November 13, 2021 • 10 mins
On this day in 1974, nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood was killed in a one-car crash under mysterious circumstances.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that pays tribute to people of the past
by telling their stories. Today I'm Gabe Lousier, and today
(00:22):
we're looking at the time when a labor union activist
at a nuclear facility lost her life in a car accident.
But was it really an accident or was it an assassination?
(00:42):
The day was November seventy four. Nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood
was killed in a one car crash under mysterious circumstances.
The twenty eight year old had worked as a chemical
technician at the Kerr McGee plu utonium fuel's production plan
in Crescent, Oklahoma. She was also a member of the
(01:05):
Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, or the o c
a W. Silkwood had been openly critical of Kermaghee's safety measures,
and in the months leading up to her death, she
had been gathering evidence for the union to back up
her claims that the plant was unsafe. After leaving a
union meeting on the evening of November, Silkwood was on
(01:29):
her way to meet with a New York Times reporter
allegedly to handover incriminating documents that proved her company had
been negligent. She never made it to the meeting, and
the unexplained circumstances of her death led many to speculate
there had been foul play. Karen Silkwood was born in Longview, Texas,
(01:51):
on February ninety six. She grew up in nearby Niederland, Texas,
and after graduating school, she went to study medical technology
at Lamar State College in Beaumont. In seventy two, Silkwood
moved to Oklahoma City, where she got a job at
(02:11):
Kerr McGhee as a technician and the metallography lab. She
worked at the company's Simarron fuel fabrication site near Crescent, Oklahoma.
It was her lab's job to create plutonium fuel rods
for the Atomic Energy Commission the a e C. On
a typical day, Silkwood would inspect the plutonium pellets that
(02:33):
were used to make the fuel rods. She ensured the
radioactive pellets or the correct size, and that they didn't
have any chips or cracks that might release radiation. After
about three months on the job, Silkwood went on strike
with her fellow workers to demand better health than safety
programs and a wage increase. The strike went on for
(02:55):
nine to ten weeks, but Kerr McGhee refused to meet
the union's man's In the end, the workers returned to
their jobs with no higher wages and no improvements to
health and safety protocols or training. Two years later, in
the spring of nineteen seventy four, kerr McGhee ramped up
(03:16):
production and required employees at the metallography lab to work
twelve hour shifts, seven days a week. The strain of
this frenzied pace took its toll on the workforce, leading
to an increase in spills and contaminations. Employees began quitting
at an alarming rate, so the company hired increasingly untrained
(03:40):
workers to prevent any pause in production. In early August,
Silkwood became the first woman to be elected to the
Employee Bargaining Committee at Kerr McGhee. Working with the other
two committee members, Silkwood was tasked with documenting the many
health and safety concerns at their nuclear facility. At the
(04:01):
end of September, the committee would present its findings at
a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission. Silkwood spent about
six weeks interviewing workers and combing through reports of contamination incidents.
By the time of their testimony on September, the committee
had found thirty nine different examples of company negligence, including
(04:24):
improper training, improper facilities, and failure to monitor worker exposure
to radiation. After reviewing each example, the a e C
concluded that twenty out of the thirty nine incidents were
quote at least partially substantiated, if not entirely. The Commission
(04:45):
agreed to investigate these incidents, but sadly, Karen Silkwood didn't
live to see it happen. In October four, she decided
not to wait for the a e C to save
the day. She started collecting hard evidence of the plant's
contamination issues. She was viewed as a troublemaker by management
(05:07):
and even some other union members, worried that she was
making too many waves too quickly, but Silkwood couldn't be swayed.
She started making plans to share her findings with the
press in mid November. On the evening of November five,
Silkwood was polishing plutonium pellets during her twelve hour shift
(05:28):
when an alarm went off on her gloves. The device
was an alpha detector that monitored her gloves to make
sure she wasn't being exposed to radioactive materials. According to
the device, Silkwood's whole right arm was covered in plutonium.
In a strange twist, additional tests showed that only the
(05:50):
inside of her gloves were contaminated. The outside, which were
the parts that had been in contact with the pellets,
came back clean. Strangers still was that Silkwood's urine and
feces were found to be radioactive, and so was the
apartment she shared with a co worker. It's still a
(06:10):
mystery how or why all this alpha activity wound up
in her system and her home. After her death, KERR
McGhee would suggest that maybe Silkwood had purposely contaminated herself
by ingesting plutonium as a way to embarrass the company.
