Puget Sound You are Being Deliberately Poisoned by the Puget Electroplating Shop With Chrome VI

The Cover Up is This Document Published by the U.S. Navy:

"Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chromium (CrVI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations"

 

How do you know you are being poisoned by the toxic cancer causing Chrome 6 discharged from the Navy shipyard chrome plating shop? The first part of this answer is the Navy is disobeying Navy regulations to keep the discharge of this genetic poison and powerful cancer causing poison a secret. Here's how they are doing it. U.S. Navy Regulations mandate that whenever a safety system is in operation it must be monitored hourly and inspected to make sure it is operating properly by the system operator. Navy Regulations mandate that the safety system must be monitored on a log sheet that the system operator uses to record system pressures, temperatures and flow rates among other things. Navy Regulations mandate these log sheets must be kept indefinitely. The log sheets are an official U.S. Government document and this means it is a federal crime to falsify the data or to refuse to record it. The Navy has simply decided to not monitor the chrome plating scrubber system and to violate Navy Regulations applicable to a vital safety system. The reason for this is to avoid collection of documents that would either force them to spend vast sums of money to operate the scrubber systems properly or to accumulate a pile of documents that will convict the Navy of a federal crime. It's easy to see it's easier an better to just not record the data, not accumulate the log sheets and this is what they are doing. The U.S. Navy has NEVER monitored its chrome plating scrubber systems. It has NEVER collected a single operating log for them. It DOES NOT routinely monitor the performance of the scrubbers. The scrubbers need clean water and lots of it to operate properly. This water absorbs toxic chrome 6 and becomes federally regulated hazardous waste that cannot be poured down the drain. It is extremely expensive to properly handle, package and dispose of the very large quantities of chrome 6 contaminated hazardous waste water a properly operated chrome scrubber will produce. The U.S. Navy has decided to not spend this money by simply letting the scrubbers sit to rot on the plating shop roof without the necessary water flow while you are poisoned. How do you know you are being poisoned? There are two ways. The first is simple and this is to ask if the cancer rate in the area surrounding the shipyard is elevated. The answer to this question is yes at all shipyards. The second is to ask the Navy to show you the scrubber system operating logs that U.S. Navy regulations mandate they must have. EPA safety regulations mandate that YOU have a RIGHT to inspect all records concerning safety equipment that protects YOU so the Navy MUST have these documents and it MUST allow you to inspect them. The answer to this is they will not and cannot produce such documents because they have deliberately not collected them, EVER. The answer to this seems simple to me and this is they know what they are doing and the deadly results.

Here's a little story that helps a lot to explain about your being poisoned. . About 20 years ago I saw a documentary on TV about the radium dial painting girls who died of cancer at the turn of the last century from licking the radium loaded brushes used to paint dials. The bad press about this in New York City drove the dial painting factories out of New York and into a small town in Illinois. The girls who worked in the factory there got killed off but one survived. During this documentary she opened her scrap book to show pictures of all her old friends who had worked with her at the factory. They were all wearing furs and standing next to new luxury cars and they all had only graduated from High School if that and none was older than 20. The conclusion that immediately came into my mind was that they were paid death wages but without being told they were death wages. Later, when I worked at Mare Island I noticed the Navy allowed workers to "appropriate" vast quantities of overtime. A single worker would be allowed to drive in and punch in time cards for hundreds of workers on Saturday and Sunday morning and then drive back in eight hours later and punch them all out. I didn't understand the reason for this then but do now. It's now clear to me these were simply death wages. The extra overtime allowed the workers to buy expensive toys like Harleys, RV's and custom homes. It also boosted their retirement pensions so the widow would not complain too much when the husband died too young. I am convinced the reason for this is Chromic Acid because the amount of money is just too big and cannot be for nothing. The Navy treats money very seriously and NEVER EVER gives it away for nothing. The vast amount of overtime it allowed to be collected for no work is too vast and so it must have a vast cause. It's a strange thing about money. No one complains or asks any questions when he's paid too much money; even when its death wages.

In 2007 a U.S. Navy contractor prepared and the U.S. Navy released a document titled to be a survey of Hexavalent Chrome exposures to shipyard workers at shipyards in the U.S.A. This "Survey" predictably came to the conclusion that Chrome VI exposures from Chrome plating operations are all under control and completely safe at all major Shipyards including U.S. Navy shipyards. Given the U.S. Navy history of deliberate perjury when forced to confront its real history of Chrome VI exposures to its workers from the Chrome plating shop at Mare Island Shipyard this conclusion is seemed to me to be fantastic and had to be critically examined. During my examination of this Survey I discovered much evidence that convinces me the workers at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and others are currently being poisoned with huge amounts of Chrome VI being discharged into their air by the Chrome plating shop in building 873.

The way the U.S. Navy system works is you can only address your concern about being poisoned by Chrome VI through your Union. Only the Unions have the Federal Legal Right to go to management, get in their faces, and fight for you and force them to stop poisoning you. Your individual federal legal right is to support and participate in the Union. If you try to take things on by yourself the U.S. Navy has the legal right and the demonstrated ability to chew you up and spit you out. I was poisoned by the U.S. Navy Chrome plating shop at Mare Island and it took me a long long time, a lot of education and just plain good luck to figure it all out. Its taken about 24 years to figure the whole thing out to be able to help you here. If you want to know what you need to DEMAND your Union do for you to stop the poisoning just use this link:

What You Want to Demand Your Union to Do

If you want to find out how your are being poisoned by Chrome VI being spewed from the plating shop and what it is doing to you use this link:

The PSNS Plating Shop is Spewing Chrome VI into Your Air

If you want to find out why you are being poisoned with Chrome VI you can use this link:

Why You Are Being Poisoned

If you take my advice and get your Union to protect you the poisoning will stop and here's why:

Why Only The Unions Can Stop The Poisoning

 

The one thing the U.S. Navy has depended upon to be successful in its decades long campaign of lies to hide the Chrome VI and poisoning that you are getting from it's plating shops is a very understandable lack of information about plating shops and how they are operated, by the normal shipyard worker. Nothing in your education or life experience prepares the average person to be able to understand the workings of a metal plating shop and their dangers to people outside the shop. When we are young we get burned so we quickly learn to be afraid of fire. But there is no life experience that teaches us the chemicals that come out of a plating shop are just as dangerous to us as fire. There are no classes in Chrome Plating at high school or college and so it's largely a skill that is passed down from artist to artist and so it's definitely on the job training. But, today there is a lot of information about chrome plating on the Web, this page and the www.MareIslandMurder site. If you worked at Puget Sound or another big shipyard; or if you work there or at one of them now, it is literally a life or death decision for you to decide to take some time to learn about plating shops, and Chrome Plating along with Chrome Plating Scrubbers.

If you want to know how the Navy always gets its way with the Government people you think are there to help you like OSHA or the EPA use this link:

The Phony "National Security" Excuse

I was lucky and got sucked into a union as an officer by accident shortly after I was poisoned with Chrome VI and my health was mostly ruined permanently. This gave me strong legal protections against being given the "bums rush" out of the shipyard and so even though I was very unlucky to be poisoned, I was lucky enough to get to retirement. But, I can assure you that every hour of every day I have to work around the nasty effects of this poisoning. You truly do not want what happened to me to happen to you. That's what this page is all about. I wish you every good luck. If you want to go to the part of this page that deals with how plating shops and their scrubbers work you can use this link:

Information about Chrome Plating and Scrubbers

If you are concerned about your exposure to Chrome VI and other hazardous chemicals from the plating shop you may want to ask your Union to demand the shipyard to produce its maintenance, operational , health and safety and environmental monitoring records for the Chrome VI plating scrubbers and the other dangerous chemicals in the plating shop. Once the Unions have these documents you can view and study them. After all, if there's nothing to hide and if everything has been done properly to protect your health, there should be no problem and these records should be quickly produced. The shipyard should be happy to give copies of them for your Union officers to see. But my experience, as a union president, in asking for these records at Mare Island, was they would rather have their fingernails pulled out than give me those records. I found out there was nothing management would not do, there was no lie too big, and no scheme of entrapment they would not operate against me to protect them from having to give up those those records. They even committed perjury in writing to cover their dirty tracks. You may have better luck and I certainly hope so because Chrome VI makes you sick; even a little bit of it. If you start a records war with the Navy you can expect a huge fight. But, to not fight means to keep being poisoned and the more they fight to not show their records the more guilty they are and the more concerned about what has been done to you that you should be.

If you want to know why Asbestos is well controlled at your shipyard and why Chrome VI is not use this link:

Asbestos Vs. Chrome VI

And you can also use this link:

How Chrome VI Ruins Your Health

 

Only if you properly educate yourself about chrome plating will you be able to ask your Shipyard Management Representatives the questions they absolutely do not want to hear. And only if you educate yourself will you be able to see how long and how thoroughly you have been lied to about your having been poisoned. A lot of time and effort has been taken to put a great deal of information about these things on this page and on the www.MareIslandMurder web site. You'll find the www.MareIslandMurder Web site is a good place to start your education. I've done my best to make it as easy, simple and complete as possible for visitors to gain the understanding they need so that they can properly torture the representatives of the Labor Relations, Occupational Health and Safety, Environmental and Public Works departments of your shipyard with questions they dare not answer truthfully. The www.MareIslandMurder site explains all about the plating shop and the big cover up at Mare Island in great detail and I am sure that much the same crimes have been committed at Puget Sound and probably at every other major shipyard in the U.S.A. The only difference being that the Puget Sound plating shop is much larger than the Mare Island shop was and this means you are being more thoroughly and deeply poisoned than we at Mare Island were. Here is a link to the MareIslandMurder page:

Mare Island Murder by Chrome VI Explained

If you would like to see evidence of the U.S. Navy Perjury you can use this link:

U.S. Navy Arbitration Hearing Perjury in Writing

It is perfectly natural for the average hard working worker to believe the U.S. Navy has everything under control and that they are looking out for your health and safety. It's actually different. The U.S. Navy wants every occupational injury claim that is filed to be denied. Even more than this they don't want claims to be filed; even valid ones. This does not mean they want to accomplish this by ensuring a perfectly safe work place. If you get sick or injured you'll quickly find out that the Injury Claims Office is filled with your enemies who hate you. The Occupational Safety and Health department is not what it is named. It is really a Injury Claims Denial Department. It's normal for a strong young person who is working hard and making good money to believe a crippling injury won't happen to him until it does happen to him. It is only then he will find out everything about the mechanical cruelty of the Injury Claims process. The thing to keep in mind is that no matter how strong and young and good you are you are not immune to cyanide or Chrome VI and they can make you permanently terribly sick in one day or they can rob you of your health slowly. If you would like to know why and how you are U.S. Navy public enemy No. 1 if you get injured enough to file an injury compensation claim you should use this link:

The U.S. Navy Injury Claims Office is Hell on Earth

Do not take matters into your own hands or take your concerns to your supervisor or to management. The Navy is very careful to choose only the most cruel and heartless people to serve in executive positions. If they think you're dangerous they'll do what it takes to get rid of you. The system is designed to grind you up and spit you out if you are an ordinary worker who tries to make the safety situation better. The only way you are protected from being punished for doing good is to act with your Union and to support it and its officers. The way Federal Law works is that your Union officers are protected from being harassed or intimidated or to be unfairly punished for doing your Union job. Take your concerns to your Union but make them educated concerns. Know what the plating shop is doing to you and you family before doing anything. Then, once you are sure, go to your Union and keep going back because only your Union officers have the legal right to put management on the spot without fear of reprisal. Put your pressure on the Union and keep it up because by yourself you can accomplish nothing. Also be sure to join your union if you're not already a member. Joining puts more power in the hands of union officers.

A Metal Plating shop is so dangerous the mind can't handle it. Most people have no experience with danger so great. The only good thing about a plating shop is actually a bad thing and this is they don't explode. If they did explode then people would give them the respect they deserve. It is because they generally kill people slowly their great danger is not recognized. I think that because nothing obviously dangerous happens in them they are ignored by people in the vicinity and treated with contempt by the people who work in them and who run them. Running a well controlled plating shop is a very expensive thing to do because the chemicals in it are so corrosive the place is literally melting from within while it is used. This applies to the safety equipment designed to protect people outside the shop from the chemicals inside the shop. A plating shop that is well run is a big money pit and you know it is almost impossible for the U.S. Navy to spend any real money on anything other than a ship, a gun or a jet.

Your one and only way to safety from the plating shop is for your Union to have the right to enter the shop with independent experts and to conduct inspections of the shop and its records without notice any time of the day or night. Right now you don't have this and the only thing you do have are well paid and rehearsed U.S. Navy spokesperson mouthpieces who automatically spew this lie to the media whenever the plating shop comes to the attention of the media somehow. This is what the official Puget spokesperson said to the media about the Puget Plating shop recently after a visit by the EPA who found it was a little shop of horrors:

This means if the plating shop gives you leukemia or some other form of cancer or if it ruins your lungs so you can't work you get nothing.

Here's a list of the chemicals that were in the Mare Island Shipyard plating shop. There will be the same in any other Navy or other Shipyard plating shop:

Just click on the image to pull up a full sized copy. You can then do Google searches on these chemicals to find out all the bad things they do to people. Keep in mind that when these are released from a plating shop, and they are, their hazards multiply by each other and do not simply add up. This is one of the things that makes releases of chemicals from plating shops to be very dangerous. Also, if you are going to be exposed to a toxic chemical it is far better to have one single big exposure in your life than to be constantly exposed to a small level. This is another thing that makes plating shops extremely dangerous to people exposed to the toxic chemicals they release.

The Phony "National Security" Claim:

Whenever the Navy gets into a bind with a media outlet, local or state government, other federal regulator like OSHA or the EPA, labor-management relations or anyone else, it pulls out the phony "National Security" claim. It will not hesitate to simply say to whoever is getting into their way, "We have to do things they way we are doing them because of National Security. Another favorite tactic is to threaten local government officials with the withdrawal of funds provided for local improvements or to lay off employees or make public relations trouble for them.. The Navy "contributes" to local government financial needs to be able to exert firm control of local government decisions should the need arise. When I was negotiating an issue with the Navy once and things were taken to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which is a federal government entity designed to ensure "fairness" in labor and management relations and negotiations I was told by the government attorney that if I didn't give in the Navy said they would close Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Can you imagine that? This is the big lie they said to get what they wanted.. This is the reason the Navy has absolutely no fear of OSHA, the EPA, local or state Environmental or Work Place Safety officials. If these people get to be too dangerous they get shut down from above by the U.S. Navy going to their bosses and saying, "If we can't have what we want we will have to shut down". Then, the elected officials you voted to protect you will decide it's better for you to be poisoned than for you to be laid off and make political trouble for them.

The simple truth of the matter is if you want not to be poisoned you are going to have to do it yourselves by supporting your local Union and by forcing and helping them to do their job. The Union officers who YOU elect have legal protections under federal law that YOU DO NOT. You are protected from retaliation by management when you participate in the Union. The Officers are protected when they negotiate with management for you. So put your pressure on your Union Officers and join the union if you are not already a member. You will get no where writing to your Congressman or Senator, the EPA, OSHA, the State EPA or OSHA. The one and only way is for your Union to open an official negotiating issue for your Contract or to file a Grievance. But know this: not matter what they do they are starting a big big war. I know from experience there is no amount of money the U.S. Navy will not spend to win when its a matter of being able to operate their Chrome plating shops the way they always have. There is a simple reason for this.

The Reason Management Refuses to Control the Plating Shop:

There is no college degree in electroplating. It's one of those industrial things we depend on but that has grown up based on experience rather than thought and theory. Just call it practical black magic. It's definitely an "on the job training" thing. This means the plating shop is its own little shipyard empire and its got a lot of power. Also, management is scared of it. It's a frightening place they do not understand. It's full of poisons they know nothing about. To put it simply it scares them more than any other thing on the shipyard and no one wants to go into the plating shop or to have anything to do with it.

