End of the Dream Page 10

  Speaking from the steps of the State Capitol at Austin to a huge, infuriated crowd of Texans, Governor Cooker expressed the mood now becoming state-wide:

  “The idiot press had the nation and the world sneering at Brownsville while that stricken city’s children were dying in dreadful pain. The idiot press speaks of an ‘apian Alamo’ as if the courage of Texan mothers who have given their lives in the streets to cover their babes and youngsters were a joke.

  “The biggest press agency in the world, save one, and the libeling newspapers must pay for this unspeakable crime-in-print! For the idiot press caused thousands of amused and curious citizens to rush to the afflicted area—for, mind you—laughs. The result was a traffic shambles.

  “Many of those people died laughing. Worse, these hordes prevented the rapid delivery of serums and spray materials to vital points. Had the idiot press not been the agent of this blockade, countless lives might not have been lost. And had irresponsible reporting not led to the blocking of highways into Brownsville, the present and admittedly more dangerous emergency spraying might have been avoided.”

  Bowen T. Willis, president of the UIPA, said in a preliminary reply, “The governor is understandably upset. It may have been somewhat poor taste of our Brownsville representative to take, initially, a slightly light view of what then was not yet even conceivable as the disaster it soon became. However, it is my belief that when communication is restored the world will find that a very serious panic situation did occur in the city and that our local representative’s steadily changing report represented a correct view of rapid deterioration of morale, of mass flight and stampede.

  “What is condemned without reservation by myself, by the officials of this Association and by every editor of the fine journals we serve is the absolute blackout of regular news from the stricken area. This order, given by General Womley Chute Banger, commanding officer of Guard units on duty in the region, is not only unfree, and so un-American, but unprecedented and dangerous. No similar abuse of ‘martial law’ comes to mind. The right to know is a public and constitutional right and the need to know the worst is part of the right. For when ‘the worst’ is known, imagination will not create still more terrible notions and react to such false nightmares.”

  Brownsville, Texas, August 5, 1976. UIPA. This is a city in mourning and a city trying to endure the unbearable: mass shame. It is a city in shock and a city in dread. The bees are dead to the last buzzing invader. Offices, schools and banks are closed. Only the parlors of undertakers and morticians, hospitals and refugee centers are busy. Only a few vehicles and slow-strolling, stunned pedestrians pass on the streets.

  Tuesday, the day of ignominy, was clear, hot and calm. Now the dry winds are turning sheets of newspaper in dusty whorls and raising small spirals of the whitish, powdery insecticide that was crop-dusted on the city. It stopped the insects that had sent thousands of people into hysterical flight but the frenzy went on. The vast amounts used are now a cause of concern as the compound is new and its long-range effects on man are not yet known. Nothing else of a suitable sort was available in the emergency.

  Up to this time only four deaths attributed to stinging by the “deadly” bees have been recorded. Seven other victims are still hospitalized but reported out of danger.

  The official toll of those who perished owing to suffocation, trampling, car crashes, fires and other panic-related incidents has passed the thousand mark in the last hour. The injured now number more than five thousand. Bodies and injured survivors are still being found and brought to aid centers from outlying areas. Fires continue burning in the suburbs.

  Already the agonized questions are being asked, “Why?” “How could it have happened?” The only correct answer is as clear as simple:

  In a city of more than seventy thousand and an area of some one hundred thousand, a large fraction of these citizens were jittery owing to causes familiar to everyone. These people had been prepared and perhaps overprepared for the faint chance they’d encounter the most venomous mutant strain of the renowned “Brazilian” honeybees. When the swarms actually began to appear with dawn last Tuesday, panic gripped the minds of some early observers and they spread it like an instant plague. The real peril was trivial as the figures make clear. But the price of panic is always awesome.

  Brownsville is paying the price in full.

