Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel

When I was an employee at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in 1991, I wrote an anonymous letter detailing safety concerns to the Vermont governor and other state officials. I then sent off a copy of my concerns to the local anti nuclear group telling them to accuse the governor of sitting on these safety concerns. She quickly called a press conference and I got a NRC investigation of my concerns. I got the plant and the NRC to write a book full of new procedures and rules. Most of my concerns were found to be correct. I went on an individual campaign to challenge the plant, the state and NRC for the next two years raising many other national safety issues. I was one of the few individual in our nation who had ever changed the direction of a nuclear power plant safety culture. I eventually got fired from the plant.

Though these experiences, I was asked by a group of mother to investigate their serious safety concerns at a children’s institution for the severely physically and mentally disabled. I became an undercover low paid counselor at the institution. These kids lived separated from the families. This place was terribly dysfunctional. The medical care of these children were horrendous. As I was involved in high level management meetings detaining my concerns –we then had a preventable death of a child in our house. I was playing with this child the night before his death and I dearly loved this boy. I “took out” residential management through this death and later lead to the change-out of all management. I raised issues on a national level about the care of the disabled at these institutions. I later worked in a community setting with the care of the adult disabled. I watched the police arrest a cerebral palsy man I was caring for. He was just yelling. I visited him jail –they we violating his human rights with the jail being not adequate for his wheelchair. That’s when it hit me that a large percentage of the jail population was the mentally disabled. I expressed our whole system of care of the disabled; childhood, prisons and through death, as our “American Gulag”.

We had a small paper mill leaking wasted sludge into at small stream near my house. It was turning the water into a light milky color. I made a complaint to the NH state environmental people –their response was beyond pathetic to me. I went on a personnel campaign. I got all the state and federal agencies involve –I took video pictures and got the local paper involve. Through this they discovered the corporation and CEO were defrauding the banks to the tune of $400 million. An Arthur Anderson NE regional executive pleaded guilty to cooking the books and the corporation quickly went belly up. American Tissue was the 5th largest tissue maker in the nation. The parent company had a huge mill up north which got shutdown –it was the economic engine of the northern part of our state. Berlin NH lost tax revenues from the shutdown – and the small city went into a financial crisis leading to the layoff of teachers, police and some town officials.