![]() Last November, antinuclear groups around the country held demonstrations marking the fourth anniversary of her death. As the lawsuit underwent pretrial preparation, the Silkwood case became the subject of increasing publicity. On March 6, 1976, Miss Silkwood's family filed a Multimillion‐dollar lawsuit against Kerr‐McGee. In December 1975, barely a year after Miss Silkwood's death, KerrMcGee closed the Cimarron plant and reported that it had found 90 pounds of plutonium missing from its stocks. opened an investigation of alleged safety violations at the Kerr‐McGee plant but reported finding only three violations.įour months later the Justice Department, despite the union's contentions that Miss Silkwood's car had been forced off the road by another, decided that there was no evidence to suggest anything other than an accidental death.Īltbol►gh the circumstances of Miss Silkwood's death were not an issue in the lawsuit that was decided yesterday in her favor by a Federal jury in Oklahoma City, suspicions about how she had died made her name a national catchword, not only for critics of nuclear energy but also for an increasing variety of political groups, including the National Organization for Women, which in August 1975 asked for another Justice Department investigation of the case.Įleanor Smeal, the national president of NOW, said in a statement yesterday that the decision in favor of Miss Silkwood's estate was “particularly gratifying” to the organization, which had viewed the Silkwood case as ‘'a symbol of feminist concerns about health and safety in the workplace.” In January 1975, at the request of union officials, the A. Although the police ruled her death an accident, nuclear critics and union officials suggested that her car might have been bumped from behind by someone wanting to frighten her or silence her. 13, 1974, while Miss Silkwood was driving to that meeting, her car, a Honda Civic, swerved to the left across Highway 74 outside Oklahoma City, skidded along an embankment and came to rest in a culvert. Miss Silkwood, who was then 28 years old, conferred with union officials and made arrangements to meet with David Burnham, a reporter for The New York Times, for whom she had promised to document her claims about inadequate plant safety. 12 she was barred by Kerr‐McGee from the plutonium‐processing areas of the Cimarron plant. The agency arranged for Miss Silkwood to travel to New Mexico for special diagnostic examinations. Investigators for the A.E.C., which has since been supplanted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, arrived in Oklahoma the next day and were told that Kerr‐McGee, which had become increasingly aware of and concerned about Miss Silkwood's union activities, suspected that she had contaminated herself to dramatize her beliefs about negligence in the handling of plutonium. 5, 1974, Miss Silkwood found that she had again become contaminated with plutonium while working at her job, and two days later she learned that the contamination had spread to her apartment in Edmond, Okla. In September 1974, she and two other workers gave the Atomic Energy Commission a list of alleged health and safety violations at the Kerr‐McGee plant. Her concern was raised to a personal level when, in July 1979, she discovered that she had been contaminated with radiation.Īt the behest of the union, she followed the company's prescribed decontamination procedures, but the incident fired her resolve to push the issue of plant safety. Miss Silkwood, who became a labor organizer, shared the union's concern about safety measures at Kerr‐McGee, which processed fuel rods for nuclear reactors containing highly toxic plutonium. Shortly after She arrived, Miss Silkwood became active in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, which eventually called a 10week strike at the plant over demands for higher wages and improved safety and training conditions. In the summer of 1972 a slight, darkhaired woman named Karen Silkwood from Nederland, Tex., who had dreamed of becoming a scientist, left her husband and children, moved to Oklahoma City and took a job as a laboratory technician at the Kerr‐McGee Corporation's nuclear processing plant in nearby Cimarron. ![]()
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