Shop 31 people who do electroplating are in total control. At Mare Island air conditioners were forbidden by federal regulation and so you had to be a really big shot to have one. Even the head of Nuclear Engineering or a big shop like Shop 56 didn't have one. But the Shipyard Commander had one and the Plating Shop General Forman had one and his was bigger and newer than the Shipyard Commander's. The Navy just does not want to bring its plating shops into the modern era because they are doing fine them as they are. Stuff to be plated goes in the front door and comes out the back. That's all management needs to know so long as ship's schedules are not held up by something taking too long in the plating shop. If something should go wrong at the Shop 56 piping shop managers will go down there and apply the pressure by being there. They won't do this at the plating shop. It's just too scary a place.

At every shipyard there are two Kings and these are production and schedule and schedule is the King of production. The plating shop is both key to production and to schedule. The fact you get poisoned doesn't figure much in production and schedule. There is no place for it on a job list or flow chart.. Your future health means nothing compared to a keystone like undocking. Besides, it's all under control with what I believe to be phony statements being pumped out by the U.S. Navy.

You must educate yourself about Chrome Electroplating. You need to know its dangers and the dangerous chemicals spewed into your air by it so that you can put pressure on your Union Officers to do the hard job and negotiate the U.S. Navy into truly controlling poisonous emissions of Chrome VI and other toxic chemicals from it's plating shops. If the Navy doesn't want to control them then let the Navy pay you the hazardous duty pay you have long deserved and fully inform you about what they are doing to ruin your health. Only your Union can force them to do this, but it won't be easy and they need your support and help.

 

"Work should Provide A Living and Not a Cause of Death"

I believe the Industry-Wide Chrome VI Exposure Survey was designed to contradict this truth. Chrome VI is a source of work death. When a population of workers at a shipyard are exposed to a cancer causing thing like Asbestos or Chrome VI some of them are going to get cancer as a direct result of this exposure. Science cannot yet identify those individuals out of the population who will get cancer. This means that if you are being exposed to Asbestos or Chrome VI it could be you. You need to ask yourself what would you think and then do if the doctor came into the examining room and said, "You've got lung cancer" or "You've got sinus cancer" or "You've got leukemia".. It is well known that cancers caused by industrial chemicals are different from naturally occurring cancers in that they are rapid onset, quick progressing, and resistant to medical intervention. The typical industrial cancer kills its victim in three months. You may not have a lot of time.

I have examined this "Survey" very carefully and believe it is just another completely phony thing constructed by the U.S. Navy to cover up the fact it is deliberately exposing its employees and adjacent communities to harmful amounts of Chrome VI. The main idea that must be kept in mind is that U.S. Navy Electroplating shops are massive sources of toxic Chrome VI released into the ambient air if they are not properly controlled. If all the other sources of Chrome VI on a typical shipyard are added up they total to nothing compared to the amount that can be discharged from a plating shop in one day from Chrome plating operations. Because the Chrome plating shop contains a massive quantity of Chrome VI is is my belief this Survey is really aimed at covering up massive Chrome plating shop Chrome VI discharges into the air you are breathing. If you'd like to go directly to the part of this page that demonstrates just how massive these discharges of Chrome VI are just use this link:

Industry-Wide Survey States That Navy Chrome Plating Shop Chrome VI Releases are Perfectly Safe

 

There have been recent big Chrome VI problems at the Puget Sound Plating Shop and a Navy campaign of cover up about them. If you'd like to directly go to the part of this web page that deals with this use this link:

2012 Plating Shop Problems Cover Up

Why am I Doing This and What are the Many Ways Chrome VI Ruins your Health?

My health was ruined beyond description because I was exposed to Chrome VI emissions from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard Electroplating shop from 1983 until the shop was closed in 1988. This exposure concluded with a massive spill into the air of Chrome VI from that shop in February 1988 that sent me home sick for two weeks. During the years of suffering after February 1988 I accidentally and fortunately became the president of the local union there I.F.P.T.E. Local 25. Up until shortly before Mare Island was closed in 1988 I had no idea of what had happened to ruin my health. It was only at the time of shipyard closure I accidentally discovered documents that Mare Island had kept secret for years about the February 17, 1988 Chrome VI spill. Then I did a thorough search and found out that for decades the Mare Island plating shop had actually been a tottering wreck that had been barely held together. The best way to describe it is it was like an old west ghost town kept in a state of "arrested decay" for tourists. I prosecuted a grievance against the shipyard but perjury committed by management during the arbitration hearing won the day for them. In the years since I have suffered and have waited for the Navy to do the right thing but this has not happened yet. Recently I discovered that Puget Sound has a very high cancer rate and also found documents that demonstrate to my personal satisfaction that the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Electroplating Shop in Building 873 is being operated in the same way as the one at Mare Island was. Up until now I could not imagine that the U.S. Navy could be universally poisoning its employees with Chrome VI deliberately at other shipyards, but they are. Even though I am now retied it just isn't possible for me to let this tremendous crime go unexposed and do nothing. The U.S. Navy works very hard to keep its Chrome VI poisoning a big secret and so they've done a lot of complex things to cover it up. It's not been quick, easy or simple to unravel all of the lies and misdirection the U.S. Navy has used to keep its victims ignorant of what is being done to them and so this page is not short or simple. It is complex but I assure you that if you take the time to read it you will be amply rewarded particularly if you have worked or now work at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard or another U.S. Navy shipyard.

Here's how it all began:

When I first went to work at Mare Island in 1983 I started getting my hair cut at a barber shop in Vallejo. It was always very busy because all shipyard managers got their hair cut there and so also did all the Vallejo City officials. There was a stack of magazines and so it was always very pleasant to sit and wait and listen to the conversations between the barbers and the customers getting their hair cut while flipping through a magazine. One day the Coroner was getting his hair cut and he was talking to the barber and I didn't pay much attention to this conversation until the following words hit my ears, I can remember it as clearly as if it happened a minute ago. The Coroner said, "The one thing I'd really like to know is why the average life expectancy of a Mare Island Shipyard employee is only 18 months after retirement". This got my attention and in the following years, from time to time, it would bubble up and my mind would work on it for a little while and then put it away because there wasn't anything I could do with it. A pure case of insufficient information. Then, as my career proceeded at Mare Island and I began to see people who I worked with retire I began to notice they were all used up, being weak and in very bad health and looking bad and yet they were not so old. Then, as I began to work on the submarines during overhauls I thought surely this must be the cause. A poorly ventilated hull full of welders and welding fumes would kill anyone early. But then I would see workers ready to retire who worked in shops where they had never gone on board a submarine in overhaul and yet they were also all used up and prematurely aged. Finally the big thought came to me. Here's how it works. When a manufacturer of a product wants to know how long it will last before it will fail the product is artificially aged by being exposed in a chamber to to cycling hot and cold, wet and dry, and neutral and acid conditions over and over again. This is called artificial aging. The same holds true for people. if you want to artificially age people you do the same thing and there is no more effective artificial aging agent for people than a good poison like Hexavalent Chrome. The artificial aging is even faster with people if the poison in in the air. Over time the strength and endurance your body once had will diminish to the point where you feel it. You'll be tired and you'll adjust to this by doing fewer things than you used to. You will switch to doing things that are not as strenuous as you used to do. You just won't enjoy them anymore without knowing why. You'll find you enjoy just sitting down far more than you used to. All these things will happen gradually and so you'll excuse them by thinking it's overwork and/or age. If you are being exposed to Chrome VI it is Chrome VI that is doing its deadly work on you and making you old long before your time.

Hexavalent Chrome is used to tan leather. If leather is tanned using natural methods derived from tree bark it takes about six months. If it is tanned using Hexavalent Chrome it takes about six hours. The form of Chrome VI used to tan leather is Chromic Oxide and this is the exact same chemical used to plate Chrome. There is another name used in industry for Hexavalent Chrome and it is "denaturant". It DE NATURES you and if you breathe it in it TANS your lungs and coverts them into leather. This is a process that can only be partially and very slowly reversed if at all. This is why shipyard workers run out of steam by the time they are 60 if they get that far. If you think you are somehow immune just take a good look at a piece of leather. It was the same Hexavalent Chrome that is emitted out of the Building 873 Plating Shop that made perfectly good skin into that leather and it is doing the same thing to you and it only takes a tiny amount of Hexavalent Chrome every day to do the job. Chrome VI reduces the ability of your lungs to take in oxygen and exhaust carbon dioxide. When I started work at Mare Island in 1983 my lung capacity was measured at the Mare Island clinic and was measured to be 120% of normal and I felt really good and strong. In 1999 my lung capacity was measured to be 40% of normal and I was sick and tired most of the time. Now it's back up to about 55% in 2012. There's no doubt in my mind the Chrome VI blasted out of the Mare Island plating shop did this. You are as healthy as your lungs and you are as old as your lungs are. Chrome VI, even tiny amounts of it, make your lungs old.

The Navy has been able to hide the Chrome VI exposure behind a couple of facts that are very bad for you. The first is Chrome VI emitted from a plating shop is odorless, colorless and tasteless. Most importantly it is a pain killing local anesthetic. When you are exposed to Chrome VI, even to extremely high levels of it, you have absolutely no idea of what is happening to you. If you are exposed to enough of it to have an immediate effect, as I was, you are going to be completely unaware that you are being poisoned by it as I was. The Chrome VI discharged from a plating shop enters the body mostly through the lungs and lung injury symptoms are not immediate and when they do appear there is nothing available to let you make a link between Chrome VI exposure and the injury like asthma, lung cancer, sinus cancer, liver or kidney damage. Typically the symptoms of very long term exposure to harmful amounts of Chrome VI in the air are not immediate and are delayed. Usually an electroplating shop that is discharging harmful amounts of Chrome VI is not going to be in your immediate vicinity and you're not going to notice it. All of these factors have made it safe for the U.S. Navy to hide the fact it has been poisoning its employees for decades to save the money it would cost to not poison them. These factors also explain why it's always necessary to demonstrate the fact of poisoning with documents. The U.S. Navy has a long standing policy of not collecting documents or taking samples to show the concentration of Chrome VI discharged from it's Chrome plating scrubbers. It's a case of deliberate health and safety malpractice leading to premature death and health ruin. Then also, anyone who gets a diagnosis of Cancer is not about to go to the shipyard OH&S office demanding Chrome VI sample results or to go to the Injury Claims office.

The bottom line is the U.S. Navy knows how much it would cost to prevent Chrome VI being discharged from its plating shops at harmful levels. It made the decision not to pay this. This means you are paying the cost out of you bodies. This is fine with the Navy because under conditions it has established it is practically impossible for you to send the bill back to the U.S. Navy. Right now, if you are working at a shipyard you are likely a family person and are worrying about making ends meet, taking good care of your family and the future Shipyard workload. Money is important and so is the future stability of your paycheck. These are very important things. At Mare Island the Navy was always holding meetings to tell us how we need to keep our costs down and so money was on everyone's mind all the time. This is normal and there's nothing wrong with this. Chrome VI poisoning is likely the last thing on your mind if it is ever on your mind. But it should be on your mind because the instant you get the diagnosis you've got cancer all that other stuff is going to be the last thing on your mind. At Mare Island, if you came down with cancer, you were gone and quickly. You were either invited to "retire" or put into the middle of a campaign of harassment designed to make you stop coming to work. There was no kindness and compassion. The whole situation gave me a new and more accurate meaning of what the U.S. Navy really means when it says "We take care of our own". They certainly do. A man I worked right next to came down with prostate cancer. He had an operation and was pronounced to be completely cured. Then he was invited to retire and he declined. Then he was given an outstanding performance evaluation. Then we was overloaded with work to the point he became exhausted. Then his supervisor invited him to retire and he accepted. It all works just like a machine, which it is.

When I first started out to write this paper the idea was only to analyze the "Industry-Wide Study", but as part of this work I discovered evidence to convince me the Puget Sound Plating Shop is being operated the exact same way the Mare Island Plating Shop was during the time it was spewing Chrome 6 poison onto the shipyard. This means it also is spewing vast quantities of Hexavalent Chrome into the lungs of the workers there. This discovery prompted me to take a good look at the Building 873 Plating Shop in the light of experience with the Mare Island plating shop. While doing this it also became my belief the main U.S. Navy purpose of the 'Industry-Wide Survey" is to cover up the fact the U.S. Navy has been poisoning all the workers at all of its Shipyards for decades with their plating shops the same as they did at Mare Island. So this page is concerned with the Survey but also exposes the great crime of the PSNS Plating Shop as part of the good work of my analysis of the Industry-Wide Survey.

If you want to download the Industry-Wide Chrome VI Exposure Survey just use this link:

The Industry-Wide Survey For Hexavalent Chrome (CrVI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations

 

Why is Asbestos Exposure Controlled and Chrome VI Exposure Not Controlled - They Both Cause Cancer

The main fact of exposure to carcinogens like asbestos and Chrome VI is that they magnify each other. This means that if you are exposed to both asbestos and chrome VI your total cancer risk is much higher than the sum of the two risks. Cancer causing chemicals magnify the effect of each other. It is very significant that the area surrounding the Puget Sound Electroplating shop has an extremely high cancer rate being among the highest five percent of the nation. A big shipyard will have a big plating shop and it will belch out massive quantities of the cancer causing Chrome VI.

It is difficult to identify a cancer causing chemical and it takes a lot of time. The identification of Asbestos to be a cancer cause took over 100 years before it was banned. Chrome has been studied as a cancer cause since the 1950's so there is definitely a lot more bad news about it to come. It is now known definitely to cause lung, sinus, liver and kidney cancers. Recent studies have shown it causes leukemia in animals. This means it won't be long before it is officially named to be a cause of leukemia in people. Until recently it was thought Chrome VI in drinking water did not cause cancer. Now we know it causes stomach and intestinal cancers when ingested and that vitamin C only makes it worse. I firmly believe that in time it's going to be officially determined that the very high leukemia rate surrounding Puget Sound Naval Shipyard is the fact the plating shop there has been belching out Chrome VI for a very very long time.

The answer why asbestos is controlled and Chrome VI is only given lip service by the U.S. Navy is money and fault. Asbestos causes a form of cancer called Mesotheolioma This form of cancer is only caused by asbestos. This means that if you get Mesotheolioma it is because you were exposed to asbestos. This clear connection between this form of cancer and asbestos is God's gift to trial lawyers. It provides the perfect fatal disease with the absolute cause. It's been a real money maker for them. This means that any company that exposes an employee to asbestos can be made to pay for all the employees who later develop Mesotheolioma The result of this is asbestos is banned. It was not banned because employers like the U.S. Navy developed a conscience, it was because there was no where to hide from having to pay for the deaths they caused.

If you do some historical research you will see that people like U.S. Navy spokespersons, who lie and create cover stories for Chrome VI exposure once did exactly the same thing for asbestos.

I believe the reason the U.S. Navy prefers to create the Industry-Wide Survey rather than bring Chrome VI emissions under control is money. Current medical science does not yet have the capability to say that any cancer was caused by Chrome VI the way it can do this with asbestos. So, if you've got practically limitless resources of people and money, and you'd rather not control massive emissions of Chrome VI to your employees because it's just too expensive, its just easier, faster and much much cheaper to hire someone to create some scholarly looking dishonest paper for you so you can publish it and look good. Right now there's no way anyone is going to get caught for causing Chrome VI cancer. But this is now and I am sure that in time this situation will change as medical science progresses. There were years where Asbestos caused cancer was not linked to asbestos and so the U.S. Navy was perfectly safe to lie all about it.

Why all the Work of this Web Page?

This MareIslandMurder web page shows, using U.S. Navy and U.S. Navy hired contractor documents, that just like the Metal Plating Shop at Mare Island the Puget Sound Electroplating shop at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard is also spewing vast quantities of hexavalent chrome down the throats of the employees there. I had mistakenly thought that once the U.S. Navy knew about what had happened at the plating shop at Mare Island they would make sure it wasn't happening elsewhere; that they would correct the same situations elsewhere if necessary. But the sad fact is they did not. Even today the U.S. Navy is engaging in a scheme of cover up to hide the fact they have been secretly poisoning their employees for many many years with Hexavalent Chrome everywhere. And when it comes to artificially aging people nothing does the job like Hexavalent Chrome.