  And yet there may be some compensation. This reporter met a bearded, leather-cheeked Texan, an old cowpoke, who made the day’s wisest observation. His name is Jim Deever. His boots are spur-hacked and his hands bridle-curled. His eyes are shuttered by range squint but gimlet-bright. Jim Deever was born in Brownsville and his words fittingly conclude this tale:

  “Maybe other folks in the rest of the nation’ll learn how shaky we all have got. They should, and the fact ought to chill every son of a gun to the bone. If Texans can blow up over a bee swarm, we’re all, all us Americans, nearer the ragged edge than seemed possible till lately.”

  7. A Document

  CLASSIFIED

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Office of the Scientific Adviser to the President

  PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY

  SUBJECT: Two Events under Study Code Names: Hot Water; Pickle

  FROM: J. D. Ovoth, Assistant Director

  TO: The President

  DATE: October 9, 1977

  OTHER: Category: Top secret classification and To Be Burned when Read.

  This data has been requested by the President for immediate study. Repeat, presidential and immediate-designation order.

  Aides will not open, not hold up, as with same yesterday when aides prevented delivery, in person, by me.

  Signed, JONAS D. OVOTH Asst. Dir.

  MR. PRESIDENT: Herewith as required my “lay language” presentation of “Hot Water” (The Great Valley Report, Cattle-Kill, etc.) and “Pickle” (The Harlem Trouble). Both problems are very technical in cause. My translation here is, in my view, oversimple and scientifically near to culpable. Also, the advisories on policy are not mine and were made over my objection. You have my resignation, “Yellow” File B, Drawer 12, if this attitude is an impertinence. Ovoth.

  THE GREAT VALLEY REPORT:

  This report referred to the affliction and death of some 750 cattle and horses habitually watered and allowed to wade in Chenokee Creek. This small stream flows from its source in NE Cattaraugus County through Great Valley and into Little Jay River, which then empties into the Allegheny River and thence to the reservoir. Chenokee Creek passes within a mile of the General Recovery Corporation’s facility, an installation licensed to process spent reactor fuel cans. These are long containers in which enriched uranium and/or plutonium still exists but in amounts reduced by use below the effective fuel levels. Though atomic, the fuel has “decayed” below reactor-use value, the unspent residue and reactor-created plutonium are exceedingly valuable. Recovery is a complicated matter and involves separation from immense amounts of various highly radioactive elements. While every precaution is taken to store part of this “hot waste” in tanks until its level of radiation permits its disposal in the creek, errors can occur. Also huge quantities of long-lived, very hot waste materials (long-lasting radioactivity in many elements) result and this waste must be transported, in ten-ton, lead-covered special containers, each with an independent cooling system, as this material is also boiling hot, thermally, and must be kept cool while in transit and after reaching storage tank farms where tanks must be cooled by complex devices for centuries to come. Accidents in transfer of this very dangerous trucked cargo are not impossible. Low-level material routinely let into waterways (Chenokee Creek) is carried off “harmlessly,” in AEC term. However, two unforeseeable accidents in the past winter caused an unusually high level of hot material to reach Chenokee Creek. One was the unpredictable heaving of earthen dams by frost in the record-breaking cold spell for the area of February last, 15th–19th. At that time the ground was covered by snow to a depth of 17 inches (average) and
the fissures in the retaining “pits” (large, covered ponds) were not detected till the March thaws.

  The thaws were gradual so that a considerable amount of “hot” material entered the creek. Immediately afterward, a lengthy drought occurred. The result was that an unusually large amount of radioactive matter first entered the creek in slow but steady amounts with runoff and then, as the drought was followed by rapid subsiding of the creek flow, much of this material settled in the downstream bed of the creek.

  Weather Bureau records show no such combination of steady runoff followed rapidly by drop-down of the creek in question so it was not economically rational to take measures in advance for a situation with no precedent. Also, the assumption was, during the thaw period, that the earth-retaining walls were, as engineers had supposed, not leaking. This means that the leaks went unnoticed in the period of high water, when monitoring the rapid flow is not done, as it is assumed the radiation levels will be very dilute owing to the volume and flow of the stream.

