Some still remember the day Mississip... - Cold War Survivors - tribe.net

Some still remember the day Mississip... - Cold War Survivors - tribe.net

By James W. Crawley
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031783753122&path=!nationworld&s=1037645509161
Winston-Salem Journal | Some still remember the day Mississippi was nuked

BAXTERVILLE, Miss.

Billy Ray Anderson remembers the day the earth kicked up waves, the ground cracked, chimneys tumbled and the creeks turned black in this corner of the Deep South.

"The ground swelled up," said Anderson. "It was just like the ocean - there was a wave every 200 feet or so."

It was the day the government nuked Mississippi.

At precisely 10 a.m. on Oct. 22, 1964, a nuclear bomb exploded 2,700 feet beneath the loblolly pines of Lamar County. Within a microsecond, the clash of plutonium atoms heated an underground salt dome to the temperature of the sun.

On Saturday, the world will mark the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test at Alamagordo, N.M. The anniversary is significant to Anderson and his neighbors because no Americans live closer to a nuclear-test site. The 1,052 other U.S. nuclear blasts occurred in sparsely populated sections of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Alaska or in the Pacific Ocean.

Time has erased much of the evidence and memory of two underground nuclear explosions here - the only times the United States detonated atomic bombs east of the Mississippi River.

Some residents fear that the bomb has caused cancer. Others think that's just a bunch of hooey.

Federal and state officials say that residents are safe.

The story of Mississippi and the bomb begins in the Cold War.

By the early 1960s, atmospheric nuclear testing had spread fallout around most of the world.

The Pentagon and Atomic Energy Commission feared that the Soviets might cheat on a test-ban treaty by muffling a nuclear explosion inside a salt dome. Officials decided to test the theory.

Project Dribble would explode two nuclear bombs in Mississippi's Tatum Salt Dome, about 20 miles southwest of Hattiesburg, as a test.

Before dawn Oct. 22, 1964, scientists and engineers towed the 1,113-pound nuclear bomb, called Salmon, behind a Dodge sedan from the heavily guarded assembly building hidden deep in the pine forest to ground zero. A crane lowered the bomb underground.

Anderson, 69, lives less than a mile from the salt dome - the residents' phrase for ground zero. No one lives closer.

Most days he is at his fishing camp, an eclectic wood-and-sheet-metal building next to a pond and topped by Santa's sleigh and reindeer stenciled in Christmas lights. It's a place he can fish, take a swim, drink beer and tend his tomatoes without interruption.

He remembers the day the bomb exploded as if it were yesterday.

State troopers started knocking on doors at 5 a.m. to evacuate everyone near ground zero. Each adult received $10 and children $5 for their inconvenience.

Anderson drove a water tanker at the test site and waited at the command post as the countdown ticked to zero.

Local and state officials were inside an air-conditioned trailer, watching it on closed-circuit TV, he said.

When the clock hit 10, the bomb exploded with the force of 5.3 kilotons of TNT - one-third the size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

"It was like you hit a big drum on top," he recalled. "It made such a big bang, it shook things for miles."

The ground rose. Forty-one years later, Anderson demonstrated the groundswell's height by holding his hands about 18 inches off the ground.

"It really did jar things," he added.

The trailer rocked and rolled. "Those politicians came running out of the trailer, grabbing their handkerchiefs and wiping the sweat off their foreheads," he said. The TV inside was knocked over and the command post's radios were damaged.

Seismographs throughout the United States, plus some in Europe, recorded the shock waves.

After the explosion, Anderson drove to the forward control shack, less than a mile from ground zero.

"The creek was black ... it was running black as it could be," he recalled. Anderson would stay busy for days delivering water to neighbors because the blast soured wells, also turning them black with silt.

Cracks - "big enough to put your hand in" - fractured roads, he said.

Many foundations, walls and chimneys were damaged.

Although the seismograph needles jiggled, the meters on government radiation detectors were still. No radioactivity escaped during the blast. No one was hurt.

"If (the bomb) had been on top of the earth, it would have scorched Purvis," Anderson said, referring to a nearby town.