There are three reasons for this web page and they are presented in order of their importance. The first two were stated by the U.S. Navy in a document paid for by the U.S. Navy in 1999, "Welding Fume Survey Final Report". It is important to realize that this 1999 statement represents a huge change in the understanding of the toxicity of Chrome. In the past it had been thought that there were forms of Chrome that were not harmful to human health and there were also harmful forms like Hexavalent Chrome. This statement indicates the U.S. Navy realized in 1999 there is no safe form of Chrome and that all forms are harmful to human health.

Chrome is a HUMAN GENETIC POISON. It causes permanent defects and mutations in human genes that are inheritable. This means that harmful levels of Chrome cause damage that will cascade down through human generations and will affect the offspring of all generations. THIS MAKES IT A UNIQUELY DANGEROUS THING unlike any other poison. It is important to realize that other known genetic poisons like Dioxin and PCB's have been BANNED yet this web page will amply demonstrate that the U.S. Navy is currently engaging in a very complex scheme of disinformation and cover up so that it can avoid the responsibility and costs and continue to expose its workers and innocent people in adjacent communities to extremely harmful levels of chrome.

The third reason will have to wait a little while. It's related to the fact that I was secretly drenched in Chrome poison due to a spill into the air out of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard Electroplating shop in 1988. All I can say about this fairly complete destruction of my health and happiness right now is it is the very last thing you ever want to happen to you or anyone you know. The point of this page is not to convince you of everything I say here. It is intended to get you thinking and give you enough truthful and accurate information and analysis so that you will be able to independently examine the documentary record yourself. Then you will be able to independently come to the conclusion, and believe as I believe, that the "Industry-Wide Survey" is a piece of trash used by the Navy to cover up massive releases of Hexavalent Chrome from U.S. Navy plating shops.

U.S. Navy employees and their families do not have a right to sue if they are injured by the U.S. Navy as a result of working for the U.S. Navy. The are forced by Federal Law to obtain injury compensation under the Federal Injury Compensation Act (FECA). The problem is the FECA process is entirely doctor driven. Without a specific doctor's diagnosis that an injury is "work related" the claim is denied. The way the U.S. Navy gets claims denied is to make sure doctors have no accurate Chrome VI exposure data and to ensure that any Chrome VI data available shows exposure levels are safe, even when this is not true and Chrome VI exposure levels are harmful. The Navy has been doing this for at least a century and I believe this Survey demonstrates they are still doing it. This page of the MareIslandMurder web site is intended to demonstrate that the U.S. Navy is still busy and active in manufacturing false evidence, blocking the injured from appropriate medical care, and, to put it simply, murdering and maiming its workers and their families.

In 1988, At Mare Island Shipyard, the U.S. Navy hired a contractor (Research Science Associates or RSA) to produce a report the U.S. Navy needed to be dishonest to cover up the true massive release of Chrome VI from the Chrome Plating Scrubbers. The problem was RSA is run by a person with Ph.D. and so he was fed dishonest data rather that being asked to deliberately write a dishonest report. This contractor was provided incomplete, misleading and "sanitized" data to be used in a U.S. Navy scheme of cover up by mathematical analysis to result in the phony conclusion that the Mare Island Electroplating Shop was operated properly and did not emit harmful amounts of Hexavalent Chrome. If you would like to review this dishonest report just use this link:

RSA Mare Island Chrome Plating Report

The most recent contractor being paid by the U.S. Navy to make the statement that U.S. Navy Electroplating shops and other Chrome VI emission sources are well controlled and safe is Atrium Environmental Services LLC. In 2012 Atrium produced a briefing document concerning an upcoming assignment to produce a report about hearing damage and noise in Navy shipyards. In this briefing document Atrium asked to be provided with "sanitized" data for this U.S. Navy noise report. Here is page 4 from this Briefing Document:

 

or you can download the entire Briefing Document from the Navy site using this link:

Atrium Asks for "Sanitized" Data

You can expect that this link is going to go dead shortly after this page is published. When this happens just use this link to a local copy of the same document:

Atrium asks for Sanitized Data

I'm not going to go into any discussion of the meaning of the phrase "sanitized data" because everyone knows what it means. I'm going to explain what I believe to be the fundamental dishonesty of the "Industry-Wide Survey" and show that, as I believe, it is crooked to the bone. The first thing to understand about this Survey is that it is U.S. Navy Property intended by the Navy to satisfy U.S. Navy purposes and was paid for with U.S. Navy funds. I believe this means the U.S. Navy specified and got a Survey that was entirely to its liking and for its purposes. This is demonstrated by the first fact it is issued and made available to the public through the following U.S. Navy web site and no other. You can use this link to access this report on the Internet from the U.S. Navy site if you wish:

U.S. Navy Industry-Wide Chrome VI Exposure Survey

or you just see that this link to it is a U.S. Navy web site:

http://www.public.navy.mil/navsafecen/Documents/OSH/oshdata/OccHlth/NSRP_Hexavalent_Chromium_Exposures-0108.pdf

This Survey is 48 pages long and because most of its contents are, in my opinion, factually worthless it is not going to be entirely reproduced here. My intent with this Survey is only to use pages from the Survey and other U.S. Navy reports and other U.S. Navy contractor documents to convince you that the U.S. Navy is a deliberately poisoning its employees with Chrome VI. If you want to download this Survey you can use this link to a local copy in the event the U.S. Navy site link should go dead:

U.S. Navy Industry-Wide Hexavalent Chrome Exposure Survey

This Survey was issued in 2007 and it states on the Cover page that it was prepared by:

Atrium Environmental Health and Safety Services, LLC
11495 Sunset Hills Road, Suite 210
Reston, Virginia 20190
703-689-9482

If you'd like to know more about Atrium Environmental Services LLC. here is the link to their web site:

Atrium Environmental Services Web Site

The strange thing about Atrium is if you do an exhaustive web search on it and it's founder you will find almost nothing and I found nothing of value to me that is useful for determining the qualifications of Atrium to produce this report. I found this to amazing and seemingly unbelievable. The idea that the Navy hires a company to do a very important survey and nothing is known about the people who prepared this report is ridiculous to me. Atrium is a new company and the author of the Survey is identified to be the company's founder. I believe the people who prepare an important document to demonstrate Chrome VI exposures from Chrome plating shops in all the major shipyards in the U.S.A. are safe needs to be qualified by both education and experience to be fully capable to do this very important work. All we can know about the author of this document is he has 25 years of experience in the industry and this means absolutely nothing to me about what qualifies him to say everything is fine with Chrome VI from Chrome plating shops at shipyards. There is no resume, no statement of education, jobs and significant career accomplishments. It's all just a blank and I believe this blank must be filled in completely otherwise the Industry-Wide Survey is just a big nothing in my opinion. I believe the Internet was scrubbed clean of anything having to do with the real educational and work experiences of the people who created this Industry-Wide Survey for a very good reason, otherwise this information would be available.

This Survey states on the Cover Page it was prepared for the National Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP). The NSRP web site states that it was founded "At the request of the U.S. Navy" and "NSRP is co-funded by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Shipbuilding Industry. Here is a link to the NSRP web site:

National Shipbuilding Research Project (NSRP) Web Site

The NSRP is quick to make the argument that is a kind of big Shipyard club. This is contradicted by the "Welding Fume Regulations Final Report", issued in 1999 for the NSRP that contains the statement:

Here is a link to this report:

NSRP Chrome VI Regulation Final Report

All this demonstrates that when the NSRP Web site says, "and the U.S. Shipbuilding Industry" it means "Paid for, specified by and produced for the U.S. Navy". This means simply is that the NSRP is a totally owned subsidiary of the U.S. Navy funded with U.S. Navy money that has been laundered by being passed through one or more of all the other U.S. Shipyards. There is no doubt the NSRP does some good work to avoid duplication of effort and the combination of expensive research. But, just like anything that can be used for good it can also be used to do bad. I believe this "Industry Wide Survey" is a very bad thing that can only possibly be used for bad purposes. I believe the Survey was made for, paid for, used by and specified by the U.S. Navy for one purpose only and this is to deny the uncounted many who are injured by exposure to Chrome VI the right to be cared for and compensated for injuries caused by Chrome VI. Looking at the Survey from a scientific standpoint with my experience and education it appears to me to be just plain trash. I believe it is a very evil thing.

Occupational Injury costs are Line item No. 1 on the U.S. Navy budget. This means that this expense is under constant scrutiny and pressure. When it comes to cutting costs the first place the U.S. Navy money bean counters look is Injury Compensation. The best way to reduce U.S. Navy Injury Compensation costs is to do everything possible to reduce Injury Compensation claims and the best way to do this is, whenever and wherever and however possible to make sure doctors don't have enough information to make the diagnosis an injury is related to work. The Mare Island Injury Compensation office had invented a very clever scheme to accomplish this. They had a "reward" program for local doctors who had been contacted by injured employees and had certified their injuries to be work related. These doctors were told that Mare Island had a kind and just injury compensation system and that it had money for doctors to use for education and sabbatical trips, all the doctor had to do was apply. And the doctor was told that most workers from Mare Island who applied for injury compensation were just malingerer's looking for a free ride. The doctor was advised to contact the injury compensation office if a Mare Island employee contacted him so that the compensation office could help the doctor. This was slick and it worked. When I went to my doctor to report Chrome VI poisoning after being poisoned to within an inch of my life by the February 1988 Chrome VI spill my doctor told me that Mare Island said I was full of shit. You can be sure that if you do what I did and go to the doctor to report Chrome VI poisoning they will say the same thing to your doctor. I believe you can also be sure if your doctor asks the Navy to prove it they will hand him or her a copy of the Industry-Wide Survey and point out figure 16 to him..

If you'd like to see the February 1988 Mare Island Chrome VI Airborne Spill Report (Critique) you can use this link:

Mare Island Chrome VI Spill Critique Report 1988

The big problem with the Mare Island "reward the doctors" method is it creates too many witnesses and too many possibilities for demands for ever increasing "rewards". It's dangerous to the Navy in the long run because you just never can tell when such a scheme would accidentally become exposed. Then the results would be catastrophic from a financial and public relations standpoint. Something better was needed and I believe this "Industry-Wide Survey" is the outcome of a very clever long term scheme constructed by the U.S. Navy to avoid occupational injury claims and shield itself completely from the financial responsibility for its guilt in all the Chrome VI deaths and health ruin it has caused.

Looking at the situation from a U.S. Navy perspective it's easy to see it's worth spending a lot of money, time and effort to obtain completely dishonest scholarly looking and independent looking documents that are used to deny Injury Compensation Claims, like Chrome VI and hearing injury claims that are likely to last a long time and be very expensive. The Navy also hires very intelligent people to help them see things that are to come. It doesn't take much of a genius to see that if you expose a large population of people to a genetic toxin chemical that causes inheritable genetic defects the downstream claim potential is practically unlimited. It's easy to foresee the Navy being taken to court sometime in the next 50 years by a severely disabled child whose birth defect problems are medically attributed to Chrome VI exposure at a Navy shipyard by his grandmother. Better for the Navy to create the paper now to make it difficult to prosecute any such thing.

Injuries from Chrome VI exposure are usually permanent meaning if the victim lives a long but painful life the costs of an approved Injury Compensation claim will last for decades and be very expensive to the U.S. Navy Injury Compensation costs. The U.S. Navy has created a vast quantity of Chrome VI victims. It's easy to see from a bean counter perspective that, no matter the cost, it's just simpler and better to hide the evidence, deny, deny, deny and then paper the whole situation over with dishonest reports that "look really scholarly". It's also easy to see that dishonest paper is always best when prepared by someone else and this situation is even better if the someone else can appear to have been paid by someone other than the U.S. Navy, as is the case with what I believe to be the completely dishonest, "Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chromium (CrVI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations".

The U.S. Navy burned Research Science Associates when it purchased them to prepare the twisted 1988 Mare Island Shipyard Electroplating Shop Chrome VI Emissions report. The author of that report had a Ph.D. and a Ph.D. is a lot of "scholarly" horsepower. I'm sure you can imagine that when the monsters at the U.S. Navy decided sometime in 2004 it was time to buy another Chrome VI cover up document like that RSA report it would have been best to have a person with a Ph.D. be it's author. But there is a funny thing about people with Ph .D's. They've got a lot to loose when they are found to be wrong and its even worse if they are both wrong and stupid enough to allow themselves to have been fooled and to be used like a dirty rag like RSA was used. Word gets around in the very small Ph.D. community and they avoid the poison. It's no mystery to me there is no Ph.D. authoring the "Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chromium (CrVI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations". Nor does it surprise me that there is not one single person with a Ph.D. in any natural science indicated to have participated in its preparation. This says to me that the entire report was prepared by people having about the same educational and experience level as one would expect to find in any typical U.S. Navy Occupational Health and Safety office; and I don't think this is any accident. A Ph.D. is paid to study and research a thing and publish independent conclusions and I believe everyone else is simply paid to produce a specified product. The "Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chromium (CrVI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations" is, in my opinion, just a product produced by hirelings entirely to U.S. Navy specifications and I believe it's just a tool in the U.S. Navy Chrome VI Injury Compensation Claim Denial Tool Box.

The U.S. Navy financial liability for all of the maiming, crippling, injuries, and the creation of widows and orphans caused by exposure to Chrome VI released by the U.S. Navy is so huge it is probable the U.S. Navy would be bankrupted entirely if it was forced to pay these costs. This means that there is absolutely nothing the U.S. Navy will not do to avoid having to pay even one single claim for even the slightest Chrome VI exposure injury. Just one approved claim would open the door to hundreds of thousands of them and the U.S. Navy knows it.

Everything hazardous we use comes with a risk and a reward. The greater the reward the greater risk a user will be willing to assume when a hazardous material is used. If the risk is to someone other than him then you better watch out. There are two prominent examples of materials that were once used a lot and, at during those times, seemed to have low risk and high gain. They were also cheap to obtain and use. These are asbestos and the lead additive for gasoline. The actual final cost of the use of asbestos is well known and we are paying it today in many ways. There are many lawyers actively seeking to find good asbestos victims to represent because there is a gigantic 30 Billion dollar fund that has been set up to compensate these asbestos victims for their injuries. Clearly asbestos is a hazardous substance that was once perceived to be low cost, high gain and low risk but later it was discovered its risk was extremely high and also that the true cost of using it was so great its use had to be banned. The same thing goes for the gasoline lead additive. It was once seen to be a good cheap and effective gasoline additive that allowed powerful engines to be made easily because it eliminated the knock that destroyed engines. But, in time, the poisonous effect on everyone of the lead emitted from all those automobile tail pipes was discovered to be so great it also had to be banned. And we are paying the price today. The lead additive was so cheap and effective we didn't need expensive computer controlled engines with knock sensors variable cam shafts and all the other bells and whistles necessary to replace it as we do today. It's risk was very very great because the lead made us physically sick and stupid. Since it was banned, the measured Intellectual Quotient (IQ) of people born after it was banned has continued to increase. It's much the same way with Chrome VI. The problem with Chrome VI is that it is a vital part of our national security and cannot, under any circumstances, be banned. Unlike asbestos or lead in gasoline there is, as yet. no substitute for Chrome VI in weapons like guns, tanks, ships, high performance aircraft and submarines and it is very likely there never will be. The exposure control problem with Chrome VI is that it is tremendously expensive to capture when it is used. These exposure reduction costs are so great there is a corresponding great desire to somehow avoid having to pay these costs by military planners. The situation is that regardless of its necessity for the making of weapons, its use comes with a cost much higher than the cost of asbestos or the lead gasoline additive. The reason for this is that unlike asbestos and lead Chrome VI is a genetic poison that causes genetic defects and mutations that are transmitted down through the generations. This means that the effective genetic price of the use of Chrome VI can be practically unlimited and what value is our genetic integrity? But military planners do not yet see this and so if the cost of reducing Chrome VI exposure at U.S. Navy shipyards is about the same as the cost of a new Virginia Class Submarine, and it is, they will choose to do what it takes so they can get the new submarine. I believe the situation confronting the U.S. Navy by the imposition of new highly stringent Chrome VI regulations by OSHA was to spend a new Virginia Class Submarine on Chrome VI exposure reduction from its Chrome plating shops or produce a white wash document. This is completely understandable from the perspective of the bean counters at the U.S. Navy but it also means the genetic carcinogen Chrome VI is still being spewed out onto workers and adjacent communities. In time, just like with Asbestos and the lead gasoline additive, we will have it demonstrated to us in the maternity wards of hospitals, that this was, by far, the most stupid thing we have ever done to ourselves. With asbestos and the lead gasoline additive we began to heal once our exposure to these things stopped. But, will we heal when we are no longer exposed to Chrome VI and if so how long will it take? And how much money will be needed, like with asbestos, to cover the cost and where will this money come from? The answer to these questions is it is infinitely cheaper and better to do what it takes and to spend what it takes, now, to get military generally and U.S. Navy particularly, Chrome VI emissions under real and not fictional control.