I'll leave it to listeners to decide if that's really
(06:31):
the most likely explanation. A week after the incident, Silkwood
was cleared to return to work. After her evening shift
on November thirteenth, she attended a union meeting at the
Hub Cafe in Crescent. From there, she began driving to
Oklahoma City, where she had arranged to meet with David Burnham,
(06:52):
a reporter for The New York Times. According to him,
Silkwood was finally going to share the documentation she'd been
gathering since the September meeting with the A e. C. However,
while driving along Highway seventy four, Silkwood somehow crashed into
a concrete culvert, a tunnel like structure that provides cross
(07:14):
drainage under roadways. Police were called to the scene, but
Silkwood was dead by the time they arrived. According to
the autopsy, there was a large dose of quaaludes in
her system, which would suggest she may have fallen asleep
at the wheel. However, the accident investigator noted some puzzling
(07:35):
irregularities at the scene. For starters, there were skid marks
on the road and a suspicious fresh dent on the
rear bumper of Silkwood's car. These details indicated that a
second car may have forced Silkwood off the road. Another
curious detail was that State trooper Rick Fagan claimed he
(07:58):
had collected scattered papers at the scene and put them
back in Silkwood's car. However, by the time her boyfriend
arrived later that evening, the documents were nowhere to be
found and were never seen again. Rumors swirled that Silkwood
had been murdered as a way to silence Kerr McGhee's
(08:18):
most passionate whistleblower and to send a message to any
others in waiting. Her story became the subject of countless
books and articles, as well as a ninety three movie
starring Meryl Streep as Silkwood. The ending of that film
heavily implies that she was driven off the road by
a car behind her. Still, there's no proof that the
(08:42):
company was responsible for Silkwood's death. In light of this,
her family filed a civil suit. Instead. They sought eleven
and a half million dollars in damages, claiming that Kerr
McGhee's negligence had led the silkwood's contamination in early November.
This was when the company claimed that Silkwood had eaten
(09:03):
plutonium to make them look bad. In the end, the
suit was settled twelve years later for one point three
million dollars. As for Kerr McGhee, it was forced to
close its nuclear plant barely a year after Silkwood's death.
The A E. C S Better Late than Never investigation
(09:24):
had turned up numerous health and safety violations. Just as
Silkwood had reported, KERR McGhee spent the next three decades
cleaning up the contamination it had caused in Crescent City.
As of one, the ground water under the old plutonium
plant is still contaminated. Investigations are ongoing to determine just
(09:49):
how far those contaminants may have traveled. I'm Gabe Lousier
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you want to keep
up with the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at t d i HC Show, and if
(10:10):
you have any comments or suggestions, you can always send
them my way at this Day at i heart media
dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another day in History Class. For more
(10:33):
podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that pays tribute to people of the past
by telling their stories. Today I'm Gabe Lousier, and today
(00:22):
we're looking at the time when a labor union activist
at a nuclear facility lost her life in a car accident.
But was it really an accident or was it an assassination?
(00:42):
The day was November seventy four. Nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood
was killed in a one car crash under mysterious circumstances.
The twenty eight year old had worked as a chemical
technician at the Kerr McGee plu utonium fuel's production plan
in Crescent, Oklahoma. She was also a member of the
(01:05):
Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, or the o c
a W. Silkwood had been openly critical of Kermaghee's safety measures,
and in the months leading up to her death, she
had been gathering evidence for the union to back up
her claims that the plant was unsafe. After leaving a
union meeting on the evening of November, Silkwood was on
(01:29):
her way to meet with a New York Times reporter
allegedly to handover incriminating documents that proved her company had
been negligent. She never made it to the meeting, and
the unexplained circumstances of her death led many to speculate
there had been foul play. Karen Silkwood was born in Longview, Texas,
(01:51):
on February ninety six. She grew up in nearby Niederland, Texas,
and after graduating school, she went to study medical technology
at Lamar State College in Beaumont. In seventy two, Silkwood
moved to Oklahoma City, where she got a job at
(02:11):
Kerr McGhee as a technician and the metallography lab. She
worked at the company's Simarron fuel fabrication site near Crescent, Oklahoma.
It was her lab's job to create plutonium fuel rods
for the Atomic Energy Commission the a e C. On
a typical day, Silkwood would inspect the plutonium pellets that
(02:33):
were used to make the fuel rods. She ensured the
radioactive pellets or the correct size, and that they didn't
have any chips or cracks that might release radiation. After
about three months on the job, Silkwood went on strike
with her fellow workers to demand better health than safety
programs and a wage increase. The strike went on for
(02:55):
nine to ten weeks, but Kerr McGhee refused to meet
the union's man's In the end, the workers returned to
their jobs with no higher wages and no improvements to
health and safety protocols or training. Two years later, in
the spring of nineteen seventy four, kerr McGhee ramped up
(03:16):
production and required employees at the metallography lab to work
twelve hour shifts, seven days a week. The strain of
this frenzied pace took its toll on the workforce, leading
to an increase in spills and contaminations. Employees began quitting
at an alarming rate, so the company hired increasingly untrained
(03:40):
workers to prevent any pause in production. In early August,
Silkwood became the first woman to be elected to the
Employee Bargaining Committee at Kerr McGhee. Working with the other
two committee members, Silkwood was tasked with documenting the many
health and safety concerns at their nuclear facility. At the
(04:01):
end of September, the committee would present its findings at
a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission. Silkwood spent about
six weeks interviewing workers and combing through reports of contamination incidents.
