Nuclear-Testing ‘Downwinders’ Speak about History and Fear

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Schoolkids were taken outside to watch nuclear bomb tests and stare as an orange shroud spread across the sky. “I remember the clouds coming over our town and writing our names in the dust.”

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When Sandra Evans Walsh was growing up in Parowan, Utah, her class would sometimes trek outside to a row of trees. They were about to watch history in the making, the teacher would tell them. The kids would then stare as an orange shroud spread across the sky. “I remember the clouds coming over our town and writing our names in the dust,” she said in an interview with Justin Sorensen, a geographical information systems specialist at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library.

Sorensen and his team spoke to both women and dozens of other people for a project called the Downwinders of Utah Archive. Hosted by the J. Willard Marriott Library, the archive is an attempt to qualify, quantify and make accessible people’s experiences of, and effects from, the American legacy of nuclear weapons testing. In 2011 the Senate unanimously designated January 27 as the National Day of Remembrance for Downwinders.

Some interviewees told Sorensen of men who examined their thyroids or of the potassium iodide pills teachers passed out to combat the effects of radiation. Dickson recalled watching public-information films starring Bert the Turtle, who taught kids to duck and cover in the event of a nuclear explosion. The film, though, was not really a warning about what your own country might do inside its borders.

Since 1990 the federal government has offered some recompense to downwinders and others affected by nuclear testing through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act . Set to expire this summer unless a bill is passed to renew it, RECA pays downwinders, test participants and uranium workers between $50,000 and $100,000—if they have specific ailments and can prove they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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ScolesSarah This just amazes me Sarah.

ScolesSarah HardcoreHistory

DoctorKarl My grandmother use to tell us about the huge dust storms that would blow in from the nuke test in SA

Yet, people still believe that humans can alter the climate of a planet in the solar system...

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