 

 

The "Industry-Wide Survey of Chrome VI Exposures"

 

I believe the motive for this Survey is money: big Navy money. This fact adequate control of Chrome VI exposure to workers is hugely expensive is disclosed in the "Welding Fume Regulations Final Report" on Page 4 in paragraph 3.2:

$24,094 multiplied by all of the workers at all the U.S. Navy and other subordinate shipyards is a tremendous amount of money. It's more than enough to ring alarm bells at U.S. Navy budget central control as you can see in the last two words of Paragraph 3.2, "national security". When the U.S. Navy purchases a document to study costs and it is to be published to the Navy and others, and they invoke the term "national security" in conjunction with costs it means the U.S. Navy is not going to pay those costs and that's all there is to it. If you do the math and assume 200,000 workers and multiply them times $24,094.00 you get 4,818,800,000.00 which is close to 5 Billion dollars. There's just no way the U.S. Navy is going to spend anywhere near 5 Billion dollars to protect its workers from Hexavalent Chrome. That is never going to happen. It's cheaper to just "take care of things" so that there is never going to be any written record to show the workers were exposed at excessive levels of Hexavalent Chrome.

I believe the "Survey" was constructed to justify only two statements in it. The first is this simple statement made on Page 1, Paragraph 1:

 

 

This is, in my opinion, a wonderful evasion. The U.S. Navy word tuners are highly experienced in the fabrication of extremely complex lies and misdirection by omissions and careful word selection. Notice how this is a very highly qualified statement although it uses the very strong words "well characterized and well controlled". This statement is fabricated so that when you are finished reading it the idea that Chrome VI exposures are "well characterized and well controlled" will be in your mind. But there is the qualifier, "Based on the data provided" and most importantly the main operative phrase "IT APPEARS". Now, why not use the strong phrases "We have verified", "It is our determination", "The conclusion is" or "engineering analysis demonstrates". The answer is simply that the "objective historical" data provided by participating organizations had to be, in my opinion, so useless and corrupt that I believe the author knew he had to protect himself and build in some handy word shields to be used should the necessity to protect himself arise.

The Executive Summary also contains this miracle of word construction:

"Practical and well-directed" is fine, but don't think for a minute this means the same as "effective". And it's safe to think that "practical" means "lowest possible cost". You'll also notice the phrase "protecting personnel health" are not present. While the reader may assume the purpose of the report is to promote the reduction of Chrome VI exposures this is not stated. But the Industry-Wide Survey must have a "practical" use and it does and I believe this is to cover up harmful amounts of Chrome VI being spewed into the air at shipyards out of the Chrome plating shops. My belief is the actual practical use of this Survey is to deny the ability of workers injured by electroplating shop emissions of Chrome VI the ability to get a doctor's diagnosis their injuries are work related.

It may help you to understand the true meaning of some of the important words used in this sentence.

"Shipbuilding Industry" means The U.S. Navy.

"Existing" means the Survey will do no new sampling and will use what I believe is "sanitized" data.

"Historical" means a long time ago. The question is just how long ago? The answer is very probably no earlier than 2004. There are several very good reasons for this. One is a statement contained in the 1999, "Welding Fume Regulations Final Report".

This means simply that the U.S. Navy and its captive shipyards admit and accept they do not know what they are doing when it comes to sampling air for Chrome VI. It's all a chaotic mess and this means every speck of this data would fail and be rejected by a qualified independent scientific researcher tasked to examine it. It's just plain trash data. The reason for this is that there are authoritative and official detailed Chrome VI sampling procedures that have been published for a long time and are accepted by courts of law. If these procedures were being used at the shipyards and by the U.S. Navy this statement would not have been made. Overall, I think this means that the term "Historical", when it comes to Chrome VI sampling data means something other than "a long time ago". I think it's a code word that really means "make it up", "provide fantasy data" "give us something that fits the need" or something like that. What makes me think these things is the recent uncovering of serious Chrome VI handling and contamination problems discovered by the EPA at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Electroplating Shop in Building 873.

Here is a link to the National Disease Clusters Alliance Web Site Page about the PSNSY Plating Shop problems:

NDCA Puget Sound Building 873 Plating Shop Page

An analysis of the few statements in the media about this plating shop problem illuminate the subject of Navy honesty (there is no such thing) very well. The first of these concerns the scope of the problems found at the plating shop. The official PSNSY story is that it was "drips" of Chrome VI solution into the sub basement of building 873 and an open container of paint waste that were all the problems. But this is contradicted by a statement by an EPA inspector who was there during the surprise visit:

What other things did they find? What were the problems "over the years" and that were supposed to have been addressed by PSNSY "years ago" and had not been corrected. Since the topic of the EPA Citation and the Building 873 Closure Procedure are Hexavalent Chrome I think these problems were Chrome VI problems and that the EPA had been communicating with the PSNSY over the years to correct its bad Chrome VI habits and finally the EPA ran out of patience with PSNSY telling the EPA to "go screw yourself" by doing nothing to address and correct continuing Chrome VI violations. The question is was a sub basement filled with Chrome VI plating solution the only serious violation found by the EPA during the surprise visit? The answer is no and this is supported by the following statement:

The Chrome VI filled sub basement was "AMONG" the "MORE SERIOUS" of a number of "VIOLATIONS" and it was therefore not the only serious nor the most serious of a number of serious violations. What were the other "more serious" violations And since a basement awash in Chrome VI plating solution was "more serious" what was the most serious violation and why don't we know about that? What could possibly be more serious than a basement full of Chrome VI? The Chrome VI Plating Scrubbers is the only thing I can think of. This belief is supported by a statement made by the PSNSY official spokesperson:

This is a big pack of lies and here's how:

"The facility" is the Building 873 Plating shop.

"Design" this is just a word used to make it look like there are some kind of designed "operational controls" in the plating shop when there actually are none.

"Operational Controls" is the purest of pure lies. What operational controls? There are no safety related operational controls in a U.S. Navy plating shop except for the on/off switch for the water pump that provides water to the scrubbers and is it always "off". What these liars are saying is that there is some kind of well controlled safety system there and there is not.

"Ensured" this means the non-existent "operational controls" are always working.

"potential exposures" actually means that exposures have never happened and this is certainly a lie.

"far below" means that you have been well protected..

This kind of extraordinarily well constructed pack of lies, evasions and spinning words does not just happen. A number of very well educated people in the Shipyard OH&S and Environmental and Human Resources department got together to make sure any official statement coming out of the shipyard was bullet proof.

The fact is the plating shop was so badly operated it filled up its basement with a big enough quality of Chrome VI so that the shop had to be officially shut down to clean it up. This is much more than 1000 gallons so it's not just drips. It can also be demonstrated to be a lie that exposures from this building wide Chrome VI contamination is under "operational control" by findings published by the State of California in a document published in 2006 entitled "PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO THE HEXAVALENT CHROMIUM AIRBORNE TOXIC CONTROL MEASURE FOR CHROME PLATING AND CHROMIC ACID ANODIZING OPERATIONS" on page 82:

"While they cannot be quantified because of variation from facility to facility, fugitive dust emissions also likely impact people residing near chromium plating and chromic acid anodizing facilities. Information on fugitive dust emissions is contained in Chapter V. Therefore, staff is proposing that all facilities would need to implement housekeeping measures to reduce dust emissions. We have found that fugitive emissions related to poor housekeeping can be an additional source of hexavalent chromium emissions."

There was no housekeeping system. The only system for safety to people outside the shop is scrubbers.

This is a link to this California Air Resources Board document:

California Air Resources Board Chrome VI

 

It is a fact that the Shipyard OS&H Office and the Environmental office have to know that fugitive Chrome VI dust emissions from a plating shop are dangerous to people outside the shop.This is old news. The fact there was NO housekeeping at the Building 873 shop to prevent these emissions is a CRIME that is covered up with a blizzard of the best possible lies. This begs the question, what "design and operational controls" could possibly exist to prevent fugitive dust contaminated with high levels of Chrome VI being emitted from a plating shop whose basement is filled with highly concentrated Chrome VI plating solution? There are none and to say otherwise is to just promote a pure fantasy. The fact is dust emitted from the shop, including grinding and polishing dust, is contaminated with Chrome VI. This dust is carried out of the shop by personnel and the wind. They carry it home with them and expose their families to harmful amounts of Chrome VI. This is all made light by another statement by the Shipyard:

This is another Navy miracle of careful word choice, spin and lie. It starts by saying that drips should have been cleaned more frequently. This make it all look like the matter was minor dripping from a leaky faucet of no real concern to anyone. But filling up a basement that has a drain line and a pump that is used to transfer the fluid to the IWTP requires a rather large flow of Chrome VI fluid to fill it up. And it also needs contempt for the dangers of Chrome VI. These are the truths this innocent sounding phrase are designed to deflect. Then also there is "that system" and this begs the question, what system? There is no system. There is only a basement, there are grates, and there is a path to the plating shop door. This word "system" is a pure lie designed to create a false sense of security in the reader. And the phrase "contain and segregate" waste. Okay, how does the basement full of highly concentrated Chrome VI fluid "contain and segregate" anything? This is another lie because if there had been a system to contain and segregate that basement full of Chrome VI there would have been no EPA citation, no need to close the building to clean it up and no need to replace the Chrome Plating ventilation system. Finally this wonderfully lie filled paragraph of U.S. Navy word wonders is capped of with the big whopper:

The big idea of occupational health and safety with plating shops is to protect the employees "INSIDE" the shop. There is only one system in or on a plating shop that both protects the employees inside the shop from excess chemical exposure and that "SHOULD" prevent releases to the environment and this is the ventilation system and the SCRUBBER. The ventilation system will protect the employees working inside the shop if the scrubber does not work. If the scrubber does not work it is the people OUTSIDE the shop who will be exposed. Usually at a shipyard like Puget the number of people outside the shop outnumbers the people inside the shop by about a thousand to one or more. This makes the scrubbers to be very important safety devices that are usually not operated properly and usually cause the people outside the plating shop to be exposed to more chrome than the people outside the shop. The key question that needs to be answered is, were the chrome plating scrubbers operated properly and I believe the answer can be proven to be no and this is done a little bit further down this page. Here's a link to that spot:

Puget Scrubbers were Starved of Water

The official U.S. Navy story is that it was fined $56,000.00 by the EPA for very large and serious Chrome VI handling violations at this plating shop in 2009. As a result of this violation the shop had to be temporarily shut down so it could be cleaned out. There are some statements in the documents related to this incident that justify the conclusion the U.S. Navy operated the PSNSY Chromium Scrubbers without water flow just as they did at Mare Island with the same result at Puget as happened at Mare Island. Mare Island and Vallejo were fumigated with very large amounts of Chrome VI. I believe that this means that the U.S. Navy was providing dishonest data to Atrium for it's Industry-Wide Survey. I believe it could not possibly be anything else. Here's why:

This is a page from a report prepared by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ADTDR) in 2005. It proves the PSNSY plating shop has been badly operated for a very very long time. It is titled, "BNC/Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Public Health Assessment (PHA). It was issued to the public in May 2005. Samples were collected in the soil of the PSNSY Electroplating Shop in Building 873 and they disclosed extremely high levels of Chrome VI contamination. So where were the "designed operational controls" then?:

 

Numerous spills between 1988 and 1992? Where was the designed system intended to prevent "potential exposures"?. The bottom line is you can believe NOTHING the Navy says about how it operates its plating shops except that they are volcanoes of Chrome VI that constantly spew poison over everyone. Also, where was the EPA in 1994 and why all of their surprise in 2009 when the "discovered" the Building 873 plating shop was full of Chrome VI? The fact is the U.S. Navy and the EPA have worked together to keep the full scope of the situation at the plating shop a big secret and I believe this is for the very good reason the plating shop scrubbers have been completely ineffective and removing Chrome VI and have been poisoning the shipyard for decades if not much longer.

This fact is that in 1994 the level of chromium contamination in Building 873 was demonstrated to be 16,500 PPM. This is an extremely high and very unsafe level and what it indicates is complete contempt for the dangers inherent in an extremely dangerous chemical. This altitude of contempt is also demonstrated more recently in 2011 in several ways. The first is that the EPA cited the U.S. Navy for findings that Building 873 had a severe chrome contamination problem due to poor housekeeping. You may recall that back in 1988 the California EPA found that poor housekeeping in a plating shop is likely responsible for a harmful level of Chrome VI emissions from the shop and so this citation was very serious. This recent PSNS citation resulted in a $56,000.00 fine. The Navy paid and it and also agreed to clean up the plating shop and undertake a whole series of protective measures in the future to prevent this happening again. However, we know from the Mare Island experience that uncontrolled Chrome VI contamination in a plating shop does not merely result from minor tank spillage it results from an attitude of contempt and a lack of upkeep for everything, including most importantly, the ventilation and chrome plating scrubber systems. It is very interesting to examine the entire procedure prepared by PSNS to accomplish the clean up of the Building 873 Plating Shop. The first thing is that while it calls itself a "Closure" the work was completed before it was written. This means that if it is incomplete, this is a deliberate and intentional omission. If you examine it you will see absolutely nothing mentioned about a ventilation system. Here is a link to this Clean Up Procedure or Closure document:

PSNS Building 873 Cleanup Procedure 2011

All of the things done in Building 873 were the result of a Consent Order issued by the EPA and the U.S. Navy. This is a document, issued by the EPA and it specifies the terms of the citation and the remedial actions the EPA and the Navy agreed would solve the Chrome VI contaminating problem in Building 873:

EPA Navy Building 873 Consent Agreement

If you read this you will also see no mention of any ventilation problem of any kind. The law requires the public comment to any cleanup procedure and so there had to be a comment period for the Building 873 Cleanup Procedure even though all the work had already been done. The Washington State Department of Environmental Protection issued a public notice in November 2011 soliciting comments and explaining that all the work had already been done. If you would like to review this document you can use this link:

Washington State Request for Comments Building 873 Cleanup Procedure

The Request for Comments demonstrates that the the Consent Agreement and the Cleanup Procedure do not contain some vital information. If you look at page 2 of this Request you will see the statement that as part of the work of the cleanup procedure the chrome plating ventilation system was replaced:

This statement makes the Consent Agreement and the Building 873 Cleanup Procedure to be deliberately incomplete and so they are just another set of Chrome plating shop lies. So why hide the ventilation system work? The Chrome plating ventilation system would not have been replaced for no reason and the fact that the U.S. Navy took extreme care to make sure no one knew it was being replaced means it was replaced for a very good reason. This begs the question, just how much of the ventilation system was replaced? If all that was done was to replace some local corroded piping then there's really no problem in simply taking advantage of the shop down time to do some good preventative maintenance. But on the other hand it's important that only the Chrome plating ventilation system was replaced. What about all the other plating and process tanks and their ventilation piping? The big question that needs to be answered is were the Chrome Plating Scrubbers also replaced or rebuilt because if they were it means they needed this work for a very very long time. We remember that there were many complaints at the Mare Island plating shop of large volumes of chrome contaminated water running out of the ventilation system over the chrome plating tanks there when the scrubbers were run without water or maintenance for years and were allowed to "rock up" and become useless at trapping and removing large harmful amounts of Chrome VI discharged into the ambient air. It is deeply deeply suspicious the U.S. Navy would work so hard to keep the fact the Chrome Plating ventilation system was replaced if all they did was replace some pipes.