  A second and far less pardonable or predictable blunder of an individual added to the radioactive content of the waterway at this time. Owing to a shutdown of General Recovery’s Minnesota plant for repairs, the Great Valley facility was nearly overwhelmed with incoming material. To keep pace with necessity some independent, local truck owner-drivers were hired for haulage (to the tank farms) of the very hot wastes. A driver of one such truck left the plant for Colorado but, having failed to understand his briefing, he became alarmed by the energetic sounds of the cooling machinery and those emitted by the lead-sheathed tank.

  He turned into a woods two miles beyond the plant property and, using a tractor he fetched from his nearby home, off-loaded the cargo. He made no report and took up other work. The tank was not missed for three days until it failed to be delivered to Denver. Meanwhile, without proper driver attention, the cooling machine failed. All six containing walls, ceramic, ceramic-metal, stainless steel and lead, were broached and a tremendous quantity of very radioactive waste then poured out. It collected in a swampy sink which drained with the thaw into a small tributary of Chenokee Creek, thus adding to the other, undetected, hot leakage.

  Fortunately, after this foolish and unthinkably dangerous act occurred, the low swamp contained 99% of the hot materials. The area has been covertly closed to public approach and to inquiry. The material is being recollected, a difficult task. There will doubtless be some delayed human effects (burns, cancer, etc.) owing to wind and weather carrying escaping hot gases and fine particular matter to nearby farms, villages. These will be “explained” when and as they develop.

  The members of the Atomic Energy Commission have secretly reviewed the foregoing. Their (and this Office’s) official recommendations will follow. The General Recovery Corporation is held by the Commission majority to be blameless. The proper technicians and appropriate inspectors from AEC had thoroughly checked and recently re-viewed the warning systems with an okay for all monitors, systems, personnel and so forth.

  Effects of the unfortunate high levels of radiation in the sedimentary stretches of the creek did not come to notice until late April when a “hoof-and-mouth disease” scare brought to the attention of a county agent the fact that cattle, horses and swine belonging to certain farmers were developing hoof slough, hair loss on legs and mouth ulcers. The area was quarantined and neither meat nor milk nor other animal foodstuff was permitted for use or export although it was soon learned that the hoof-and-mouth fright was groundless.

  That something similar was locally epidemic, however, became increasingly evident as not only hoofs, limbs, hair on limbs and mouths showed slough signs but tongues and stomachs exhibited an equally pathological syndrome, swellings, ulceration, skin slough, ulcer and so on. Unfortunately, these symptoms were studied for some time as surely of bacterial or viral origin. It was not until early May that a radiobiologist visiting the state veterinary labs in Rochester suggested the tissues under examination looked like radiation burns.

  Meantime, some human users of the creek—for drinking and laundering water supplies, wading and fishing, and the like—fell ill and a number have died as others now ill are sure to do. Once the nature of the damage was certainly determined a swift check by General Recovery Corporation was made and the entire phenomenon was then clear. A vast but carefully disguised survey of the downstream river system was initiated and (classified) preliminary reports are disquieting. The waters of Chenokee Creek, the Little Jay River and the Allegheny Reservoir are heavily contaminated with radioactive isotopes, “hot” elements, including plutonium, which is a deadly poison as well as radioactive, cesium, strontium, etc.

  Studies of the reservoir indicate it is heavily contaminated, though it is so far thought that it may continue to be used, owing to the dilution of that water by added waters from other sources than the radioactive river.

  To date, the policy has been to halt all use of contaminated waters and all entry of animals or persons into those waters above the reservoir. The reason given is “an unidentified bacterium or virus.” In view of the certainty of large-scale panic if the true situation (radioactive and toxic plutonium content) were known, this long-planned “substitute hazard” has been given as the “real” cause for the widespread prohibition.

  Unfortunately, not all citizens in the region are satisfied by the official announcement. Apparently several persons have evaded the guards along the waterway and have made amateurish but damaging radiation counts. Some of them have been arrested and held (on various counts, such as trespassing, malicious intent to cause civil disturbance, etc.). Such published claims as appeared have been refuted as “utterly in error,” “irresponsible,” “wild-eyed” and “crackpot.” The guards have been increased to a degree where it is hoped further troubles of the above sort will be impossible.

