Downwinders seek acknowledgement that Trinity test caused suffering

[TexasTowelie]

Barbara Kent, 83, was living in El Paso in 1945, but on the July day that scientists from Los Alamos conducted the Trinity test in the Southern New Mexico desert, she was on a camping trip near Ruidoso with her dance teacher and 11 other young dance students.

“It was about 5 o’clock in the morning … and all of us in the upper bunks fell to the floor when the bomb went off,” Kent recalled recently. “Nobody could understand what was going on.”

Another jolt came later in the day when the girls saw what they thought must be snow falling from the sky. “We all thought ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” she said. “It’s July and it’s snowing … yet it was real warm.”

What Kent, who now lives near Laguna Beach, Calif., didn’t know at the time was that she was among a number of people who were unintentionally present at the dawn of the nuclear age, exposed to fallout from the world’s first atomic bomb. As some developed cancers and other maladies in succeeding years, they began to blame that exposure and the government that did nothing to warn them about potential dangers before or after the sudden blast and its towering mushroom cloud.

Read more: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/downwinders-seek-acknowledgement-that-trinity-test-caused-suffering/article_617f9d01-299a-5d3d-b278-01b8fb5775a8.html

[MADem]

1. This is fascinating. Terribly sad, too, of course.

I just finished reading a book about the history of the TRINITY project.

The government did try (and fail, obviously) to create an exclusion zone around the area, and they did have people all over hell with radiological equipment to measure fallout (some of them checked into motels and guest houses with their equipment in suitcases and posed as holidaymakers), but they clearly didn't fully understand affect, never mind that they didn't really know how big a 'boom' they would end up with in the first place.

They also didn't have a clear understanding of how far any 'downwind' fallout would travel. Add to that, the weather was iffy right up until they made the decision to go ahead with the tests, and the tests exceeded every expectation in terms of the potency of the weapon. I do think they would have preferred a more 'still' air environment but they believed--weather forecasting being the half art/half science that it was in the days before satellites--that they were within acceptable parameters. Clearly, they were dead wrong.

The government should compensate those victims. Time IS running out. Will the GOP Congress ever act? I doubt it strongly.