The way to answer the question about whether or not the Chrome plating scrubber needed to be replaced is to see how much water it was provided during normal operations. If it was provided with a flow of about 6 gallons per minute during Chrome plating operations then it was operated properly and could not have rocked up. Under a condition of good water flow it's highly unlikely the scrubber would need to be replaced or rebuilt. But, if it can be seen the scrubber was regularly starved of water it's easy to see this is a very serious cause for the EPA and State of Washington to cite the plating shop. A rocked up useless scrubber is far far more important to a regulator than is a basement contaminated with Chrome VI particularly when the shop was not cited for "multiple Chrome VI spills between 1994 and 1999. Fortunately, there is a U.S. Navy document that allows a simple calculation of how much water per day was provided to the Building 873 Chrome Scrubber.

Before the calculations a little bit about a Chrome Scrubber if you're not familiar with them, and most people are not. But the fact a Chrome VI Plating scrubber has the capability, if not operated properly to poison you, rob you of your health and cause genetic defects in you children and grandchildren should make you realize they are the most important piece of safety equipment on any shipyard. Here's a scrubber diagram to help you out:

A scrubber is also a very high efficiency cleaning device. It cleans everything out of the air that passes through it. This means that if the air that COMES INTO the plating shop is not cleaned before it enters the shop it will be cleaned when it passes through the scrubber. If a scrubber is installed in a shipyard where there is a tremendous about of dust and material released into the air from general industrial operations, all of this junk in the air that gets into the scrubber will stay in the scrubber. A scrubber is designed to remove only water soluble material. General junk in the air is not water soluble so once it gets into the scrubber it stays there. Over time this junk will fill up the scrubber with a mixture of dirt and Chrome VI and this is called "rock" because it's a lot like rock and removing it is like hammering cement into pieces. It's a nasty job. I know of no and I mean NO shipyard that filters the air coming into the plating shop. This means simply that you can anticipate that the average Chrome VI removal efficiency of the scrubbers at your shipyard are about the same as they were at Mare Island Shipyard, and this is about 7% for Chrome VI released by decorative chrome plating and about 17% for hard chrome plating and anodizing. Puget sound uses Scrubber No. 3 for all three processes.

You can expect that if the Puget Sound plating shop does not have a very good air filtration system to filter the air COMING INTO the plating shop that you are breathing a lot of Chrome VI. The reason for this is that Puget Sound Naval Shipyard has to provide a report to the EPA every year that specifies exactly how many pounds of hazardous materials it releases into the Shipyard air and this is a total of 35,000 pounds of toxic materials released to the air. This is a lot of junk and the fans on the plating shop are big and suck in vast quantities of air every day all day and clean it and keep this junk in the scrubber to clog it and rock it up.

The main question is, if the Puget Scrubber has been run without water flow and is not good at removing the vast amount of Chrome VI generated inside the plating shop just how much Chrome VI is discharged from the Puget plating shop? I believe that Puget Sound Naval Shipyard has accurately answered this question for a number of years in a report that the shipyard must submit to the EPA every year. Here is a link to a site that has copies of this EPA Toxic Release Inventory report submitted by PSNSY every year:

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Airborne Toxic Releases

There is a tremendous amount of information available on this site. But the topic of this page is Chrome released to the air and I've extracted this page from the Puget TRI Report for the year 2010, have scanned it and you can download it using this link:

Puget Chrome Toxic Release Report 2010

To make it easy to get to the pont here is the important Table of toxic Chrome releases from this toxic Chrome release report:

You can see that under "Other Release Onsite" and this means "To The Air" Puget reports that in 2009 there were 79 pounds of chrome released to the air and in 2010 the amount was 161 pounds. I believe these figures are actually the amount of Chrome VI discharged from the Building 873 Plating shop in these years. There are three reasons for this belief. The first is that these amounts are within the range of the amount of Chrome VI calculated to have been released from the Mare Island plating shop in 1988. This was 156 pounds. If you'd like to review this Mare Island Estimate you can use this link:

Mare Island Chrome Discharge Calculation

The second reason is provided by another figure in the TRI statement for 2010 produced by Puget in the same TRI Report showing that 122 pounds of Chromium were released to the ambient air:

The third reason is this TRI report contains a deliberate lie on Page 2 of this report. Puget was required to report the total amount of Chrome present on the facility in this report. They reported a total amount of zero to a maximum of 99 pounds of chrome were present during the year:

This is a ridiculously low amount. The Decorative Chrome, Hard Chrome and Anodizing tanks contain thousands of gallons of concentrated Chrome VI solutions that are about 25% Chrome Oxide by weight. Any one of these baths will contain much more than 99 pounds of Chrome. In addition to this the Shipyard is certainly going to keep enough Chrome VI (Chromic Oxide) on hand to make up new plating and anodizing baths in the event the need to do so should unexpectedly arise. The Shipyard will certainly have several THOUSAND pounds of Chrome VI on hand.

If you want a good idea of the Chrome VI removal efficiency of the Puget Sound Plating Shop Chrome Plating Scrubber the efficiency figures from the Mare Island scrubbers is a very good estimate of the Chrome VI removal efficiency of scrubbers maintained by the U.S. Navy everywhere at all of is shipyards. There's no doubt in my mind the Puget Chrome Scrubber emitted somewhere between 80 and 160 pounds of Chrome VI into the air per year. This is a huge amount and is more than enough to do serious damage to the health of the people working at Puget an those living in surrounding communities. The question is how did this happen? There is no doubt in my mind the Puget Scrubber has been run without water flow for a very very long time just as the Mare Island scrubbers were run dry. Here's what makes me come to this conclusion:

This is a statement from page 18 of the Mare Island RSA Report showing the normal efficiencies of the Mare Island Plating Shop Chrome scrubbers:

 

The TRI report for the year 2010 shows that in that year 2010 over 35,000 pounds of hazardous material were released into the air by Puget Sound Shipyard. This does not include un measurable things like general dirt, dust and debris released into the air, grinding dust, tire rubber and so on. The simple fact is an incoming air filtration system is absolutely necessary to the continued good operating condition of a Chrome VI scrubber. The U.S. Navy knows this, and yet does not and never has provided it at any plating shop. This shows me an attitude of great cheapness because it shows that even when the U.S. Navy is dealing with one of the most serious poisons there is it won't spend enough money to do the safety job right. It's a crime.

A Chrome VI scrubber always needs a flow of fresh water. Here's why: A Chrome VII scrubber is just a plastic box that water is circulated through by being sprayed into it. Air sucked from above the plating tanks carries air contaminated with Chrome VI droplets into the scrubber where the droplets are absorbed into the water stream and the cleaned air is exhausted to the outside air. It's simple. The scrubber has no moving parts and it's always "on" so long as the fans sucking air from above the plating tanks are running. These fans are always running because there is a health and safety requirement for them to be running so long as the plating tanks are not covered and they are never covered. Air passing through the scrubber evaporates the water in the scrubber and so a scrubber is always discharging a large quantity of evaporated water. Scrubber exhaust air is always 100% water saturated. The water sprayed into the scrubber comes from a surge tank and it returns back to the surge tank. Because the chrome plating solution in the plating tanks is always agitated it is always discharging some chrome VI into the air and into the scrubber. This results in the Chrome VI concentration always building up in the water in the surge tank unless something is done to continually reduce it. This is done by continually removing Chrome VI water from the surge tank and adding clean make-up water. The long and short of it is a Chrome VI plating scrubber always needs make up water to account for evaporation and it needs blow-down water to keep the concentration of Chrome VI in the surge tank and circulating water low so that it will effectively remove the Chrome VI that enters it.

If a shipyard does not maintain a scrubber, does not provide the plating shop with clean incoming air, does not provide a 6 gpm blow down rate, and only makes up for evaporation the Chrome VI level will just continue to build up in the scrubber. The Chrome VI concentration in the surge tank level will build up and continue to increase without any limit. Finally, the concentration of Chrome VI will build up until the circulating water becomes so thick it is blown out of the scrubber. This is what happened in February 1988 at Mare Island. You can read the Chrome VI Spill Critique Report using this link:

Mare Island Chrome VI Scrubber Spill Critique

The reason this spill happened is that Mare Island got caught running the scrubbers without water. Then the regulators piled on them and this forced them to run the scrubbers with water. But it was too difficult and expensive to handle all that 6 gpm blow down water that had to be handled and disposed of as hazardous waste and so the water was turned off. They kept the surge tank water circulating through the scrubber and added water to it only to make up for evaporation. The result was the Chrome VI concentration in the surge tank built up until the liquid foamed and got blown out of the scrubber. What you at Puget need to keep in mind now is that the regulators jumped on the plating shop. The scrubbers probably got rebuilt. Now the scrubbers are being operated with water flow. The question is do you think the people running the Puget Sound Electroplating shop are any smarter and do they have a greater concern for your safety and well being than the same people at Mare Island did? I know I don't think so. It would be interesting to see how Puget Sound has operated the scrubbers up until now. This can be done with some simple mathematics and a good idea of how much Chrome VI contaminated water is transferred from the Plating Shop to the IWTP each day.

The first thing to do is to estimate the amount of Chrome VI contaminated water the plating shop should discharge each day from blow down of the scrubber surge tank if the scrubber and the mist eliminator are given enough water needed for them to remove Chrome VI efficiently.

1. The first question is how much Chrome plating is done per day at the PSNSY plating shop? Hard chrome is deposited at a thickness rate of 0.00098 in per hour maximum. Objects hard chrome plated are usually plated to a thickness of 0.0030 in to 0.0098 in. This will take the plating bath to be used (energized and producing mist) from three hours to ten hours per piece plated. Military hard plating is usually closer to 0.005 in, so this estimate is probably low by 33%. The average of this is 6.5 hours per day per piece that is hard chrome plated. The assumption is one piece per day. A large shipyard like Puget will certainly need at least one piece per day to be hard chrome plated and very probably many more from time to time.

2. The amount of water needed for a properly operating scrubber is a minimum of 6 gallons per minute (gpm) for a scrubber and 3 gpm for the mist eliminator during plating operations. Assuming 6.5 hours of hard chrome plating per day results in the following water need:

1 scrubber X 6 gpm X 6.5 hours X 60 min/hr = 2340 gallons

1 mist eliminator X 3 gpm X 6.5 hours X 60 mi/hr = 1170 gallons

Total = 2340 + 1170 gallons = 3510 gallons for proper scrubber operation

In 2002 the Naval Facilities Engineering Command NAVFAC issued a report concerning the testing a new technology to be used to remove chrome from Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Electroplating Waste Waters received at the Building 871 IWTP. This 147 page report contains a table on Page D-3 recording flows of Chromium VI waste water from the Building 873 Electroplating shop to the Building 871 IWTP. These flows make it straightforward to see how much water was provided to the chrome scrubber and mist eliminator per day. If you would like to review this report you can use this link:

NAVFAC 2002 Molecular Filter Test Report

Chrome plating also uses water for rinsing and this is also discharged to the IWTP as Chrome VI contaminated water. About 95% of the Chrome VI contaminated water discharged from a plating shop will be rinse water, not counting scrubber water. Chrome VI contaminated rinse water results from rinsing objects that have been anodized, decorative chrome plated, hard chrome plated, and other processes using Chrome VI as an ingredient. The PSNSY plating shop should produce a minimum of 1500 Gallons of Chrome VI contaminated rinse water per day if very good water conservation practices are used. A 25 person commercial chrome plating shop will need about 25,000 gallons per day for rinse water by comparison.

The appropriate table from this report is reproduced here for your convenience because it is a very important page:

The comparison is:

3510 gallons needed for scrubbers Vs. 1,385 Gallons total per day actual used

1500 Gallons per day needed for rinsing.

This means the only Chrome VI contaminated water that was transferred from the plating shop to the IWTP was rinse water. No water was provided to the scrubber or mist eliminator.

This demonstrates conclusively the scrubbers were run without water at least during these four years and very probably much longer up until the EPA made its surprise visit in 2011. I believe this is the actual gigantic violation the EPA found at the Plating shop and that the Navy negotiated a cover up because the costs of the truth would be so large as to be unpayable. This explains why all the secrecy surrounding the replacement of ventilation piping above the chrome plating tanks. It wasn't just the ventilation piping, which would be no big deal, it was the rocked up useless chrome VI spewing scrubber that was the thing that was actually fixed. If you look at the Consent Agreement you'll see it contains a lot of logs and other things for shop personnel to do to make sure that sub basement never gets contaminated again. It's a great shame it mentions nothing about and provides no logs or other things to make sure the scrubber doesn't get run dry all the time again.

EPA & U.S. Navy Plating Shop Consent Agreement 2011

Lets get back to the Atrium "Industry-Wide Survey". I believe its purpose is to cover up massive releases of Chrome VI from U.S. Navy Plating shops.

The data this Survey says it analyzed is described to be objective. I believe "Objective" is a word deliberately used to create a false sense of confidence in the reader because it is a word that is not at all necessary to use in the context of this Survey. The reason for this is that what possible good is any data that is not objective? If it is not objective it's just trash and so why would the U.S. Navy ever waste any money or time to collect data that is not objective? I believe the answer is simple and it is that the U.S. Navy has absolutely no objective historical data to use in this Survey. I believe the Survey is based on data that is not objective. Ordinarily this would be a difficult assertion for me to prove. Fortunately, Atrium Environmental Services was recently tasked by the U.S. Navy in the year 2011 to prepare a Survey of Risk Analysis for Shipyard Noise. The U.S. Navy has a lot of hearing damaged people who file occupational injury claims and so I am sure that "in order to promote....." Atrium was commissioned to perform a shipyard noise survey. Atrium prepared a Briefing Document for the meeting to discuss this noise survey. Here is a link to a copy of this Briefing Document:

Atrium 2012 Briefing Document

In this Briefing Document, on Page 4 and in paragraph b. Atrium is reminding the briefing participants to provide it with "SANITIZED DATA". A Shipyard is a very noisy place and the closed metal hull of a ship filled with workers using air powered hand grinders, air powered chisels, needle guns, drills, welders and hammers is pure noise hell. No one can work in such an environment without injury to hearing, often serious injury. There is no way to reduce this noise because it's just the nature of the beast. The Shipyards provide hearing protective ear plugs but if you wear them you cannot communicate with other workers. The way most workers resolve the situation of wearing ear plugs and not being able to communicate or to not wear them and be able to do their jobs is to not wear the plugs. Consequently, a lot of shipyard workers are practically deaf and have permanent ringing in the ears. Naturally they want to be properly compensated for this unavoidable work related injury and naturally the U.S. Navy wants these victims to have their claims rejected or to be effectively discouraged from filing claims. In comes the good contractor Atrium Services. I believe the Navy would just give them good solid Sanitized Noise data and I believe they will "analyze" it and come to the conclusion everything is "appears to be well controlled" just like in the Chrome VI Industry-Wide Survey. This, of course, begs the question was Atrium actually provided with sanitized Chrome VI personnel exposure data? I believe the Survey itself says "yes"in several ways.

