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In an interview with a local NBC news team, truck driver Lonnie Poteet said he arrived outside the Hanford Site to deliver fuel rods and quickly began experiencing symptoms from exposure to chemical vapors. What he did not know, however, is that there had been a nuclear spill just hours before at the site.
“I was already burning from my glove line to my t-shirt line and the side of my face and I was already starting to lose a little bit of vision in my right eye,” Poteet told NBC Right Now.
He said everything happened very quickly.
‘They didn’t tell everyone’
On July 27, 2007, Poteet, who was a contracted worker, drove up to the site to deliver the fuel. At the the time, the firm CH2M HILL was managing the cleanup effort and failed to notify all workers about the spill.
According to the report, the spill happened around 2:10 a.m.; Poteet says he arrived at the fence line of the Hanford Site’s tank farm around 10:00 a.m.
“Very frustrated. When they told their crews that showed up that day to go to work to stay in because they had a potential spill, they held them back, but notified nobody else. They put me in [harm’s] way. Specifically they asked me to be there as late in the day as possible. They knew I was coming. Why didn’t they say something?” Poteet said.
Read more at U.S. nuclear workers suffer severe brain damage, teeth fall out while truth is buried
