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