The first way has already been pointed out. A very accurate description of the "objective historical" Chrome VI exposure data submitted to Atrium by by the U.S. Navy and its subordinate shipyards. This is provided on Page 7 of the 1999 "Weld Fume Study Final Report":

This description basically says to me that the U.S. Navy and other shipyards have a well developed practice of engineering malpractice when it comes to sampling the air workers breathe to measure the amount of highly toxic Chrome VI they are breathing. The kind of data resulting from the complete sampling chaos described in the Weld Fume Final Report is just absolute trash and is totally worthless for purposes of using it for any kind of analysis except to analyze it to find out all the things that are being done wrong. And you can be sure the Navy is not doing this.

If you take a look at the end of the Industry Wide Chrome VI Survey published on the U.S. Navy web site you will see on the Table of Contents, page 2, that there is shown an Appendix A that contains spread sheets with all of the data used in the Survey. If you go to these pages here is what you will actually see:

 

The Appendix A Cover Page and a data page have been combined into one page here to sow that there is no data for you to see. This means to me the U.S. Navy decided it should not be published meaning to me they don't want anyone to see it so that it can be questioned in any way. This tells me that the data is, in my opinion, NOT DEFENSABLE and would fail the simplest challenge. The fact there is no data makes me believe the Survey is a hoax based on sanitized data that must be hidden.

Chrome VI exposure data is just about the most serious thing there is by virtue of the terrible damage Chrome VI does to human health without the victim being able to know about it. This seriousness demands this exposure data be clean and pure and be collected so that it has the highest possible degree of scientific validity and confidence. It must be absolutely unimpeachable. It has to be collected in accordance with industry standard written and approved procedures by trained personnel who are qualified to collect representative samples and who are acting independently under clear orders requiring them to ensure they do nothing that could bias the sample results. Samples must be analyzed in a certified independent chemical laboratory in accordance with written and approved procedures. There must be properly documented chains of custody. All of these sampling and analysis actions must be accompanied by written logs prepared by the sampling and analytical personnel so that in the event there is any question of the accuracy of the data these questions can be answered. This Industry-Wide Survey contains no data or any means by which the data can be examined or authenticated. It just says that Atrium looked at the data it was given, subjected it to mathematical manipulation, and then decided that it looks like everyone who paid for the report is doing everything just right. This is in 2007 and then in 2011 Atrium is tasked to do another Survey and ask for sanitized data.

When metal that contains Chrome, such as stainless steel, is welded fumes containing Hexavalent chrome are generated and released into the surrounding air. This Hexavalent Chrome is the same Chrome VI that is released during chrome plating. In 1999 the U.S. Shipbuilding industry faced the reduction of personnel exposure limits for Chrome VI by OSHA. The reductions were to be so great there was no way to achieve the necessary reductions using machines and equipment available in 1999. The National Shipbuilding Research Program commissioned the report, "Welding Fume Study Final Report" to provide guidance as to how to proceed so that the shipbuilding industry (U.S. Navy) could achieve compliance with the new Chrome VI exposure regulations when they became effective in 2006. This is a long report. It is 147 pages long and you can download it using this link:

1999 Welding Fume (Chrome VI) Report

 

This report was not prepared by Atrium Environmental Services but they knew about it. The Report contains this transmission document that was written by the founder of Atrium Environmental Services who is also listed to be an author of the 2007 Industry-Wide Survey of Shipyard Chrome VI Exposures. Here is a copy of this page:

The Weld Fume Study contains two very important statements. These are reproduced here from the original report pages:

These two statements indicate that in 1999 the U.S. Navy finally admitted Hexavalent Chrome is a carcinogen and a human mutagen. Of the two effects I am sure you will recognize that mutagen is the worst because the mutant genes produced by Chrome VI exposure can be transmitted down through the generations. Excessive exposure to Chrome VI does not merely involve the degradation of the health of the worker it results in the permanent degradation of the health of his or her descendants.

The Weld Fume Study stated plainly that it's results were based on observations in the field:

 

The Hexavalent Chrome Industry Wide Study was based on "HISTORICAL DATA" provided to Atrium Environmental Services. Atrium "analyzed" the data using mathematical methods but did no field work to ensure the data was accurate or complete. This is indicated by the following DISCLAIMER or "Limitations" statement included by Atrium in the Survey:

I believe the key to understanding the necessity for this limitation or DISCLAIMER is contained in a statement made in the 1999 Fume Report that makes it clear to me to see the only thing the U.S. Navy cares about with regard to Chrome VI exposure limit compliance is money and it is BIG MONEY for compliance. This is because the U.S. Navy is the biggest source of work to all of the shipyards in the United States and so the cost of Chrome VI exposure compliance just about everywhere in the U.S. Shipbuilding and repair industry will be billed back to them. This is a statement from the 1999 Chrome VI Fume Report that explains everything:

The problem is that where there is big money there will also always be big dishonesty. This is just a fact of life that has been around for as long as there has been money. I believe this explains the DISCLAIMER or statement of Limitations in the Chrome VI Industry-Wide Survey. The authors of the 1999 Chrome Fume Study did not need a disclaimer because their report was based on data they had collected in the field and could verify and defend if the need to defend it should arise. I believe the authors of the Chrome VI Industry-Wide Survey needed a Disclaimer because they were simply handed the data by the U.S. Navy and its slave shipyards.

The purpose of the MareIslandMurder web site is to uncover and demonstrate the U.S. Navy dishonesty concerning the criminal U.S. Navy cover up of the deliberate massive Chrome VI exposure to Mare Island workers and residents of the adjacent community of Vallejo for about a century. This exposure came from uncontrolled Chrome VI emissions from the Metal Plating Shop at Mare Island. The purpose of this page is to demonstrate the Chrome Plating Ship cover up is still continuing, but elsewhere. This is because Mare Island was closed prior to the 2007 Industry-Wide Chrome VI Exposure Survey being published. Any data or conclusions about the Chrome VI emissions from plating shops contained in the 2007 Survey must be from shipyards other than Mare Island and these include Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The 2007 Industry-Wide Chrome VI Exposure Survey contains, in my opinion, the untrue happy news that plating Shop Chrome VI emissions from all U.S. Shipyards are almost zero. This is, in my opinion, a fantastic claim, buried deep inside the Survey, backed up by nothing in the Survey, and in my opinion untrue. I believe the true purpose of the Survey is to cover up massive releases of Chrome VI from the shipyard Chrome plating shops and that this is hidden secretly inside the survey so that only those "in the know" can find it.

The Title of the Survey says nothing about Chrome plating releases of Chrome VI, and it's not discussed inside the Survey. But, the happy statement that U.S. Navy plating shops emit or discharge just about no Chrome VI seems to me to be carefully hidden in this Survey. Here is how this was done: This page is the first page of the Table of Contents. You will see that on Page 1 of this Table, "Paint Removal and Other CRVI Activities" is indicated to be on Page 23. No where on this page is the Electroplating of Chrome mentioned. This comes on the next page.

 

 

But notice it is indicated on the title for Page 33 of the Table of Contents Chrome Electroplating is identified to be included with "Other Chrome VI Activities" and that the results of the "Data Analysis" are provided on Figure 16.

 

Here is Figure 16. You can see the reported exposure for electroplating operations at the far right side of the Figure. This shows that the U.S. Navy wants you (and your doctor) to believe that the average exposure to workers and everyone else to Hexavalent Chrome from electroplating operations is most often so far below the Permissible Exposure Level (PEL), it's just above the OSHA 'Exemption Level" where there is absolutely no risk; very close to zero. This is an extremely exceptional claim that has absolutely nothing to back it up. There is a general universal precept concerning claims of all kinds and this is that exceptional claims must be demonstrated by exceptional evidence and there is nothing but evidence to the contrary. This evidence is the fact the massive Chrome VI exposures from plating operations at Mare Island are well demonstrated to be harmful. The U.S. Navy perjury and many other forms of dishonesty intended to cover up this harmful exposure demand an exceptional level of evidence, data and argument before the happy results of Chrome VI exposure being near the No Risk Level in 2007 can possibly be believed. I believe that what the Navy has done in the Survey is to say "we are completely innocent and you can take our word on it". I don't think that if you're smart enough to have read this far you can possibly be stupid enough to believe this nonsense.

Here is a close up of the Electroplating section of this graph so you can see it more clearly:

I believe this little section of the graph on Figure 16 is the true purpose of the entire Industry-Wide Survey. The reason for this belief is that it is the Electroplating shop that is the largest source of Hexavalent Chrome on any shipyard. There are hundreds if not thousands of pounds of Chrome VI there. It has been clearly demonstrated that the Mare Island and Puget Sound Chrome VI Plating Scrubbers were run without water and the PSNS Scrubber has been run without water at least up to 2011. Welding operations will only result in the exposure to the welder and a few adjacent personnel and is local. But as the Mare Island Shipyard example shows an electroplating shop can fumigate an entire shipyard and much, if not all, of the adjacent community with Chrome VI. Since it is a huge Chrome VI source and because this Survey is, in my opinion, completely dishonest, it seems to me to be appropriate the main purpose of the report would be minimized by being hidden in the Table of Contents and by being made a small little line on a graph. This little line is, in my opinion, the BIG LIE of the Survey. In my belief it purports dishonestly to demonstrate that emissions of Chrome VI from Chrome plating operations at U.S. Navy Shipyards is usually just above the OSHA "No Harm" level. My opinion is the real purpose of this little line is to make absolutely sure no doctor can possibly sign a diagnosis that any injury to any U.S. Navy worker, past or present, or his or her descendants was due to Chrome VI exposure and I believe this is just about the BIGGEST BIG LIE possible.

I have conducted a complete examination of the U.S. Navy "Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chrome (Chrome VI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations" and can find absolutely no discussion of any plating shop Chrome VI emission data or any data upon which any discussion or conclusion about Chrome plating shop Chrome VI discharges could be based. The single solitary Plating Shop Chrome Emission data in this entire Survey is the happy news provided by the single line on Figure 16 that says all is well controlled and safe and there's nothing to worry about at all. This "Survey" is in my opinion nothing more than a tool to be used to ensure that any person, at any U.S. Navy Shipyard, who has been or who ever will be damaged by U.S. Navy Hexavalent Chrome emissions from electroplating activities will be denied their rights and entitlements to compensation under Federal Law.

The question posed at the start of this page, and partially explained, is what did Atrium mean when it said the Survey is based on "Historical" Data. The answer is provided by Atrium itself in a document published on the Internet. I believe this document was to be used during a meeting to discuss the preparation of a report paid for by the U.S. Navy and to be prepared by Atrium. You can plainly see that the kind of Historical Data Atrium says it wants is "SANITIZED HISTORICAL DATA". You can download a copy of the entire four page presentation using this link:

New NSRP Project for 2012 Presentation

This is the link to the NSRP web site page containing this document but don't be too surprised if this is a dead link shortly after I publish this page on the Internet:

New NSRP Project for 2012 Presentation - NSRP Web Site

 

Here is page 4:

Paragraph b. is, in my opinion, a clear 'heads up" reminder to everyone at the meeting that the report cannot have the "correct" analyzed results unless the people providing the data make sure the data will "analyze correctly" before it is submitted to Atrium. I believe that Sanitized data was used in the "Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chrome (Chrome VI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations".

The simple facts are that Hexavalent Chrome subtly and secretly destroys the health of those exposed to even tiny amounts of it in ways that are impossible for a doctor to diagnose unless he is informed of the date, time and amount of the exposure and these are largely permanent effects. It causes the inception of genetic defects in the human genome that are transmitted down through subsequent generations. These terrible facts make Chrome VI to be among the most serious things there are and that the characterization of human exposure and environmental release of this extraordinarily and deeply toxic chemical must be performed diligently, thoroughly, honestly and completely and at least as seriously as the release of radioactively contaminated material. Atrium Environmental Services is the author of the Industry-Wide Chrome VI Exposure Survey.

I believe it is SANITIZED Historical Data that was used in the Chrome VI Survey Atrium prepared for the U.S. Navy entitled, "Industry-Wide Survey for Hexavalent Chrome (Chrome VI) Exposures in Shipyard Operations" and I believe the entire thing is just a pack of dastardly lies meant to continue the U.S. Navy cover up of its murder and maiming of workers and civilians by Chrome VI. It is my opinion the word "SANITIZED" could not possibly be an innocent, inadvertent or inconsequential mistake. I believe it was the prime directive to providers of data.

The U.S. Navy Report Writing Tool

I believe the U.S. Navy needs scholarly looking impressive appearing written reports and other document types, written by others, to use to poison the Occupational Injury claims process. From the Navy perspective it appears to me the Navy needs a good, capable, reliable Tool in the form of a compliant contractor to be used to prepare these reports. The problem is, how to obtain such a thing. It would court disaster to go out into the open marketplace and haphazardly contract with environmental or health and safety companies to get them to write reports and see how they do. This would create evidence of the U.S. Navy engaging in results shopping and this would convict them of what the are. Also,an independent contractor could go rogue and get tired of being an intellectual prostitute. I believe the one and only fool proof way to get a good solid compliant report writing company that knows how to do the "right" thing and who will never ever fail is to build it up yourself from scratch. This will take some time and be costly, but in the long run the financial advantages of having a captive contractor who will write what needs to be written without too much guidance and whose work will eliminate doctor's occupational injury diagnoses will pay off and result in rich dividends and peace of mind for everyone involved. The one big problem is you just can't do this with Ph.D.'s because what they choose to write about anything is going to come out of their independent research. This is what their lengthy and costly education prepares them to do. If you want a report whose conclusions are pre-ordained Ph.D.'S are absolutely useless.

This is the web site for the America Board of Industrial Hygienists:

ABIH Web Site

It says that ABIH accreditation of Industrial Hygienists is based mostly upon experience and not formal education.

 

Information about Plating Shops and Chrome VI Scrubbers:

The big thing to understand about Chrome Plating is it's not rocket science. If you can change out the battery in your car and get the cables installed right you know know and understand everything you need to know about Chrome Plating so that you can fully understand how you are being poisoned by a plating shop.

Here is why you are being poisoned in a nutshell. Chrome is the hardest metal there is. A diamond has a hardness rating of 10 and chrome is 9. There is no metal that even comes close to being as hard as chrome. This hardness means if a metal piece is coated with a thick enough coating of chrome it will have an almost indefinite service life and will not fail due to wear. It is necessary to use parts in military equipment used in ships where the cost to replace a part is very high or if the failure of the part due to wear can result in loss of the ship in battle. This means there are parts that absolutely must be "hard" or thickly chrome plated. The problem is that chrome plating is an inherently inefficient and very dirty process. It is inefficient because the chrome plating bath does not easily or quickly plate chrome and the thick layer that hard chrome plating produces is not smooth and shiny. It is always rough and must always be made to be too thick so it can be ground down to size using precision grinding wheels. The chrome plating bath uses a lot of electricity to produce a small amount of chrome. This excess electricity produces a lot of bubbling in the chrome plating bath and this bubbling produces a toxic mist of chrome plating bath solution that is released into the air. To protect the plating shop workers air is sucked from the top of the chrome plating tank and exhausted into the outside air. To protect people outside the shop there are safety devices called "scrubbers". The purpose of these scrubbers is to reduce the chrome plating bath droplets from the exhausted air. The scrubbers use water to accomplish this removal and as a result this water becomes contaminated with chrome plating fluid. The big problem with a scrubber is that it produces lots and lots of water contaminated with chrome plating fluid. This fluid is a federally regulated hazardous waste. This means it is very expensive to handle, process, package and dispose of. It costs about $50.00 per gallon to dispose of it. A plating shop scrubber will produce about six gallons of this hazardous waste per minute. The Navy reported to the EPA that it releases about 100 pounds of chrome per year as a result of grinding of chrome. This means that this 100 pounds of chrome had to plated onto things, in one year, in the Puget Sound plating shop. A good guess is that this much plating would produce at least one million gallons of hazardous waste costing about $50.00 per gallon to dispose. On top of this cost is the cost of personnel to handle all of this waste. This is why you are being poisoned. The cost to just leave the scrubber to rot and only maintain it when it becomes an obstacle to plating shop internal operations because it has been left to rot is far less than operating the scrubber properly and handling all the hazardous waste it will generate. The Navy hides behind the fact that the cancers caused by this massive release of chrome into the air will be diffused by statistics so that no one who gets cancer from the shop can file a claim. It's a cruel calculation that has been made and you are its immediate victims. But this released chrome is also a genetic poison that causes inheritable genetic defects. This means that not only you but downstream generations are being poisoned. It would be far better for the Navy to do the right thing. But, right now there are no penalties for their continued refusal to monitor the air coming out of the scrubbers during normal plating shop operations. What the Navy does is it overhauls the scrubbers and operates them properly if state of federal regulators insist on a scrubber test. But once the regulators are gone its back to normal.

