Eliza Johnson knows that all the money in the world can't raise her husband and daughter from their graves. If it could, she'd find a way to earn, beg, borrow or steal enough to see Fruitie Johnson and Deborah Lawhorn again. She'd love to know how good it would feel to talk to them once more, to laugh, to have a reason to cook a big meal and lay it out on the empty table in her wood-paneled dining room.

To Johnson, that would be a victory, not a check from the companies she holds responsible for the cancers that killed them and others in Apollo, Leechburg, Vandergrift and Parks Township.

"They meant more to me than if I got a million dollars," said Johnson, 85, staring at wrinkled hands folded on her lap. "My daughter ... that's one in my life that I'll never get over."

Johnson and some 250 plaintiffs soon will receive payments from a $27.5 million settlement with Atlantic Richfield Co. for illnesses, deaths and property damages caused by radioactive emissions from two former nuclear fuels plants in Armstrong County started by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. in 1959. Still, they don't feel rich.

Those who are sick from brain tumors, cancer and beryllium disease say they're too weak and miserable to spend it on something fun, such as a vacation. Disheartened survivors are grappling with grief, anger and guilt.

"Whatever I do, it's not going to bring them back," said Johnson, who lives in the Kiskimere neighborhood in Parks Township.

Made for TV

The NUMEC story is one that has been told in movies such as "Erin Brockovich" and "A Civil Action." The plot is familiar: small-town activist or beleaguered attorney discovers a dangerous environmental condition, takes on a corporate giant and eventually wins one for the downtrodden.

The corporate giant, NUMEC, used deadly radioactive materials -- uranium and plutonium -- and other chemicals to process nuclear fuels under government contracts with the U.S. military during the Cold War. Atlantic Richfield took over its plants in Apollo and Parks Township, in 1967. Babcock & Wilcox Co. bought out ARCO's stock in 1971 and operated the plants until 1983.

The activist is Patty Ameno, 56, a disabled Navy veteran who blames her two brain tumors on a childhood spent living across the street from the Apollo plant that created uranium fuel pellets for nuclear reactors. Ameno, a plaintiff who will share in the ARCO settlement, argues that the mishandling of radioactive materials sickened and killed her neighbors and friends.

Full Story: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/
s_565716.html

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