Mercury highway leads to the closed town of Mercury, Nev., entrance to the Nevada test site.
What one captain’s decision on the Nevada test site can teach every firefighter about exposure documentation
In June 2005, 16 of us were sitting in the back of a Sikorsky S-61, flying toward a fire we had not been briefed on. The Arroyo Grande Flight Crew, H-527 out of the Los Padres National Forest, had been pulled off a lightning complex in the Sierra Nevada and redirected to a high-priority incident on the Nevada test site. The name on the dispatch was “Air Force.” That was about all we knew.
The intercom system in the S-61 is partitioned. Pilots and crew supervisors on one circuit, crewmen on another. Whatever our overhead was hearing from Air Force approach control and the Department of Energy, we received second hand. A bearing. A sector assignment. The instruction that cameras were prohibited on DOE land. When we touched down in the parking lot of an abandoned government building, DOE representatives and security guards holding assault rifles were waiting. Our overhead got off the ship and talked to them. The crew sat in the cabin and waited. Nobody invited us to the conversation.
What none of us understood at the time was the nature of the ground beneath us. Area 25 of the Nevada National Security Site had been used for nearly two decades to test nuclear rocket engines under Projects Rover and NERVA. Engineers fired reactors on open-air test stands until fuel assemblies liquefied and scattered fission products across the desert floor. In 1965, a reactor melted down. The cleanup took 400 people and two months. The isotopes that escaped, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90, settled into the soil and stayed. By the time we arrived, 40 years later, roughly half the original radioactivity remained.
The Hidden History Beneath Our Feet
Research has shown that wildfire lifts those contaminated particles out of the soil and into the smoke plume, where they become respirable. In 2025, the DOE itself acknowledged that wildfires on the NNSS “can serve to remobilize contaminants” and that firefighters face exposure in “radiological areas.”
We were never told any of this.
We wore standard Nomex and Kevlar. White’s smoke jumper boots. Leather gloves. No respiratory protection. No dosimeters. Between H-527 and the Silver State Interagency Hotshot Crew, who were ferried into the area aboard our helicopter, more than 60 federal firefighters worked that fire for up to seven days. We cut line through sagebrush. We slept on the ground. We ate food prepared in that environment. We accepted the mission because that is what we do.
Exposure Without Informed Consent
But acceptance without disclosure is not informed consent. It is just exposure.
When we came off the fire, DOE officials were waiting at Beatty Airport with handheld Geiger counters. A man in jeans and a T-shirt waved a detector around each of us. No readings were shared. No thresholds explained.
Word filtered down from the crew supervisors: we were clear. What I have since learned is that a Geiger counter
measures gamma radiation on surfaces. It cannot detect what has already been inhaled. It cannot detect Strontium-90, a pure beta emitter that mimics calcium, incorporates into bone, and irradiates marrow from within for decades.
The Limits of a Geiger Counter
They scanned our boots. They did not scan our lungs. This is where the story becomes a lesson in leadership.
Captain Tom Plymale, our crew captain, was not satisfied with the scan and the silence that followed it. He passed the order: every member of H-527 was getting an Occupational Exposure Form, USDA Forest Service Form R5-6700-9.
Most captains would have taken the all-clear and moved on. The culture rewards that. We are trained to eat smoke, stay on the line, and be hard. Paperwork is an afterthought. The CA-1 exists for the injury you can see, the broken ankle, the tree strike. It pays the bills in the present tense. But the Occupational Exposure Form operates on a different timeline. It links a name to a set of coordinates, on a specific date, under specific conditions, and places that record inside the federal personnel system where it cannot be lost or denied.
A Captain Who Refused to Look Away
Without that form, our presence on the Nevada test site would exist only in dispatch records and personal memory. Neither constitutes proof of occupational exposure in a workers’ compensation claim. If any of us developed cancer 20 years later, the burden of proof would fall entirely on us. Plymale took that burden off our shoulders and placed it on the record.
Among the crew, we discussed the forms in the gallows humor native to the fireline. “In case somebody gets cancer,” we said. We filled them out. Plymale did not make a speech. He made a decision. It was the most consequential act of leadership I witnessed in my career.
Twenty years have passed. No one from the Forest Service has contacted any member of the 2005 crew regarding the exposure on incident NV-LVD-0029. No health survey. No follow-up monitoring. Not a word. Plymale died of cancer. No investigation was conducted to determine whether his death was connected to the ground he walked on or the dust he breathed. The exposure forms he insisted on filing remain the only institutional record of what happened to us.
Institutional Silence as a System
That is the architecture of institutional erasure. You do not need a conspiracy. You need only silence and the passage of time.
On the structural side of the fire service, the IAFF and California Professional Firefighters now operate personal exposure reporting systems that track carcinogen exposures across an entire career. The records survive retirement. No equivalent system exists for federal wildland firefighters. The form Plymale filed in 2005 is not mandatory, not widely known, and not part of any systematic tracking program.
If you are a leader of firefighters, your duty of care extends beyond the shift, beyond the season, beyond the career. You are not merely a tactician. You are the guardian of your crew’s long-term health. The CA-1 is for the injury you can see. The exposure form is for the one you cannot. The one that comes back for your family decades after the last fire.
The Duty of Care
Do not be a passenger in your own career. Ask the questions about what you are breathing, even when the culture tells you to shut up and dig. Document every exposure, every unknown hazard, every assignment where the briefing did not match the risk. If your agency does not have a form for it, make one. And if you ever find yourself working ground where the history is classified and the answers are not forthcoming, make certain you sign the paper that proves you were there.
Because in this profession, if it is not documented, it did not happen.
*The full investigative article,The Atomic Fire: Leadership in the Shadow of the Invisible, is available on LinkedIn. Michael Kern can be reached at kernmichael81@gmail.com.*