At Mare Island many people were extremely concerned about the metal plating shop, did not want to enter it and did just about anything to stay out of it. It was truly a scary place and when it came time to clean it up after it had been closed it was obvious it was smart to be scared of it. It was bad and it was dirty and it had been run cheap for a long long time and was falling in on itself. A plating shop has got tanks full of thousands of gallons of the most poisonous stuff there is. There is cyanide, acids, heavy metals, and Chrome VI. But all this is the reason why it is absolutely necessary for you to get your hands on that shop and control it. The last thing in the world the Navy wants is someone who they do not control taking a stroll through one of their filthy badly run plating shops and then telling you what they see. Your Union officers are just like you and I am sure they don't want to spend any more time in the plating shop than you do. But, if no one who represents the employees has the right to enter that shop any time he or she likes and has the right to tell you what's going on there, then you are going to be continue to be poisoned. The reason you are being poisoned is because that bad stuff is there and they Navy knows you don't want to go in. This makes it safe for the Navy to starve the shop of money so it is forced into operating in a way that robs you of very good years of your life and the enjoyment of those precious years. Imagine if your neighbor had a 5 gallon bucket of cyanide solution sitting on the floor of his garage. You can't imagine that it won't spill, the spill won't evaporate, turn to dust and get tracked into your house. This is happening to you now where you work. A plating shop is so dangerous it is a crime for any of them to not be watched very carefully and very closely by everyone who can be poisoned by the dust, gasses and mists that can come out of it.

This is a link to a site that is an excellent overview of Chrome plating. It's definitely a good starting point.

A Primer on Chrome Plating

This is an eight page Pamphlet that explains many of the hazards of electroplating along with the reasons for the hazards. It's a good place to start:

Electroplating Process and Hazards

This is a link to a detailed exploded diagram of a Chrome VI scrubber. As you can see it needs clean water to operate properly:

Chrome VI Scrubber Picture

This is a link to a picture and description of a pad type Mist Eliminator. Puget Sound Plating Shop uses this type of mist eliminator at the outlet of its Chrome VI Scrubbers. It also needs clean water continuously to operate properly:

Chrome VI Scrubber Mist Eliminator Picture

Why is the U.S. Navy Injury Claims Process Hell on Earth?

I was a union president at Mare Island and had to file occupational injury claims for injuries to my hands on the computer and also due to asbestos exposure so I've been there and done that and you can believe me I know the whole process from the inside out.

Once upon a time in the Federal Government if you got injured you had to sue because there as no injury claims office. The problem developed that the government got sued a lot and this was very difficult and costly. The problems associated with these lawsuits got so big a Federal Law was approved called the Federal Employee Injury Compensation Act. The official words in this law are that the Federal Injury Claims Process is the "Sole Recourse" for every Federal employee. This means you have no right to sue the U.S. Government and your right to sue is replaced with the injury claims process. Because the law takes away your right to sue Congress intended it should be generous. But like every other law it has loopholes that are not good for the injured. The Law requires that the Department of Labor examine and approve every claim. The way the process is supposed to work is the Navy Injury Claims office processes the claim form and submits it to the Department of Labor. The Navy had no problems with occupational injury claims until the early 1970's. Up until that time the Department of Labor paid all costs for all claims. Then the law was changed so that the part of the Federal Government the worker came from had to pay back the Department of Labor for all claims costs. Then things in the Navy began to get hard and they've just gotten harder and harder since then.

The U.S. Navy has done everything possible that is good or bad, honest or dishonest to avoid having to pay injury compensation claims. The Navy has built up a very complex system to accomplish this. They have made sure the head of the Injury Compensation office is headed by a lawyer with the heart of a snake. The people who work in that office know very well it is their job to help you OUT and I do mean OUT. Every shipyard department has a specific part of their management bonus fund connected to injury claims so that any approved claim from that department is subtracted directly from the bonus pool. This means that if you get injured at work and you file a claim you are the personal enemy of every supervisor and manager. No matter what you may think about a supervisor or foreman being your friend that friendship comes to an end the instant you file an occupational injury claim. They will even hold meetings with their goons to get them to spy on you to search out any weakness or bad habit that can be used against you to get you to drop the claim or quit your job.

The Navy has good squads of good people who have the minds of Nazi death camp guards. These people are given the phone number of people who are out recovering from an occupational injury. They will call this person and threaten him. They try to get him to violate doctors orders and come into work even if coming into work will make the injury worse. They will tell the injured person their job is in jeopardy and they can be fired. The reason these goons can do this is because they are not associated with management or the Injury Compensation Office. They are just trusted workers like you who get bonuses when they are able to convince an injured worker to return to work in violation of Doctors orders.

Another trick the Shipyard has is called the 5 Year plan. The way an occupational injury works is if the Shipyard can demonstrate that you are capable of earning a living in a reduced capacity for five years they can then abolish the position and put you out. But, when you are put out your salary during that five years is subtracted from your occupational injury compensation because it is a "demonstrated earning capacity". It's a made up job invented only to rob from the injured a big chunk of his income for the rest of his life. At Mare Island they used to park people who they knew had been injured severely enough to last a lifetime as "copier operators" or "report assemblers". The Occupational Injury law states that you must take a position that is offered to you if the shipyard has made a "reasonable accommodation" to account for the handicaps that are a result of your injury. But, where the shipyard cheats is they don't explain how the phony job position is a reasonable accommodation so that when the Department of Labor people assess you for earning potential they can't see it's a made up job designed to rob you. You must make sure that the job description for any job you take is accurate and explains any necessary "reasonable accommodations" that are part of it. This way, when the DOL people look at the Navy request for you to be found to have a demonstrated earning capacity, it will be one with big hang ups and the Navy request will be denied.

These days the favorite way the U.S. Navy has to get rid of people is the computer, the Internet and porn sites. What they will do is act sympathetic and will tell you they are going to help you out and give you a desk job until you recover. Then they will put you in a nice lonely place with a good computer and a very fast and good internet connection. What most people do, both men and women, who are given this treatment is to take some time to enjoy pornography on paid time on a U.S. Government computer. The computer is loaded with software to record all the sites that are visited. After a month or two the person is called into a meeting with his supervisor who shows him a printout of all of the web sites that have been visited. The the victim is asked if he would rather quietly quit or be put up for discipline, and be fired, with the whole thing being made public. Everyone always decides to quit. So if you are given the computer treatment here is what you do. You MUST and I mean MUST go to Google, search on job related terms and spend the entire time educating yourself about the Navy, Shipyards, Submarines and anything else job related that you can think of. After a while management will figure out this is not going to work and will find you some real work to do. If you visit one and I mean ONE pornography site you are finished. I was given this treatment for three months and so know all about it. What I did, since I'm a chemist, was to search on the longest chemical names I could find and to search as many times on as many different chemicals as possible as fast as possible every day. The thought of the management monsters who wanted to entrap me having to read twenty letter chemical name words for thousands of listings each day was a very great pleasure and I hope it broke their evil minds.

Another old and useful management trick is to assign you work they know you will feel is beneath your dignity. Management has the absolute right to assign work and the Union cannot interfere in this. There is no avoiding this possibility. But if you are a professional employee and you get assigned to clean up trash along the railroad tracks (I've seen this) or if you are a blue collar worker who gets assigned to scoop potatoes in the cafeteria (I've seen this also), the thing to do is to grin and bear it with good humor and act like it is fine with you because it won't last. It won't last because management is hoping that you will be so unhappy about it you'll quickly quit. But the problem is that in doing this they are creating an underdog who will gain the sympathy and respect of their co-workers because your cause is a just cause. if you hold on you will become a hero and this is the last thing they want. Your pay will stay the same so there's no problem there. Being turned into a hero is a horror to management and so if you have some patience they will become afraid of you and you'll be assigned back to your normal job before time converts you into a hero. This won't take long. Management is always impatient and you can count on this for sure and use it to your advantage. Management is cruel but not stupid.

The most recent trick used by the Navy is to "gently direct" the injured into a medical retirement. This puts the cost into the general government fund and it costs the Navy nothing just like the good old days when the Department of Labor paid for injury claim costs. They can do this to anyone and don't need your permission to do it. You don't even need to know they are doing it until the day you get called in to be told you've been retired and good bye. The only requirement for a medical retirement is that you have some kind of disability, job related or not, that interferes enough with your job description that you need special accommodations that cannot be provided or are too difficult or expensive to provide. The Navy fills in and files the paperwork, it goes through the system, and if approved you've been medically retired. But you can't be medically retired while you are in the injury claims process. What the shipyard does is convince the injured worker to not file an injury compensation claim and reassure him that he will be well cared for. Then he gets parked in a nice safe easy comfy make work job until the medical retirement is approved. Then it's good bye. Here's the trick. The injury compensation office is inside the shipyard. Once you're out and can't go there it's impossible to file an occupational injury claim at the Shipyard. But, you don't have to file the claim at the Shipyard. It can be filed directly with the Department of Labor by mail or at the injury claims office at another federal agency that has one like an air force base. The key is to shove the signed form, that you can get directly from the Department of Labor, into the hands of the clerk at any federal claims office or to mail it to the Department of Labor. You can have an approved medical retirement and an approved occupational injury claim at the same time. It's just you can't be paid by both. If you are put out on a medical retirement and you file an injury claim elsewhere and it's approved, you will be given the choice, by the Department of Labor to be paid injury compensation or your medical retirement pension. The one key to an injury claim that you must not violate is you have 30 days from the date YOU KNOW your injury was job related to file an occupational injury claim. If you do not submit a signed claim form within 30 days of the date YOU KNOW your injury is job related you loose all rights forever. The main thing is you are not a doctor. You cannot know your injury is job related until the doctor tells you it is. This is the day the 30 day clock starts. If you look at the occupational injury claim form you'll see it's complicated and has a lot of detail. Forget all about that. Just put your name and address on it, sign it and shove it in. This stops the 30 day clock and that is the most important thing. Then the Department of Labor will have you examined by a well qualified independent doctor who will fill in the rest of the claim form for you. Don't ever expect the Navy to tell you these things.

Federal Law protects your Union Officers from retaliation when they do their job and go to war with management for you. Federal Law protects you when you join and participate in the Union. Federal Law does not protect you if you try to do the job of a Union Officer. Stay safe and pressure the Union if you want not to be poisoned.

 

What you Want Your Union to Get For You to Stop the Poisoning

I've been thinking for about 20 years about what I would do as a Union President if I was back at Mare Island in 1983 and I knew I was being poisoned at that time. Here is what I would do and this is what you want your Union to do to stop you from being poisoned:

You want your Union to negotiate an agreement with the Shipyard as an amendment to your Contract or as the order of an Arbitrator. This amendment or order should specify that the shipyard will install and maintain a continuous air sampling system to draw representative samples from the air outlets of all the Scrubbers installed on the plating shop. This sampling system will provide a common sampling point and will allow a technician or Union representative to sample the air discharged from any one scrubber individually from a convenient and public location that Union Officers or their designated representatives, including those hired by the Union, have total, unmonitored and complete unrestricted access 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. This system should be provided with sufficient personnel access points so that it can be conveniently, completely and safely inspected any time of the day or night. The Amendment or agreement should specify that the Union has the right for its own technical representatives to inspect any part of this system and to draw a samples from it and have these samples independently analyzed by an outside laboratory at any time and without notice to anyone. The Shipyard will collect daily samples from all of the scrubber air outlets and will promptly have these samples analyzed by an outside certified laboratory agreed to by the Shipyard and the Unions. The results of these samples will be provided to the Union on the day they are received by the Shipyard. This is what you need so that you will not be poisoned.

You are being poisoned in secret. Once the secret is exposed the U.S. Navy will spend what is needed to make sure you are not poisoned.

The bottom line is the Chrome VI spewed from the plating shop is a GENETIC POISON. It causes birth defects that are transmitted through the generations. When you fight to get the Scrubbers working right you are fighting for your grandchildren, great grandchildren down until the end of time. This is what is at stake and beside this there is lung, sinus and blood cancer (leukemia) for you in the here and now along with liver and kidney damage and accelerated aging of your body.

The deal that needs to be made is if the U.S. Navy must have Chrome Plating then YOU MUST HAVE scrubbers that work and keep you and your downstream generations safe from harm. The only safe Scrubbers are Scrubbers that are WELL WATCHED by YOU because you are the ones who have the most to loose.

If the Navy was forced to pay the full cost of all the damage it has done for all the years it has been blasting Chrome VI into the air at all of its shipyards the cost will easily be in the 100's of Trillions of dollars. They can't pay this. Nobody can. There is no way you or anyone else is ever going to get the Navy to admit what they have done. The one thing you can do is to get them to stop the poisoning NOW. This is the best that can be done under the circumstances because there just isn't enough money in the world to pay for all the injury U.S. Navy Chrome VI has done. The Unions must negotiate an end to the poisoning. No one can hope to get any money for what has been done to them because the Navy knows one approved injury claim means hundreds of thousands of them for Chrome VI.

Why are You Being Poisoned

When chrome plating was invented about 100 years ago no one knew the chemicals used to do it were poisonous. The result was many chrome plating shop workers lost their lives. This bad experience caused people to invent safety controls and practices that kept workers alive. Back then people only lived to be about 42 years old and so everything worked out fine. Chrome plating shop workers got paid a little more for the danger and they tended to die a little bit earlier than 42, but no one complained. Then we had wars and it was quickly discovered that the side that used the most chrome in their weapons did much better than those who didn't. So our military quickly understood that Chrome plating is as much a military necessity as bullets are. This has resulted in the situation today where if anyone does anything that makes very high military management believe that he is a threat to their chrome plating shops they get rid of him and the plating shops have become untouchable little shipyard empires. The plating shop at your shipyard has been a little shipyard empire run by the Shop 31 General Foreman who is probably the one and only real King on the shipyard.

The problem with the chemicals used to Chrome plate things is it has stayed just as poisonous as it was 100 years ago and yet in this time our life expectancy in the USA has constantly increased so that it has gone from about 42 to 72 years. And just like anything else we want more. Today people care a lot more about their health and look out for it. But, because the safety practices that were invented about 100 years ago seemed to work they've been kept in place up to now. 100 years ago no one cared about what the poisons that were being discharged out of a Chrome plating shop were doing to the outside of the shop and so no one looked to see what was happening and so a lot of time and knowledge was lost. Now the extreme toxicity and the unique genetic toxicity of Chrome plating chemicals is becoming known and the U.S. Navy knows also. This is from a U.S. Government document:

 

The situation that exists now at your shipyard is that the U.S. Navy and the entire shipbuilding industry is addicted to Chrome plating and there will likely not be a good enough substitute for a very very long time. We, all of us. are just going to have to live with this. But, Chrome plating chemicals are so dangerous to people OUTSIDE the plating shop because it causes genetic defects, cancers and other health problems in such microscopically tiny amounts it is no longer permissible to ignore the Chrome that is discharged out of the plating shop because it is just too dangerous.

The Poisonous Chrome VI coming out of the plating shop was first seen to be a bad thing as early as 1988. Prior to that the Chrome chemicals coming out of a plating shop would stain the sides of adjacent buildings and cars parked nearby and so very primitive scrubbers were installed on the plating shop ventilation systems to stop this. These scrubbers were not good enough to protect the health of people outside the shops, but no one began to suspect just how poisonous the chemicals were until 1988. The big thing to understand is that badly run scrubbers were good enough at catching the big droplets of Chrome plating chemicals to prevent the staining. They were also a lot of work and bother and got in the way of the plating business and so for the most part scrubbers were installed, left to rot, and given maintenance only when they got so rocked up with dirt and dried Chrome plating chemicals they became a problem that got in the way of Chrome plating operations. This is the situation that exists today.

