Scientist swims into hot water 

By Danny Westneat 

Seattle Times

January 24, 1996

BREMERTON, Wash. - When he's giggling with his wife or trying to jump-start his old diesel Rabbit, Norm Buske seems like a regular enough guy. 

But federal prosecutors allege he's a criminal. The French have banned him from their country. The U.S. Navy says he's a pest - and, at worst, may shoot him if he swims near one of its warships again. 

A federal judge says Buske is no menace at all, however. Federal and state scientists say he's a pretty good oceanographer. And local environmental activists call him a hero, a chemical private eye who has spent a small fortune trying to monitor radiation at a Navy shipyard 12 miles from Seattle and now is waging a lonely fight to make the military accountable to the public. 

Who are you really, Norm Buske? 

``A semi-dingbat scientist with swim fins?'' he said, letting out a maniacal gale of laughter. 

On Tuesday, Buske, 52, is scheduled to be tried in federal court for criminal trespassing. He was arrested last fall for swimming into the restricted area of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, a repair facility for the Navy's ships and submarines. 

It was the fifth time Buske had donned a frogman suit and breached the shipyard's security zone, each time to test kelp or seaweed for signs of radiation that he says may leak from nuclear-propelled engines used by the Navy. 

Twice, he has published reports claiming to have detected low levels of radiation. The Navy, backed up by its own monitoring program, says it has never spilled any measurable radiation in the waters around the shipyard. 

But late last year, very low levels of radioactive Iodine-131 were confirmed inside shipyard waters, according to a joint study by the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Health and the Navy. The study was prompted by Buske's sampling. 

Iodine-131 is a nuclear-fission product that has been linked to cancer. The amount detected was so low it couldn't harm anybody, scientists say. No one knows where it came from, though a possible source is a nearby city-sewer outfall, which carries trace amounts of radioactive material from a hospital. 

Buske agrees the radioactivity may come from the sewer. Still, with all the conviction of a minister at the pulpit, he says the Navy has been caught with its military pants down. 

``All along, the Navy has said, `Trust us, we're monitoring ourselves, and we're not finding anything,''' he said. ``Now we find radioactivity right in the middle of the shipyard. 

``Why didn't they find it? It shows us either the Navy's self-monitoring is no good, or they're not telling us everything.'' 

``It's true the Navy's probably not finding all the stuff they should be,'' said John Erickson, head of the state Health Department's environmental-radiation program. ``It's anybody's guess whether the iodine comes from the sewer or the Navy, but it's clear more testing is needed.'' 

The Navy did not detect the radioactive iodine in its waters because the concentrations are below ``any legitimate concern for health and safety or the environment,'' said Navy spokesman John Gordon. 

Even if Buske is a legitimate scientist - he has a master's degree in oceanography from Johns Hopkins University and a master's in physics from the University of Connecticut - he is enormously disruptive to Navy operations, officials at the shipyard say. 


Nobody has ever tried to swim into the shipyard's secure zone before, Gordon said. 

Each swim has cost the Navy $15,000 to $20,000 in staff and legal costs, Gordon said. Navy-base police arrested him in 1994 and took him in his wetsuit to the federal courthouse in Seattle. He was later found not guilty by U.S. District Judge William Dwyer, who ruled the Navy's own regulations don't ban swimmers and that Buske was no threat to national security, anyway. 

That day, Buske informed the Navy he would be back for more samples - he always tells them he's coming, he says - and the next day he swam into the shipyard again. 

Buske has agreed to stay away from all vessels and be accompanied by Navy divers, but still he's a hazard in the crowded shipyard, Navy officials say. 

``The first thing Mr. Buske did was immediately swim up to a large warship (the U.S.S. Arkansas) which was in full operation,'' said George Yount, shipyard commander, adding that Buske could have been sucked into the ship's intake and killed if Navy officials hadn't intervened. 

Two days later, the Navy stepped up its own patrols and asked the Coast Guard to declare an emergency rule banning swimmers. National security is at risk as well as the safety of swimmers near the massive ships, Navy officials say. 

``The crew of an operating warship is authorized ... to shoot to kill swimmers approaching it,'' warned V.T. Williams, a shipyard official, in a letter last May requesting the swimming ban. 

Buske was arrested again Sept. 11 when he swam into the shipyard twice. If convicted, he faces up to six months in jail and a $500 fine. 

Though the Navy has the right to restrict access, environmental watchdogs say the military's true agenda is eliminating citizen oversight. The shipyard, declared a federal Superfund toxic-waste site in 1993 because of contamination from heavy metals, pesticides and other pollutants, has not shown it can effectively monitor its own pollution, they say. 

``This is not a trivial issue,'' said Michael Wach of the Western Environmental Law Center. ``A truly democratic government, supposedly operating in the public interest, will not prevent the public from monitoring its actions.'' 

Occasional monitoring by the EPA and the state provides sufficient and credible oversight, Navy spokesman Gordon said. 

For Buske, the drama of swimming among nuclear-powered warships is nothing new. He was jailed in 1990 and later expelled from French Polynesia for collecting plankton at the Mururoa atoll, France's underwater nuclear-bomb test site. 

Also that year he made headlines by sending then-Gov. Booth Gardner a jar of radioactive mulberry jam made from contaminated fruit picked on the edge of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. 

He quit his job as an investigator of fires and car accidents and, since 1993, has collected samples at 10 Navy facilities around the nation, a project that has cost him $80,000. He found radiation only at the Bremerton shipyard, he says. 

Though Buske has a flair for the dramatic, he has nothing in common with the type of civil-disobedience protesters who chain themselves to nuclear subs, he says. 

``Civil disobedience addresses moral questions, like `this nuclear bomb is wrong, on a religious or spiritual level, and must be stopped,''' he said. ``But I'm not trying to stop anything. I'm just saying there are technical errors underlying the Navy's environmental-monitoring program. 

``People have a right to look over the military's shoulder, but they won't let us. That's serious.''