Colorado's congressional leaders were not happy to learn this week that federal officials apparently overlooked thousands of Rocky Flats workers when they determined eligibility for automatic aid for victims of job-related cancer.

On Friday, four lawmakers sent U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao a letter urging her to give anyone who ever worked at the former atomic bomb factory northwest of Denver immediate compensation and medical benefits if they develop cancer with known links to radiation.

If they are not granted streamlined aid, each must attempt to individually prove their exposures made them ill, a process that can take years. One in 10 Rocky Flats workers who qualified for aid has died before they got it.

The workers now being offered the streamlined aid - including more than 800 added to the list this week - are "only a small portion of Rocky Flats workers who deserve to be covered," said the letter, signed by Sen. Ken Salazar and Congressmen Mark Udall, John Salazar and Ed Perlmutter, all Democrats.

A spokesman for Sen. Wayne Allard said the Republican was unable to sign the letter because he was on an airplane, but would be sending his own letter to Chao next week.

The entire Colorado delegation has previously urged that all Flats workers with radiation-related cancers be granted the immediate aid, which the Flats workers themselves asked for more than two years ago.

The vast majority were denied, however, when government scientists said they could estimate each worker's cancer risk individually. The only exceptions were those who worked from 1952-1966 and were at risk of exposure to neutron radiation, one of the most dangerous and least-monitored kinds.

A spokesman said the Labor Department has to follow that determination, made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. But if more workers are found to have risked neutron exposure during that time, they will be added to the list, as were more than 800 workers from Building 881 this week.

The Rocky Mountain News reported Friday that more than 6,000 workers from another 19 Rocky Flats buildings risked neutron exposure but were left off the list.

"The Department of Labor will apply the same standard to workers who worked in other buildings within the Rocky Flats complex as was applied to Building 881," spokesman David James said. "Consistent with the scientific analysis given to us by NIOSH, the Department will include other facilities in the SEC when there is evidence of neutron exposure."

Meanwhile, advocates for ill nuclear workers elsewhere in the nation said the confusion over which Rocky Flats workers deserve streamlined aid could impact similar claims in others states.

"If (the government) can miss entire buildings, then what assurance do claimants have that they are capturing all the documents needed" to address their individual claims, asked Dr. Maureen Merritt, a longtime advocate for ill workers in New Mexico.

Workers from an area of the Los Alamos National Laboratory were added to the list for immediate aid there in September after being "inadvertently omitted."