The problem is that the plating shop scrubbers were just dumped on the platers who knew nothing about them. The scrubbers did not help them meet schedule and cost. The plating shops were not provided with extra people, training and other resources so they could be properly operated. They were just dumped and left. The scrubbers got cleaned up and were given qualified people to run them whenever the Air Pollution Regulators insisted that they be tested. But once the regulators were gone things quickly got back to normal and the scrubbers are left to rot.

The problem you have is you are being poisoned and poisoned severely and your grandchildren are being set up for birth defects and so is every generation downstream from you to the end of time by the Chrome VI that is coming out of the plating shop. This is just too important for things to stay "normal". The scrubbers on your plating shop need to be run the same way they are run when the regulators are on the shipyard and seeing how they are run. You need to watch the plating shop scrubbers all the time and this is the job of your Union because you cannot possibly get the shipyard to spend the money it will take to do this on your own. Here is why:

There is almost no one who works outside of a Chrome plating shop who knows what happens inside the shop. The only thing that matters to everyone outside the shop is that the metal that goes into it to be Chrome plated comes out of it with the required quality and that it be on time. Other than these two things no one cares but they care very much about these two things. And, in reality, given the way things are on a shipyard, these are the ONLY two things managers and supervisors outside the plating shop care about at all. This is the root of your being poisoned.

When you're in an argument it's always a very good idea to know where the other guy is coming from. It's just as important for you to know the reasons why the U.S. Navy is so desperately determined to hold onto their plating shops and to operate them the way they do. This way, when your Union starts the negotiations (war) about them with the Navy it can zero in on the parts of the plating shop issue that are necessary for you to have resolved in your favor while ensuring the U.S. Navy gets the things it absolutely must have. The fact is chrome plating is indispensable to the U.S. Navy and our other armed services and this chrome plating must be done by chrome platers who are under the control of the armed services. The reason for this is there are two kinds of chrome plating. There is "decorative" chrome plating like the kind on car bumpers. Then there is "hard" chrome plating and this is used for military and industrial applications. The Navy needs hard chrome plating the way a heroin addict needs his fix. Here's why:

Chrome is the hardest metal there is. When it is plated thickly onto a piece of metal that will be subjected to a lot of wear like a big shaft to move the rudder or a submarine or aircraft carrier it makes that shaft last a very very long time. Also, it is necessary to thickly plate chrome on the shafts that are part of the landing gear for high performance aircraft that land on aircraft carriers. Without being thickly chrome plated these shafts tend to break on impact. It's also used in the moving parts of rifles our soldiers carry into battle and makes them reliable so they don't jam up with a little dirt.

You can go to any phone book and look up a chrome plater. You can take a bumper or other car part there and they will re plate the piece with a new layer of chrome plating and it will be shiny and bright like a mirror. The piece goes through many chemical and mechanical preparation steps before it actually enters the chrome plating bath. It will enter that bath for only a couple of minutes. When an article is "decorative" chrome plated, like a car bumper, the chrome layer is actually only a couple of Millionths of an inch thick or about 0.000002" thick. But, hard chrome plating takes hours in the plating bath and it needs to be built up to a layer perhaps 0.05" thick. It can take anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of plating time to get a layer this thick. The reason for this is the chrome plating bath is not very good at putting a layer of chrome onto the metal. It is this inefficiency that means a lot of electricity must be put into the chrome plating bath for a long time to do only a little bit of hard chrome plating. All this electricity results in a lot of bubbles in the Chrome VI bath and all these bubbles mean a lot of very poisonous Chrome VI mist coming off the top of the tank.

When a submarine's rudder shaft is hard chrome plated the thick layer of chrome is not all nice and shiny and bright. It is dull and lumpy on its surface. Hard chrome plating has a final step and this is for it to be surface finished by precision grinding. Only grinding is hard enough to put a good precision surface on the hard chrome. Sometimes the chrome layer has holes in it or it is not uniform enough and the piece has to have its chrome layer removed and then be re plated again. It can take several cleaning and plating cycles on an important shaft to finally get the layer of chrome to be thick enough, good enough and uniform enough so it can be ground down to the final shape. And this is why the U.S. Navy absolutely must have its own plating shops. Military chrome plating is an art and it cannot be obtained from a shop that does a lot of different kinds of work for anyone who will walk through the door. Navy chrome plating is so very specialized and necessary it can only be done reliably in a plating shop that does the same thing over and over and over again so that the people who are doing it learn all the little things that need to be done to make each project come out the way it is needed.

Since Chrome plating shops are an absolute necessity for the U.S. Navy the problem is they rot to pieces about as fast as they can be repaired. The reason for this is that the chemicals that are used in Chrome and other metal plating are the most acid, most aggressive and corrosive on earth. There is nothing that can stand up to the kind of acids and other corrosive chemicals used in a plating shop. Not even stainless steel or the most modern plastics can withstand the attack of all these chemicals for long. This makes a plating shop to be a very expensive thing to operate. If you were to take a chrome plated piece off of your car and take it to a plating shop to be re chromed you'd find out fast enough just how expensive a plating shop is to operate. The problem is the U.S. Navy doesn't like to spend money on what they call "gold plating" things. And since almost no one understands why a plating shop is always in a state of being destroyed by itself from the inside (is a chemist), almost no one is willing to authorize the spending of enough money to keep this rot from going too far. It's all "gold plating" to them. The result is U.S. Navy plating shops are badly maintained under funded buildings full of open tanks of the most acid and poisonous things there are and they are barely held together. A plating shop only gets money when it becomes an emergency that threatens ship schedule mile stones as a result of outside forces. When this happens there is no amount of money the U.S. Navy will not spend to get the shop out of trouble and to get rid of the regulators who are the cause of the problem.

The people who work inside the plating shop are protected by the plating shop ventilation system. This system sucks air from the top of the plating tanks and then exhausts this air to the outside. There is only one thing that protects the people outside of this shop from being exposed to harmful amounts of the acids and other toxic chemicals removed from the shop and this is the Scrubbers. The problem is a scrubber that is not operating will not possibly impact a ship's schedule. Plating work continues and the platers in the shop are protected if the Scrubbers are working or not. The Scrubbers are there for you and no one else.

The U.S. Navy plating shops are operated by very hard working people who do their best under very high pressure work conditions. They all come out of the Electrical Shop X31. They are all very highly qualified metal plating specialist technicians who know how to plate parts to very critical Navy specifications. Their job is to plate metal and to do it so that the critical ship parts that come into the shop go out on time so that the ship's schedule is not threatened or impacted. It is wrong and bad to expect them to also be just as concerned about the Scrubbers. The reason for this is that Scrubbers are very complex to operate properly and if they are not continually monitored they will quickly deteriorate into total uselessness. A Scrubber will only become a problem big enough to spend money on for the plating shop if it is so neglected it gets so full of hard chemical residue and dirt that air will not pass through it. This can take a very very long time during which you get poisoned. The sad fact of life is the plating shop Scrubbers only get money and attention when they are so bad they impact things inside the shop to the point where a ship's schedule is threatened. This means you get poisoned for a very very long time before a broken Scrubber is repaired and once it is repaired it doesn't stay working right for long and you get poisoned.

The big missing piece in the plating shop puzzle that makes sure you keep getting poisoned is there is no money provided to the scrubbers except for emergency money and there is no pressure on the U.S. Navy to provide the necessary money, personnel and resources needed to keep the Scrubbers operating properly. It's unreasonable to expect the Shop X31 platers to operate them. They are trained, qualified and expected to be metal platers. They are not trained to machinists and Scrubbers need machinists, engineers and chemists to operate them properly. They need qualified Safety people to monitor them and to regularly sample the air that comes out of them. Currently the U.S. Navy does not sample the air coming out of the scrubbers on a regular schedule. They don't do it all. Just look at the Scrubbers on your plating shop and you will see there is no way anyone can possibly get to the air outlet of the Scrubbers on your plating shop to be able to sample the air coming out of them. What this tells you is very simple. You are getting poisoned.

A scrubber system has pumps, valves and gages, pipes and fittings. These are all exposed to the same chemicals used in the plating shop and are always being attacked and being destroyed from within. A plating shop Scrubber system needs constant maintenance and attention by electricians, machinists, engineers and chemists qualified on that system. But this would cost a lot of "gold plating" money that is not now being spent. A plating Scrubber system has to be run properly just like any other complex piece of safety equipment. It is the most important piece of safety equipment on the shipyard and currently, for the most part, it is not being operated and is neglected. The plating shop, given all that is must do, does not have the resources to operate the Scrubber system properly. In order for them to do their plating job under the pressures of time, schedule and money imposed on them the platers must ignore the Scrubber system. The reason for this is the hard working Shop X31 people are far more concerned with the very hard and tricky work getting the parts that come into the shop plated in spec. and on time than they are in operating the scrubbers. What would you do if you were the plating shop General Foreman? It is a sure bet that if you were to ask a worker in the plating shop just how much training classroom time they've been given on how to operate and maintain the scrubbers they would reply "none". It is not right, and is a crime, for the Navy to just install a very complex necessary safety system that is designed to protect you and that needs to be operated by a number of highly qualified specialists who are NOT platers and dump it onto the metal platers. The plating shop is always under manned and under funded and over worked. To just dump this big complex important system on them and tell these good people "just go do it" is a stupid crime. It is perfectly safe to operate the plating shop Scrubbers badly so long as the air coming out of them is not monitored for chemicals and a public written record of these samples is not made available for shipyard workers to see. The U.S. Navy can safely go on poising you so long as there is no way for anyone to get to the scrubber outlets and sample the air coming out of them.

So long as no one knows the concentration of poisonous chemicals coming out of the scrubbers, and so long as there is no written record of Scrubber air outlet poison concentration the Navy is safe in not providing the Scrubbers with the money and resources they need to protect YOU. Only when there is a record that the Union can examine and this record is collected HONESTLY can you be sure you are protected. Until then the one thing you can know for sure is you are being poisoned.

Only The Unions Can Stop The Poisoning

 

Management knows who is a Union member and who is not. They know that a Union member, if he is threatened, will go to the Union and demand that something be done and this means trouble they don't need. They know that a non member will usually just sit and take whatever they dish out for a long time. Management will pay lip service to a non member and tell him he does good work and other things that cost them nothing. The last thing management wants is for more of you to join the Union. This is one big reason why you should do it. Then, there's another reason, one I'm sure you don't know.

The U.S. Navy has a method to recruit and staff its management ranks called the "Management Implementation Plan" (MIP). The way this works is that the U.S. Navy goes out to the best and most expensive colleges and universities and recruits specifically for managers. They have already paid good "research and grant" money to the professors so that when graduation time comes the students the professors believe are what the Navy wants are pointed out to the Navy recruiters. Then these candidates are recruited with the promise of fast promotion to high levels of management but they are started out from the bottom so it will appear that the Navy promotes from within. These candidates are started out at the same pay grade as everyone else who starts work with them so they won't stand out. But there is a secret award and bonus program set aside for them to boost their salaries to they are actually paid much more. Then, after a year or two, they are moved up and up and up and away from everyone else. These special people truly have nothing in common with the regular workers be they wage scale or GS. They know they are better and much more special than everyone else. They know you are beneath them and always will be. This is why you need the Union because they are only afraid of the Union. The last thing members of this master race want is to be dragged into some kind of controversy that makes them look weak and ineffective; and this is what a Union can do good. I knew one of these guys. About a week before he reported for work at Mare Island I heard my Division Head briefing his best and most highly trusted supervisor. He told him this new guy was special, was being assigned to him, and that "his success is your success" meaning if he looses you loose and you better protect him. It took five years for this miracle of the MIP to be promoted to Division Head. Then, he turned around and was perhaps the most perfect rotten monster I have ever met.

I've got to admit from the start that this is a pitch for you to join your local Union at your Shipyard and to pay dues to it. The main reason for this is that just like anything else justice costs money. If you need you Union to hire a lawyer, pay him to build a case, and then represent your interests before a judge this costs real money; thousands of dollars. The one and only place the Union gets this money is your dues allotments. If you want you Union to have power that management will respect and take account of in their decision making the more dues paying members a Union has the better.

When I used to try to get people to join my union, and then the dues were only $10.00 a month, people used to ask me, "what has the Union done for me lately?" My answer was how much trouble at work from your supervisors treating you like dirt haven't you had lately? For the most part a Union prevents all kinds of little rotten and nasty things that can happen to you if there wasn't a union. It's a lot of trouble to start a union up and so you have to ask yourself, what must it have been like before there was a union? How nasty must it have been? The answer is very very very nasty indeed. My experience is that while the ranks of management and supervisors contains some nice people who have been promoted into a bad place, many of them think they are little kings who truly believe you are dirt. They would love to treat you like dirt if it wasn't for the Union being able to treat him like dirt if he did.

If you want your Union to go to war, and I do mean WAR against the Shipyard to get your Chrome Plating Shop under control so that you and your descendants are not being poisoned it is going to cost real money. The Navy is going to hire the best lawyers and professional mouthpieces they can buy. If the Union does not hire the best lawyers,engineers and other experts to testify for you, the Navy will win and you will continue to be poisoned.

When I fought the Navy over the plating shop at Mare Island I had no money. The Navy engaged in a very clever scheme of delay and finally they committed deliberate perjury in writing to win a dishonorable and dishonest temporary victory. If you want not to be poisoned then you must join your local union and pay your dues. You must put money and power into the hands of the Union Officers you have elected to enforce your right to work in a safe work place and not have your health and the health of your descendants robbed from you by a pack of liars.

The Unions are legal individuals under Federal Law who have special powers you do not. They have the Right to go to management and negotiate the conditions of work at your Shipyard for you. You do not have the individual right to negotiate. The Unions have the right and the ability to force the Shipyard to argue the facts before a judge who can decide the issue like the Chrome plating shop. You do not have this right as an individual. The one and only way you can have power is to participate in the Union and pay dues to it and to communicate with your Union Officers that YOU want THEM to go to war against the Navy for having poisoned you and everyone else at the Shipyard for many decades.

I had many enemies when I prosecuted the Union grievance against Mare Island for the way they allowed the Chrome plating shop to poison everyone. Management had put a bounty on my head. Mare Island was closing, the future was uncertain. All anyone had to do was to bring something in the way of an embarrassing character defect or bad habit of mine to management that could be used to force me to drop the grievance. I was surrounded by enemies but got to stay at Mare Island past closure and was allowed to work to retirement. Why did this happen? It happened because under Federal Law management is prohibited from punishing or taking reprisal against a Union Officer who does his job and fights for justice and the rights of the people who elected him to office. Your Union Officers are protected and can freely and without fear represent you before the monsters who populate the highest levels of management at your shipyard. You can't do this and should not try. This is why you should join your local Union and pay the small peanuts dues because it's worth a million dollars to management for you not to join.

Let me leave you with one thought. I've been thinking about just how toxic Chrome 6 really is for about 35 years. In all this time the news about it has just gotten worse and worse. I can't see anytime soon where this news is not just going to get more worse and even more worse. I think that if you want to get a good idea of just how bad the Chrome 6 is that comes out of your plating shop just ask yourself how big is the area surrounding the plating shop where the cancer rate is elevated? Is it 10 miles, 20, 30 maybe even 50 or more?

The answer to the question about just how powerful a cancer causer Chrome 6 is was answered a very very long time ago and people have forgotten. Back when the chemical used to plate chrome, Chromic Oxide, a form of Chrome 6, was first invented doctors found it was very useful and highly effective at removing warts. But they don't do this anymore because the Chrome 6 cured wart always resulted in the need for a cure for the cancer tumor that took the place of the wart.

To be continued. Thank you for visiting.