As we have discovered the first Titan II workers (1962-1964) were given useless DT-60 radiation dosimeters (incapable of detecting low level radiation) against the radiation experts giving the Vandenberg AFB medical symposium in 1962.
The lecture below was taken from the Vandenberg AFB medical symposium in 1962 as the Titan II Missile System came on line. This explains why there may have been a major flaw in recording any radiation reading on each service members DD-form-1141. Five enlisted people took care of this program for the whole USAF. Pages 53-55 in the document at the end of this page: REPORT FROM 392d AEROSPACE MEDICAL GROUP (1962) FUEL EXPOSURE 6 WEEKS AFTER SPILLS Also read the information gathered on the warhead radiation.
RECORDING IONIZING RADIATION DOSAGES
Captain Carnick A. Markarian.
Radiological Health Laboratory
Wright- Patterson Air Force Base
Since Colonel Livermore and Captain Weinberg covered some of my material, I’ll go ahead and try to give you a little information and orientation as to what we are trying to do at our laboratory, on our film dosimetry program.
I think to put it. on a basic level, I’ll start out from scratch as if none of your organizations are utilizing the film dosimetry program, and try to show you what we have to do to get this thing going, and done properly. We realize, of course, that since we are dealing with 379 individuals from 379 Air Force bases, everyone likes to use their own methods. However, this is not satisfactory for us. Let’s assume that you’re coming in for a program, a film badge invite program and you write us a letter and we get the letter from you; you are making a request for so many film badge holders for your people to monitor.
The first thing we’ll do is indorse your letter to indicate to you, prior to the monitoring program, that we would like to have a registration form filled out on each individual. And on the hand-outs issued is a sample form which you have in front of you, if you have picked them up at the desk in the back.
This is a new Air Force Form 1520; there appears to be a little problem on the base publications office receiving them. You have to make this request through your DPO. We are stocking them on a temporary basis, but you do have to make the request. But anyway, we ask you to make this out, there are a lot of pieces of information here that we want, not only for the present, but for the future. It may not look important to you, but it Is important to us and the program. After this is filled out, let’s say that you come in for 40 film badge holders for your program, we expect 40 registration forms. Our intention is to register everyone in the Air Force as utilizing or working with ionizing radiation and radioactive material.
Alter we get these forms back, they we will send you tile film badge holders and the films and the necessary supplies to run your program. The reason for this, and they~ are various, is that we are utilizing an awful lot of film badge holders that are not really necessary. Some of the organizations are becoming rat packs, and these things do cost money, and we have to budget for it each year. This is the only way you
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can keep control of the film badge holders. They cost $1.82 a piece and when you figure 15, 20, and 25 thousand out in the field this runs into a lot of money.
The supplies that you will receive in the initial request, after we get the registration forms, you will get these IBM cards back with the man’s name on it, his command, his base and the base’s code, and also social security number. We will send back to the base, a supply for each individual. When you handout the film to the individual, you’ll make out this card, as to date, EDC of film. When you finish your markings you will put the date the film was returned to you and his occupational series, whether it is quarterly or other.
Upon submitting this back to our agency, there are about 50% of the bases who are doing a good job on this and about 50% of the other bases who are not. A big base won’t even bother to return these properly, as we have instructed them on the instructions. They just throw them in a box; throw the film in the box, the cards are torn, they’re creased, and we have to sit and do this all over again, and it wastes a hell of a lot of time. What we ask, as you see in our Instructions, is that these be sequenced. We don’t care by what order, but by film number. If you have 50 of them, put 50 of them together and sequence your film in the same order. We have to check every film that comes in, so we check the film number against the card for positive identification, and when we do this it makes our job much easier and we can go ahead and process the film. We stick the cards in an IBM 526, the film comes out of the developing program, set right up and automatically when we re-offer them to our electronic-potentiometer it punches the dose on the card. It’s that simple, if we can get the cooperation of the people in the field to sequence these cards.; this saves days. We can give you 24 hours service, but we cannot if people do not submit these things properly. After the cards are punched by the computer dosimeter we take the cards and stick them in a 402 and comes out with the. results and sends back the sheets that you see there. We give the organization, the man’s name, social security number, film number and then the dose’s reporting period in millirems and the doses in quarter- millirems, and also will give you a total accumulative dose on a quarterly basis. Now for you people who are maintaining an 1141, this total accumulative dose can be very, very important to you whereby you don’t have to record on 1141 the monthly dose, the bi-weekly dose; you can if you wish, and if you have time in the small organizations it will be fine, but we can give you the total accumulative dose in millirems for any period of time, and that you can record on your 1141. By adhereing to regulations, and I think this is a matter of communication between you, the supervisor and to the lowest airman, who is doing the job for you. We have known that there is always a breakdown of communications. There are ways and means of communicating, but we have to get to the lower echelon who actually do the work, go
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over the program with him, show him how it is to be done, and set up a pattern for him, set up a routine so that he won’t deviate from this.
At the present time we are handling approximately 15 thousand people and these 15 thousand people are spread all over the world, and when these supplies come into us, and when the film comes into us we do have a problem. I have 5 people working on this program and this is in total. They are not trained in IBM we send them to school when we can, everything is OJT, and we need your support very badly. These people have a very tedious job looking at film all day, looking at. numbers, it is very hectic and then when people submit as they wish to submit, its really a harrowing experience it just makes you want to give up.
You will, notice in one of the hand-outs there .is a list of items of discrepancies that occur. What we were doing at first was to write a letter to each submitting agency to tell them what they were doing wrong to clear up the discrepancies, but when you have about 50% of the bases with discrepancies you get pretty tired of writing letters and it gets to be very tiring. We made up a list of discrepancies that occur on submission, and the general idea behind this was to show everyone what discrepancies everyone .Me was making, what errors they were making on submitting the film badges, so this will give them an idea what not to do. For instance scotch tape on dosimeter fronts is the worst thing you can do. We have a hell of a time taking scotch tape off, and upon doing this you rip the film packet and it is light-struck, and this is no good, and you’ve wasted everyone’s time.
I know there are an awful lot of questions. People have been cornering me and I don’t think this is the place for it here because we only have 15 min. so I will be around all day to entertain any discussion or any problems that you may have. I don’t know if I can give you the answers, but will try to solve it for you or give you some guidance along these lines.
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