* The Associated Press is infamous for shortening stories to the point where they lose all meaning. Here’s a prime example for Labor Day…
A northern Illinois city has paid tribute to former factory employees who worked under dangerous conditions.
The Radium Girls memorial honors the women who worked at watch-painting plants for Radium Dial and Luminous Processes in the early 20th century. The women painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials using radium-laced paint. Many died of radium exposure from using their lips to hone their paintbrushes.
* So, why would the women workers be singled out for this honor? Because, as the LaSalle News-Tribune tells us, the company essentially ordered the workers to kill themselves…
Women who worked at Radium Dial applied glow-in-the-dark paint to watch and clock hands and were instructed to lick the brushes to keep the ends pointed for precise painting. It was an instruction that sickened and killed many of Fuller and Mennie’s co-workers.
The female workers were told that licking the brushes would be good for their complexions, even after company officials knew the radium was poisonous…
The Radium Dial and Processes factories were started in 1922. Within three years, company officials learned that radium paint was toxic and threatened the workers — but wouldn’t disclose this.
The women were told that the paint—a mixture of glue, water, and radium powder—was harmless. An instructor once made a show of swallowing some just to prove the point. The girls entertained themselves by playing with the “harmless” paint, decorating their nails and teeth with the luminous mixture.
The radium they were using emits low-energy radiation, which bounces harmlessly off the skin. However, if the material is swallowed, it permanently insinuates itself into the skeleton, where it continues to emit radiation for the rest of the victim’s life, and indeed long after she is dead. Investigators would later measure the radioactivity in the bones of long-dead dial painters to prove that they had been poisoned.
As the dial painters ingested more and more paint, their skeletons crumbled from within. Their teeth fell out, their jaws shattered. They suffered from excruciating bone pain from fractures, crippling anemia as the radiation killed blood-forming cells in their bone marrow, and various cancers.
When women started becoming sick, company doctors said they had syphilis, typhus and pneumonia.
* Yet, this practice continued for many, many years. After the local media took notice, the company shut down, then reopened under a different name…
The Ottawa Radium Dial Studio was shut down amid lawsuits in the 1930s, but it re-opened under a new name, Luminous Processes, with some of the same management. Luminous Processes continued to make watch dials with radioactive materials until the 1970s, when it was shut down by nuclear regulators for mishandling tritium.
Even after the Radium Dial Co. building was demolished, people took bricks from the site to reuse and desks from the factory were donated to area schools, Sack said, spreading the contamination. [Emphasis added]
A contaminated site on the outskirts of town still needs to be remediated, a process that could take up to five years at a cost estimated over $80 million dollars.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study outlining areas where contamination by radium-226 (Ra-226) as well as emissions of radon-222 (Rn-222) are at above normal levels. These areas include homes, public areas, schools, and even a car sales lot that is housed directly over the old Radium Dial Company site.
* The “Radium Girls” case sparked a rise in worker safety and compensation laws throughout the country. It also led to several environmental law changes, both here in Illinois and nationally. It takes a few minutes to get going, but check out a 1987 documentary made about the case…
