Whistle-blower receives honors and resentment
BY: JIM LYNCH
JANUARY 3, 1999
FROM SEATTLE TIMES OLYMPIA BUREAU
THE KINGPIN of Washington whistle-blowers may be Casey Ruud. Ruud put himself in the public hot seat in 1986 after his inspection audits at the Hanford nuclear reservation contended the plutonium production plants in southeast Washington were unsafe and needed to be shut down.
His reports initially were ignored, then minimized by Hanford authorities. However, Ruud's conclusions were later deemed accurate, and led to his congressional testimony and an end to bomb making at Hanford.
Still, Ruud was laid off from Hanford in 1988 and shunned at another weapons site before resigning. He fought in court, claiming unlawful retaliation for whistle-blowing, and eventually got a job back at Hanford with the state Department of Ecology, where he now works.
Along the way, Ruud has been lauded by former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary as a model whistle-blower and received a $10,000 Cavallo Foundation award in 1996 for moral courage in government.
Last month, a judge ruled the Westinghouse Corp. owes Ruud "front pay" for the rest of his working life - the difference between his state salary and the money he would have been making if he hadn't been canned at Hanford a decade ago.
Meanwhile, Ruud, 43, still blows the whistle. During the past two years, he and Hanford scientist John Broeder proved that radioactive fluids leaking from massive storage tanks have spread much farther than Hanford authorities conceded.
Ruud says his recent efforts to expose that problem further alienated him at Hanford. "I am absolutely resented in every way by my superiors," he says.
Ruud estimates he has counseled more than 200 Hanford employees on whistle-blowing. "The majority of the people who come to me only come to me because they are desperate," he says. His advice? He tells them to make sure their spouses and relatives understand the risks. And he discourages them from thinking like victims.
"That's the key. The public doesn't want to deal with victims."
Tom Carpenter, director of the Seattle office of the Government Accountability Project (GAP), says Ruud is unusually well suited for the rigors of whistle-blowing. "He has the right instincts and has proved himself again and again. He has a sense of how to do it."
GAP is a Washington, D.C.-based group of attorneys and advocates who advise whistle-blowers. The group opened a field office in Seattle in 1992 after Hanford became the hot spot for whistle-blowing at the nation's nuclear-weapons complexes. GAP helped form a Hanford mediation council to deal with allegations of retaliation before they get mired in long, expensive legal bouts. GAP also published a thin book last year called "The Whistleblower's Survival Guide" and directs troubled clients to people like Donald Soeken. Soeken is a psychiatrist and former whistle-blower. His therapy sometimes includes support-group sessions at a Maryland farmhouse he calls "The Whistlestop."
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