In 1964, residents didn't worry about the bomb.

The government men said that everyone was safe. The bomb was a paycheck for hundreds who toiled as laborers, drivers, carpenters and caterers.

The worrying came later.

In 1979, University of Mississippi scientists reported finding a radioactive frog at the salt dome. The governor ordered an evacuation. A few days later, the college professors realized that their equipment was contaminated. The frog was not radioactive.

Since the 1970s, federal and state officials regularly visit the site to monitor the water and soil for radiation. During the 1990s, inspectors discovered tritium - a radioactive isotope of hydrogen - at levels above federal safety limits. Today, tritium levels have dropped to safe levels.

The Energy Department's site manager, Pete Sanders, said that no contamination is present on the surface or off the site.

"We've never seen anything off the site," he said.

State officials continue quarterly water and radiation tests, said Robert Goff, the director of radiological health for the Mississippi Department of Health. So far, nothing bad has shown up.

"In the past, present and future, our concern has been for public safety," Goff said.

With radiation dissipating naturally, Sanders stands by reports saying that the salt dome is safe.

Some residents are not so sure.

Cancer has taken many of their friends, neighbors and family members.

One and a half miles from the salt dome, Grace Burge, 62, spent a recent morning sorting peas for sale at the store she and her husband own.

Asked if the bomb had killed people in Lamar County, she stopped sorting for a second, gazed toward the road and said, "I would say so, but the government says no."

A 1992 Energy Department study showed normal cancer rates around the salt dome. However, the study was limited because it covered deaths only between 1980 and 1991 and no follow-up studies were done.

Anderson does not believe that the nuclear tests caused cancer.

"If radiation over there was going to kill someone, I should have been dead by now," he said.

Burge is unhappy that the federal government never asked residents if they wanted nuclear tests and has never taken responsibility for the cancer.

Randy Anderson is hoping that the government takes blame for his father's death. His dad, Billy Ray's brother, worked at the test site. He died in 1989 of colon cancer.

Two years ago, Randy Anderson, a barber in Purvis, filed a claim with a federal program that compensates former government and contractor employees who developed cancers or diseases after working at nuclear sites.

The Labor Department pays up to $150,000 to former employees or their survivors.

Of 96 claims filed by salt-dome workers, the government has paid one, denied 12 and is deliberating on the rest. Nationwide, the government has paid 14,655 claims, totaling $1.1 billion. Nearly 25,000 claims have been denied. Anderson is still waiting.

"It looks to me, if they pay one they should pay all," he said.

For five years, Bill Bishop fought the Energy Department over the salt dome.

A county supervisor from 1992 to 2000, Bishop lobbied to get a drinking-water system installed near the test site. With congressional pressure, he convinced federal officials to build a $2 million pipeline connecting about 130 people.

"The water system helped a bunch because it helped alleviate many fears about the water," he said. "But, the people who were there and the children of those who've died, they believe the nuclear explosions helped cause their deaths and that fear isn't going away."

Four months after the Salmon test, engineers lowered a TV camera to see what the bomb had wrought.

The blast carved out a spherical cavity, 110 feet across. Radioactive sludge filled the bottom of the hole. The cavity was still hot enough to vaporize paint on the camera, causing wispy clouds to obscure the view.

Two years later, the government officials lowered another steel cylinder into the ground.

Called Sterling, the second nuclear device had a much smaller yield - 380 tons of force.

When Sterling exploded Dec. 3, 1966, the ground barely shook.

Declassified studies - much information about the Mississippi tests remains classified - indicate that the Sterling blast was muffled. It helped spur Pentagon funding for better seismographic equipment, which today can pick up the smallest A-bomb blasts.

Follow-up drilling and testing contaminated soil, groundwater and equipment with radiation. Tons of radioactive debris was dumped into the salt dome and a deep aquifer.

The Atomic Energy Commission razed the buildings in 1972, packed up their instruments and left Mississippi.

• James W. Crawley is a national correspondent in Media General's Washington bureau. E-mail jcrawley@mediageneral.com