloped with William Meadows, an oil pipeline worker, with whom she had three children. After the couple filed for bankruptcy due to Meadows' excessive spending habits, and after his refusal to end an extramarital affair, Silkwood left him in 1972 and relocated to Oklahoma City where she worked briefly as a hospital clerk.

Employment and union activities

In August 1972, Silkwood was hired as a metallography laboratory technician with the Kerr-McGee Corporation at their Cimarron River plutonium production plant near Crescent, Oklahoma that had opened two years prior. She also joined the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) local.

In November 1972, when the union's contract had expired, she participated in a strike to protest poor working conditions. Kerr-McGee succeeded in breaking the strike by hiring people from the surrounding area to cross the picket line. The company's managers also began "working behind the scenes to entice workers to sign a petition calling for a decertification election to eliminate the union." The strike ended after ten weeks after employees were threatened with termination. In the early part of 1974, Kerr-McGee was behind in production and began to schedule employees to work seven-day workweeks as well as twelve hour shifts. The plant experienced a sudden increase in spills and contamination events. On July 13, 1974, almost two years into her employment, Silkwood experienced her first contamination which occurred in the emission spectroscopy lab. Testing discovered contamination within the air filter.

In August 1974, Silkwood was elected to the OCAW local's three-person bargaining committee, the first woman to hold such a position at Kerr-McGee. It was a critical time for the local as the decertification drive had collected enough signatures to force an election on October 16. Silkwood's specific union duties included investigating health and safety issues. She discovered at the Cimarron plant what she considered to be numerous violations of health regulations, such as exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment, and improper storage of samples. She believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities was increasing the risk of employee contamination. She also found evidence of missing or misplaced plutonium.

On September 26, 1974, Silkwood and the two other committee members attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., with Tony Mazzocchi, OCAW's legislative director. The committee members voiced their complaints about the dangerous workplace conditions and sought advice on how to win the upcoming decertification election. In their discussions, Mazzocchi learned that the committee members (and presumably the rest of the Cimarron plant) were not adequately informed about the hazardous material they were working with. He later wrote, "When I explained the connection between plutonium exposure and cancer, it took Karen by surprise." And so they made plans that day to have two atomic scientists from the University of Minnesota come speak to the Cimarron workers. Mazzocchi recalled how Silkwood took him aside at one point and said, "You know, there's some other problems that I'd like to talk to you about.":I said, "What are they?" She said, "I work in a quality-control lab, and I noticed the lab technician would use a felt pen on the X-ray to cover over that little thin line that showed a crack in the control rod welds." And she told me there was some fooling with the computer data, too. I said, "Look, Karen, if you could prove that, I think we could use it to beat the company and improve the conditions in that facility." At the conclusion of the meeting, Mazzocchi and his staffer Steve Wodka counseled that the best hope for survival of the Cimarron workers and their local was to raise awareness about Kerr-McGee's practices with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the national press.

Death

By November, Silkwood believed she had assembled sufficient documentation, including company papers, to corroborate her claims against Kerr-McGee. She decided to go public with this evidence and contacted David Burnham, a New York Times journalist whom Tony Mazzocchi referred her to. Burnham had previously broken the Frank Serpico police corruption case and was now researching atomic energy issues.

On November 13, 1974, Silkwood attended a 5:30 p.m. union meeting, along with ten other members of the OCAW local, at the Hub Cafe in Crescent. She made a brief presentation and sipped iced tea. Another attendee at the meeting, Wanda Jean Jung, stated in a sworn affidavit in January 1975 that Silkwood had a folder, a spiral notebook, and a packet of documents with her at the cafe. During a break in the meeting, Jung said she spoke with Silkwood who was crying quietly and admitted how frightened she was "that she had been so badly contaminated, she would eventually get cancer and die from the plutonium in her lungs." But then, Jung stated in her affidavit, Karen pointed to her documents and said, "there was one thing she was glad about ... that she had all the proof concerning falsification of records. As she said this, she clenched her hand more firmly on the folder and notebook she was holding. She told me she was on her way to meet Steve Wodka and a New York Times reporter ... to give them this material."

