Press Release

Coalition for a Healthy Environment Calls For Public Acknowledgment

of DOE Sick Workers as a Workplace Health and Safety Disaster

For Immediate Release,June 9, 2002

Contact: Harry Williams,CHE 865 - 693-7249

Jerry Tudor, USOL 865-494-9250

Janet Michel, CHE 865-966-5918

Janine Anderson, CHE 865-379-0042

On October 30, 2000 Congress enacted the Energy Employees Occupational

Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) to provide compensation to

employees of the Department of Energy and its contractors who were made ill

due to harmful exposures while working at DOE facilities. The Coalition for

a Health Environment (CHE) is an organization of diseased and disabled DOE

workers whose conditions resulted from such harmful exposures.

Although DOE and its contractors were responsible to provide safe and

healthy workplaces to these workers, the licensed and/or certified safety

professionals they employed also had a positive professional, if not legal,

duty, to inform DOE and the impacted workers of the deficient workplace

health and safety programs and conditions that resulted in the thousands of

diseases, disabilities, and premature deaths of DOE workers - a workplace

health and safety disaster of national scale.

A breakdown in the implementation of explicit duty of licensed and/or

certified DOE safety professionals to "hold paramount the health, safety,

and welfare, of the employee and public in the performance of their

professional duty," contributed to this disaster. However, DOE, its

contractors, their safety professionals and the safety professions have not

yet acknowledged, investigated, or taken steps to correct how the codes of

ethics of the safety professions and/or their implementation in DOE were

inadequate to prevent this disaster.

The recent attempt by a DOE safety professional, Joseph P. Carson, P.E., to

use the agency's employee concern process in addressing this aspect of the

DOE sick worker disaster was denied based on Congress not having

acknowledged this aspect of the sick worker disaster in the EEOICPA (see

attached May 29, 2002 memo of Rufus Smith, DOE Oak Ridge Employee Concerns

Manager). Given DOE's reason for closing Mr. Carson's employee concern

without investigation, CHE calls upon the DOE sick workers, their advocates

in Congress, DOE safety professionals, and the safety professions to:

* Acknowledge the DOE sick workers as a workplace health and safety disaster

* Investigate how the codes of ethics/rules of professional conduct of the

involved professions and/or their implementation in DOE were inadequate to

prevent this disaster.

CHE also calls upon America's workplace health and safety professions of

engineering, industrial hygiene, health physics, and occupational medicine

to endorse current Congressional efforts to provide prompt and just

compensation to the victims of this disaster.