Karen Silkwood - Vindicated

The realities of the nuclear age - nuclear power and weapons - have often turned "true believers" into opponents.

One such person was Karen Silkwood, an employee at a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant outside of Oklahoma City.

The short version of the story is that Karen Silkwood worked as a technician at the plant and her direct experience of being exposed to plutonium and radioactive dust as well as many complaints from fellow workers turned her into an advocate for nuclear safety as a representative of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union.

She began to document safety failures, had assembled a dossier on many violations and problems at the plant and was on her way to a meeting on November 13, 1974 with an OCAWU leader and a journalist from the New York Times when she was killed in a single car crash. It appeared that her car had been forced off the road from behind. The folder of documentation disappeared, never to be found.
She was twenty-eight years old, the mother of three children.

People, including her ex husband, friends, family and activists in the growing anti-nuclear movement did not let the story die. In particular, Kitty Tucker and Sara Nelson of the National Organization of Women (NOW) formed a support group calling for a congressional investigation and were instrumental in filing a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee for willful negligence.

The story of Karen Silkwood was told, retold, songs, articles and books were written, a movie starring Meryl Streep as Silkwood with Cher as her best friend was made, and when the lawsuit was decided, a jury verdict awarded $10,000,000 punitive damages and $505,000 damages.

Kerr-McGee appealed the verdict (even going so far as to say that Silkwood had contaminated herself with plutonium to make them look bad, which was proven false) and won, the damages were reduced. Then the case went to the Supreme Court, which restored the original damages in 1984.

Kerr-McGee finally settled out of court for $1.38 million dollars with no admittance of liability.

It’s important to remember Karen Silkwood and her efforts on behalf of her fellow workers and that people who knew of the story organized, agitated and took action to hold a large corporation accountable in this particular case.

It is lodged in my memory that in 1984 when the case was finally settled, Silkwood’s friends posted signs along the road where she was killed saying Karen Silkwood - Vindicated.

Kerr-McGee no longer exists as a corporate entity (it was purchased in 2006 by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation) but its toxic legacy lives on with perchlorate pollution in the Lower Colorado River, rocket fuel contamination in Lake Mead, radioactive waste throughout Navajo territories, and dumping of carcinogenic creosote in communities throughout the East, Midwest and South.