Street:

City:

State: Zip:

Email:

Date:

Dear Decisionmaker, In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment Project (LAHDRA). The LAHDRA¹s goal is to review, over several years, all pertinent historical contaminant releases from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), leak and emission records. The LAHDRA will produce a public database of retrieved unclassified documents and develop of a prioritized list of the potential health significance of historical contaminant releases from LANL. At the end of the review, the evidence may indicate that a second phase dose reconstruction/dose assessment study is necessary. The dose reconstruction/dose assessment study would estimate, according the emission data collected through the LAHDRA, the amount of radionuclides and chemicals to which LANL workers and community members have been exposed due to LANL operations. At other sites, workers have been able to use these dose reconstructions to support their claims under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA), which compensates workers whose illnesses were caused by their work. Currently, the CDC¹s work is threatened due to budget restraints and heightened security at LANL. LANL has restricted access to documents, allowed review of documents by title alone, and required that CDC employees be accompanied by LANL employees into certain document storage areas. All of these measures have forced CDC to ask its contractors to wrap up the project, of which only the first half of the first phase has been completed. Thus far, CDC¹s work has been fruitful. Their preliminary documents show that plutonium emissions at LANL may have been 100 times higher than previously estimated. Furthermore, according to autopsy reports, plutonium has been found in the bodies of Los Alamos County residents who never worked at LANL. If the LAHDRA is not completed, we will have lost our best chance to better understand the health impacts of past LANL operations. The LAHDRA has gained the support of LANL employees and community members alike. I urge you, as a decisionmaker whose constituency is directly affected by the work of LANL and its managing contractor, to please show your support for the LAHDRA and its subsequent dose reconstruction. Please send a letter to the Department of Energy (DOE) and LANL requesting that they remove the hurdles that have been erected and allow the LAHDRA work to continue uninterrupted, with adequate funding and proper openness, communication and transparency. We are contacting you, as a member of the California Congressional delegation, as well as the New Mexico delegation, because you represent the University of California, LANL¹s managing contractor. We believe that if you were to write a letter to DOE and LANL management about this problem, it would greatly assist in the continuation of the LAHDRA. Thank you very much for your consideration of our request.