By the time of their testimony on September, the committee
had found thirty nine different examples of company negligence, including
(04:24):
improper training, improper facilities, and failure to monitor worker exposure
to radiation. After reviewing each example, the a e C
concluded that twenty out of the thirty nine incidents were
quote at least partially substantiated, if not entirely. The Commission
(04:45):
agreed to investigate these incidents, but sadly, Karen Silkwood didn't
live to see it happen. In October four, she decided
not to wait for the a e C to save
the day. She started collecting hard evidence of the plant's
contamination issues. She was viewed as a troublemaker by management
(05:07):
and even some other union members, worried that she was
making too many waves too quickly, but Silkwood couldn't be swayed.
She started making plans to share her findings with the
press in mid November. On the evening of November five,
Silkwood was polishing plutonium pellets during her twelve hour shift
(05:28):
when an alarm went off on her gloves. The device
was an alpha detector that monitored her gloves to make
sure she wasn't being exposed to radioactive materials. According to
the device, Silkwood's whole right arm was covered in plutonium.
In a strange twist, additional tests showed that only the
(05:50):
inside of her gloves were contaminated. The outside, which were
the parts that had been in contact with the pellets,
came back clean. Strangers still was that Silkwood's urine and
feces were found to be radioactive, and so was the
apartment she shared with a co worker. It's still a
(06:10):
mystery how or why all this alpha activity wound up
in her system and her home. After her death, KERR
McGhee would suggest that maybe Silkwood had purposely contaminated herself
by ingesting plutonium as a way to embarrass the company.
I'll leave it to listeners to decide if that's really
(06:31):
the most likely explanation. A week after the incident, Silkwood
was cleared to return to work. After her evening shift
on November thirteenth, she attended a union meeting at the
Hub Cafe in Crescent. From there, she began driving to
Oklahoma City, where she had arranged to meet with David Burnham,
(06:52):
a reporter for The New York Times. According to him,
Silkwood was finally going to share the documentation she'd been
gathering since the September meeting with the A e. C. However,
while driving along Highway seventy four, Silkwood somehow crashed into
a concrete culvert, a tunnel like structure that provides cross
(07:14):
drainage under roadways. Police were called to the scene, but
Silkwood was dead by the time they arrived. According to
the autopsy, there was a large dose of quaaludes in
her system, which would suggest she may have fallen asleep
at the wheel. However, the accident investigator noted some puzzling
(07:35):
irregularities at the scene. For starters, there were skid marks
on the road and a suspicious fresh dent on the
rear bumper of Silkwood's car. These details indicated that a
second car may have forced Silkwood off the road. Another
curious detail was that State trooper Rick Fagan claimed he
(07:58):
had collected scattered papers at the scene and put them
back in Silkwood's car. However, by the time her boyfriend
arrived later that evening, the documents were nowhere to be
found and were never seen again. Rumors swirled that Silkwood
had been murdered as a way to silence Kerr McGhee's
(08:18):
most passionate whistleblower and to send a message to any
others in waiting. Her story became the subject of countless
books and articles, as well as a ninety three movie
starring Meryl Streep as Silkwood. The ending of that film
heavily implies that she was driven off the road by
a car behind her. Still, there's no proof that the
(08:42):
company was responsible for Silkwood's death. In light of this,
her family filed a civil suit. Instead. They sought eleven
and a half million dollars in damages, claiming that Kerr
McGhee's negligence had led the silkwood's contamination in early November.
This was when the company claimed that Silkwood had eaten
(09:03):
plutonium to make them look bad. In the end, the
suit was settled twelve years later for one point three
million dollars. As for Kerr McGhee, it was forced to
close its nuclear plant barely a year after Silkwood's death.
The A E. C S Better Late than Never investigation
(09:24):
had turned up numerous health and safety violations. Just as
Silkwood had reported, KERR McGhee spent the next three decades
cleaning up the contamination it had caused in Crescent City.
As of one, the ground water under the old plutonium
plant is still contaminated. Investigations are ongoing to determine just
(09:49):
how far those contaminants may have traveled. I'm Gabe Lousier
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you want to keep
up with the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at t d i HC Show, and if
(10:10):
you have any comments or suggestions, you can always send
them my way at this Day at i heart media
dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another day in History Class. For more
(10:33):
podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This Day in History Class News
Host
Gabe Luzier
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