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Labor Department OKs Payments To Plant Worker's Widow

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By STEVE ANDREWS | News Channel 8

Published: December 4, 2008

Laura Shives made her dying father a promise. Now after his three-year struggle, she feels a sense of accomplishment.

"He'd be proud of me that we didn't give up," Shives said.

Her father, Bob Puccinelli, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2005. He died in February.

They both held jobs at the former General Electric plant in Largo, where workers built triggers for nuclear weapons. Employees at the plant also were exposed to radiation and toxic chemicals.

By 2000, so many former nuclear weapons workers throughout the United States suffered from exposure-related illnesses that Congress passed a law to provide them a lump sum as compensation and medical expenses if they proved their jobs caused their illnesses.

After his illness was diagnosed, Puccinelli filed a claim for benefits with the Department of Labor in December 2005. Puccinelli claimed the department shuffled him to six different claims examiners.

"Each time you get a new claims examiner it seems you have to call them up and repeat all the things that you told the five previous to them," Puccinelli said in a September 2007 interview. "They want more information; I've sent them everything they've wanted except my shoes."

Puccinelli's medical bills added up. In 28 months, he made 191 visits to a St. Petersburg oncology clinic for treatments. Forty-one medical providers billed him for services. His medical bills totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. The savings he and his wife built over 49 years disappeared.

As his health faded, Puccinelli asked his daughter to carry on the fight.

"I was the ear that listened from the start and got involved with him and made phone calls and tried to keep him fighting," Shives said.

Within weeks of his death, Shives met with Labor Department representatives. She researched connections between the cancer that killed her father and chemicals he walked by every day at the plant.

In November, nearly three years after Puccinelli filed his claim for benefits and nine months after his death, the Labor Department determined toxic chemicals at the plant likely caused his cancer. His wife would receive a compensation check and be eligible for reimbursement for his medical bills. The family declined to say how much they received.

"He would be relieved to know that she was taken care of," Shives said. "It doesn't bring my father back."

The Department of Labor is processing more than 1,400 claims from workers at the General Electric plant who say they suffer from exposure-related diseases.

"That you could put people in a situation that, you know, down the road, the chances of them getting ill and dying are extremely high," Shives said, "that's not right. It's criminal."

Reporter Steve Andrews can be reached at (813) 221-5779.

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