  Meanwhile, a total of 139 miles of waterways are of varying degrees of hazard. Some eleven hundred square miles of farming and village territory is in the blockaded region.

  No effective countermeasures are possible.

  The over-all hazards cannot be expected to diminish to safe radiation levels until (and unless) heavy runoff in the next spring carries away sufficient detritus to effect relief.

  In that case, however, the hot runoff may make the reservoir unusable and for a currently indeterminable period.

  RECOMMENDATIONS:

  It is the conviction of my associates and of the majority of the AEC—and they are supported in their views by several top executives of power corporations and reactor installations, some of whom, I understand, are personal friends of yours, Mr. President—that the facts of this serious and continuing situation be suppressed permanently. A presidential broadcast is urged to shore up this policy. However, in my view the simple fact is that the national reactor program is in trouble.

  The Administration is facing disastrous consequences if present ruses are penetrated. Immediate and full candor would prevent a new “credibility gap.”

  THE HARLEM MATTER:

  The Harlem River is, actually, a tidal cut at the northern end of Manhattan connecting the waters of Long Island Sound and the East River with the Hudson River.

  The Harlem River has for many years been “off limits” for swimming, bathing, etc. It is heavily polluted and has been for decades, by sewage, garbage, industrial effluents and the like. However, it is impossible to prevent swimmers, teenage boys and younger children especially, from swimming in the river. The already overwhelmed New York Police force cannot provide adequate manpower to police the “river” and halt forays into this turgid, foul-smelling but cool and tempting sewer.

  At its northern entry into the Hudson near Spuyten Duyvil (“Spitting Devil”) a vast turbulence is a characteristic phenomenon, and though the swift and unpredictable current has caused many drownings, the fact is taken as a challenge by many illegal swimmers. This wide and circling current has had the unanticipated effect of concentrating hot isotopes in the area, with the result that severa
l scores of the so-called “Harlem Boys” have been made exceedingly ill and twelve, so far, have died, owing to a “mysterious” and complex affliction not yet attributed to what will soon, certainly, be found the real cause: radiation burns and sickness with some mortality.

  This, again, is caused in an odd manner, not unlike that of the Great Valley area, reported above.

  Briefly, the power reactors originally installed on the Hudson (Indian Point), and doubled in size in the late 1960s with other reactors now operational upriver, permit low-level radioactive wastes to enter the Hudson via coolant outflow and by low-level waste effluent. This regular and standard practice is relatively safe and causes as a rule no volume or radioactive buildup of an officially “unacceptable” amount. “Thermal pollution,” the massive plant effluent of water coolant, at a temperature higher than the river carrying it away, does raise the downstream net temperature of such rivers with various changes in and/or harm to the fish and other life forms in these rivers, but is officially still classified as a “non-hazard.”

  The Hudson, however, is tidal. The vast coolant flow entering the Hudson does not, therefore, run at a constant rate and in near total volume into the Atlantic. Tides back it up. As a consequence, part of the radioactive fraction in the coolant falls with sediment to the bottom of the river. Here it accumulates.

  If the sedimentation rate were uniform for the entire river below the entry point of the faintly “hot” water, many, many years would still pass before any resultant radiation problem would be even imaginable. However, owing to downstream current and to tidal backing, to the irregular formation of bottom muck and to the variable and not predictable circling currents in the river, the waste accumulation is not evenly deposited.

  Largely owing to the special and freakish currents off Spuyten Duyvil, it has recently been shown that fairly extensive areas at the surface of the water, and including the Harlem River “mouth,” can and do become dangerously radioactive as deeper “hot spots” are churned up by the peculiar, local turbulence. Their occasional but random and unpredictable radiation levels become, not infrequently, sufficient to make even a half hour of bodily exposure harmful. Any unlucky second and third exposure to such “hot boils” will cause severe exposure with radio burns, sickness, even death.