Suffering Effects of 50's A-Bomb Tests (original) (raw)

U.S.|Suffering Effects of 50's A-Bomb Tests

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/us/suffering-effects-of-50s-abomb-tests.html

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Sept. 5, 2004

EMMETT, Idaho, Aug. 31 - In the 1950's and early 1960's, at the height of the cold war, people in this southwestern Idaho town thought what they occasionally saw dusting their fruit orchards and cow pastures was frost -- only it was not cold to the touch, several longtime residents said. Others described it as a gray-white powder that seemed to come out of nowhere.

The residents of this town of dairy and cattle farmers did not know it then, but half a century ago, northern winds blew radioactive fallout into southeastern Idaho when the federal government set off about 90 nuclear bombs at its Nevada test site near Las Vegas.

There is not any doubt that Emmett, population 5,500, and other towns in four Idaho counties were exposed to high levels of radiation from the open-air atomic bomb blasts, receiving among the highest doses of a radioactive chemical that has been linked to increased risk for thyroid cancer. The National Cancer Institute in 1997 released a detailed study and a map plotting the locations of the fallout across the country, ranking concentrations of Radioactive Iodine-131, an isotope released when a nuclear bomb is detonated, from Nevada to upstate New York. The study put the four Idaho counties -- Gem County, which includes Emmett; Lemhi; Blaine; and Custer -- and one in Montana at the top of that list.

But few Emmett residents heard about that study, dozens said in recent interviews. Even as sick residents of other Western states received compensation from the government, the question of how Idahoans may have been affected by the nuclear tests received little attention. But now a furor has erupted here and elsewhere in Idaho, set off by one Emmett native, who survived thyroid cancer but is dying of breast cancer that has spread to her liver and her bones.

The native, Sheri Garman, 52, who now lives in Vancouver, Wash., wrote a long letter to an Idaho state legislator -- a high school classmate -- after learning that the National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the federal government, is currently re-evaluating the extent of the fallout from the Nevada test site and its connection to other cancers and diseases besides thyroid cancer.

The academy's Board on Radiation Effects Research has held three hearings on the matter over the last year, two in Utah, including one on July 29, and one in Arizona.

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