It was indeed “shockingly immoral,” as downwinder activist Tina Cordova declared early this month, when Congress “scrapped” funds to compensate Tularosa Basin downwinders in some small way for their decades of suffering from cancers and other health horrors attributed to radiation exposure from the first atomic bomb explosion in 1945.
Congress was close last year to expanding the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act (RECA) to include downwinders from the Trinity explosion in southern New Mexico and “potentially tens of thousands of others nationwide” when financial relief was “unceremoniously nixed from the legislation” during defense budget negotiations. The story was covered in detail by New Mexico journalist Marisa Demarco and El Paso writer Danielle Prokop in the Missouri Idependent.
Since RECA was enacted in 1990, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has approved more than 36,000 claims for well more than $2.3 billion in compensation mostly for downwinders from nuclear testing facilities and to a lesser degree uranium miners and processors and those exposed to poisonous tailings in New Mexico and other parts of the West. Those billions of dollars were paid out to victims of hazardous fallout that the military industrial complex has routinely and adamantly denied or downplayed with snide condescension from the very beginning.
A map of where RECA recipients live, however, shows that the DOJ has approved claims from downwinders all over the West, from Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah to Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and North and South Dakota. That’s almost half the country. I could find no hard data on how many claims have been denied since 1990. It seems clear to me, however, that if exposure to radioactive waste is a qualification for being labeled a downwinder, then all residents in those 11 Western states, and surely many more, with or without symptoms yet, must qualify too.
The Atomic Heritage Foundation goes so far as to say that fallout from the more than one hundred above-ground nuclear tests north of Las Vegas at the Nevada Proving Ground mostly in the 1950s “drifted across most of the U.S.” The University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Center explains that RECA considers many types of “primary cancer to be related to radioactive fallout,” including cancers of the brain and bladder, esophageal cancer and pancreatic cancer.
Friends and acquaintances of mine in and around the Española Valley, downwind of Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), have told me that every member of their families since the 1960s has died of some kind of cancer. And there is very clear reason for that. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded its ten-year long study called the Los Alamos Historic Document Retrievals and Assessment (LAHDRA) report in 2009, the results were mind boggling. It described, using LANL’s own “industrial hygiene” data, massive “airborne plutonium releases” from the major site of plutonium and polonium processing at LANL from 1948 to 1955. The CDC reported that plutonium releases “could easily exceed the independently reconstructed airborne plutonium release totals from the production plants at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Savannah
River combined, even without the other sources and other years at LANL included.”
The LAHDRA report also confirms that “liquid radioactive waste was discharged into Acid-Pueblo canyon,” and many other canyons draining the LANL site on the Pajarito Plateau, “without treatment or monitoring from 1945 through l950.” LAHDRA also confirms that there wasn’t a year from 1945 to the mid-1990s that plutonium, strontium-90 and other forms of radioactivity weren’t released from LANL into the water ways of canyons leading to the Rio Grande.
So basically, the entire Middle Rio Grande Valley, from Santa Fe down to Elephant Butte, could be considered a downwinder, or downstreamer, site. But, of course, nuclear and military powers that be persist in downplaying the danger. When a 2006 Santa Fe Water Quality Report accompanying city water bills
mentioned traces of plutonium in Santa Fe’s drinking water taken from Buckman aquifer, down the hill from LANL, the official federal response was to brush it off as a non-story that we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about.
Nothing above is meant to diminish the plight of Trinity Site downwinders in Tularosa and points south. For decades they have been treated as cranks and know-nothings. Just as they came close to getting some relief, the rug was ripped out from under them. But they are no longer alone. Millions of us in the West are literally in the same boat. Their fight is our fight. Their courage and determination empower us and spur us on.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thanks, yet again, for a column that tells it like it is. This is an ongoing horror story, and illustrates how political tradeoffs so often eradicate the possibility of real accountability when it comes to what government and corporations have done to human health and wellbeing. The truth is, we are all downwinders and downstreamers. Sadly, it’s up to us to keep fighting back.
This is an important issue that continues to be ignored. Keep up the good work.
I have been following the investigative reporting of Alicia Guzman. She is the daughter of Dolores Guzman (NM Scrapbook) who wrote about racism in Los Alamos in the 50s and 60s. Alicia writes for Searchlight. I also worked with NMHR, Vol. 72, (Jan.1997). Impact Los Alamos and one of the students in that project wrote the book Los Alamos Revisited, Peter Malgram (author) Good sources for research. Keep up the good work!