At 7:10 p.m., Silkwood left the meeting, got into her 1973 white Honda Civic and drove alone toward Oklahoma City, about 30 miles (48 km) away, to meet with Burnham and Wodka. Less than 30 minutes later, Silkwood's body was discovered in her smashed-up car, 7.3 miles from the cafe. The car had run off the left side of State Highway 74, traveled some distance along the grass shoulder, and then struck the wing wall of a concrete culvert 0.11 miles (180 m) south of the intersection with West Industrial Road (35.85°N 97.58°W / 35.85; -97.58). The impact from hitting the wall caused her to be impaled by her steering wheel and pinned to the roof of the Honda Civic. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Silkwood's car contained none of the documents she had been holding in the meeting at the Hub Cafe. The Oklahoma state trooper at the crash site remembers that he found one or two tablets of the sedative methaqualone (Quaalude) in the car, and what he believed were two marijuana joints. The coroner found 0.35 milligrams of methaqualone in her blood—"a therapeutic dose is .25 mg, a toxic dose, .50 mg." The Oklahoma Highway Patrol report concluded that she fell asleep at the wheel and died as a result of an accident.

Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee

In November 1976, Karen's father Bill Silkwood and his attorney Daniel Sheehan filed a complaint against Kerr-McGee for gross negligence in handling the plutonium that contaminated her. Bill Silkwood asked for $160,000 "for Karen's loss of property, personal injury, and mental anguish, and as a punishment to Kerr-McGee and the others named in the complaint."

The months leading up to the trial were likewise filled with controversy. According to Rashke, officials investigating Kerr-McGee's operations and the circumstances of the car crash were themselves at risk: "People had been tailed and forced off lonely roads by speeding cars. Two shadowy characters about to be subpoenaed suddenly packed up their attaché cases and fled to West Germany. One apparently healthy police officer about to be deposed died of a heart attack. There was no autopsy. Someone tried to murder a Kerr-McGee manager who knew too much. Someone tried to assassinate Bill Taylor, the chief investigator for the legal team representing the Silkwood family. And then there were all those strange clicks on everyone's telephone."

The trial occurred in spring of 1979. Gerry Spence was the chief attorney for the Silkwood estate, assisted by Daniel Sheehan, Arthur Angel and James Ikard. William Paul was chief attorney for Kerr-McGee. The plaintiff presented evidence that the autopsy showed Silkwood was contaminated with plutonium at the time of her death. To prove the contamination was sustained at the plant, evidence was given by a series of witnesses who were former employees of the facility.

The defense relied on expert witness Dr. George Voelz, a high-ranking scientist at Los Alamos. Voelz said he believed the contamination in Silkwood's body was within legal standards. The defense later proposed that Silkwood was a troublemaker who might have poisoned herself. After the summation arguments, Judge Frank Theis told the jury, "[I]f you find that the damage to the person or property of Karen Silkwood resulted from the operation of this plant ... defendant Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation is liable...."

The jury rendered its verdict of US$505,000 in damages and US$10,000,000 in punitive damages. On appeal in federal court, the judgment was reduced to US$5,000 (the estimated value of Silkwood's losses in property at her rental house), and the award for punitive damages was reversed. In Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp. 464 US 238 (1984), the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the original jury verdict. The court ruled that "the NRC's exclusive authority to set safety standards did not foreclose the use of state tort remedies." Although indicating it would appeal for other reasons, Kerr-McGee agreed in 1986 to settle out of court for US$1.38 million ($4.05 million today), while admitting no liability.

In media

The 1979 movie The China Syndrome includes a scene that echoes the Silkwood story: a courier, with evidence of falsified radiographs from a nuclear power plant, is rammed from behind and forced off the road while driving to a nuclear safety and plant licensing hearing. Unlike Silkwood, the courier does not die in the crash, but the radiographs are stolen from his car.

Silkwood was portrayed on stage by actress Jehane Dyllan in the one-person play Silkwood, which Dyllan scripted along with Susan Holleran and Bobbi Ausubel. Ausubel also directed the piece. It ran April 7–12, 1981 at Theater Works, UMass-Park Square in Boston.

The 1983 movie Silkwood is an account of Silkwood's life and the events resulting from her activism, based on an original screenplay by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. Meryl Streep played the title role and was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA. Cher played Dolly Pelliker, a character based on Karen's friend and roommate Sherri Ellis, and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. Mike Nichols was nominated for Best Director. Ephron and Arlen were nominated for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.

The 2012 movie Cloud Atlas contains a plotline which echoes the Silkwood case: a journalist and a whistleblower investigating a nuclear power plant for malfeasance, end up rammed off of a lonely highway bridge by a suspicious car, and assassinated in a hotel room by mysterious agent, respectively.

PBS Frontline produced the program Nuclear Reaction, which contained aspects of the Silkwood story. The program's website includes supplementary text about her that was first printed on November 23, 1995 in Los Alamos Science. The program covered the risks of nuclear energy and raised questions about corporate accountability and responsibility.