Born with No Hips
ABOUT TEN MILES east of the river and downwind from the plutonium factory, Tom Bailie, my farmer acquaintance, had figured out what Hanford was really about. He explained it in detail on a sunny Sunday morning in his pickup truck while taking me on his famous “death mile” tour. We rode through the southern district of the Columbia Basin Project, where water from the river nourishes lush fields of alfalfa and lima beans, potatoes and corn. Bailie showed me twenty-eight farmhouses where he said that members of twenty-seven families, including his own, have had cancer or thyroid disease or birth defects. As he drove, he delivered a frightful accounting of the dead and the deformed. He has been giving this tour for years, and he talks fast, like a bright Sunday-school student rattling off the books of the Bible.
“My mother and father had cancer. Both my sisters had cancer. And my uncle who lived here with us for twenty years had cancer. In fact all of my father’s brothers and sisters had cancer and they lived here in this house at one time or another and they worked on the farm in the summer with us.”
Pointing at various houses as he drove, Bailie told me about a baby born with no head, another born with no eyes, two others born with no hips. He told me about a farm wife who committed suicide in her bathtub after drowning her “really deformed” baby. As for Bailie himself, his best description of his downwind ailments appeared in an op-ed piece that he wrote for the New York Times:
“I was born a year after my stillborn brother. I struggled to breathe through underdeveloped lungs, and suffered to overcome numerous birth defects. I underwent multiple surgeries, endured paralysis, endured thyroid medication, a stint in an iron lung, loss of hair, sores all over my body, fevers, dizziness, poor hearing, asthma, teeth rotting out and, at age 18, a diagnosis of sterility.”
After giving me what seemed to be his standard tour, Bailie pulled his pickup truck off the road. He needed to move a few siphons in the irrigation ditches of a cornfield. For all his childhood ills, Bailie, in middle age, appeared healthy and fit. He had thick gray close-cropped hair, bright blue eyes, and an athlete’s trim waist. He is a successful irrigator with a middle-class income. He cooperates with other members of the Bailie clan, an extended farm family that owns thousands of acres. The biggest building in his hometown is the Bailie grain elevator. Tom Bailie ran for the state legislature a few years back, but lost badly. He is a Democrat and most of the local farmers are Republicans.
When he finished moving his siphons, Bailie apologized for not inviting me over to his house. He explained that his wife, Linda, was fed up with hearing talk about Hanford. Bailie then launched into a meticulously detailed (and wholly unsubstantiated) theory about what scientists at Hanford were trying to accomplish with their secret releases of radiation. This, too, had a well-rehearsed quality.
“I call the Columbia Basin a laboratory project, not a reclamation project,” Bailie began. “The people who settled around here were truly a test group. For the government to give you land in the reclamation project, you had to be young and of childbearing age. . . . If I was looking for a place to do radiation research, I would think that an area like this, with low-education skills, with honest, hard-working, fiercely patriotic people, would make a wonderful place to test.
“I think we had a group of scientists who were researching an iodine-131 bomb. Its purpose would be to affect human fetuses in the womb so future soldiers [in an enemy country] would be lazy and dumb and not be a force to be reckoned with.”
There was a “self-cleansing” element in the secret radiation experiments in the Columbia Basin, Bailie said. He said the federal government lured veterans into the irrigation project in the 1950s with low-interest loans that were foreclosed if farmers or their families got sick from radiation-induced disease. The government chose eastern Washington for its experiment, Bailie said, because of its Western European blood stock.
“Our enemies were expected to be European people. After our bombs dropped on Japan we had all this information on what radiation does. But that was a different gene pool. Those people’s genes may not be as strong as the Russians and the Germans.
“It was a neat operation, what they did here. It was really neat. Jesus, these [government] people were smart. The reason nobody noticed what was going on was because whenever there was a serious life-threatening illness, farmers would have to sell their crops or animals to pay off medical bills. They would end up violating Farmer’s Home Administration regulations, they’d have their loans called in, and they’d move out. Then what I call the ‘vulture effect’ occurred. Tougher farmers, we call them the land-gobblers, would buy up the land, and knock down the old farmhouse. All the evidence would be gone. There is always a stigma of shame that goes with failing in a farm operation, so people left quietly.”
As Bailie explained it, the Bureau of Reclamation was in on the conspiracy. He said that the Bureau arranged, in the early years of the irrigation project, to flood land, rinse radiation out of the soil, and wash it down the Columbia River. The Mormon Church also was in on it. Bailie said the church directed the Utah & Idaho Sugar Company to build a granulated-sugar processing factory in Moses Lake to encourage Basin farmers to grow sugar beets, a crop that Bailie said is particularly effective in sucking pernicious radionuclides from the soil. And local hospitals were in on it. Bailie said that it was impossible to get treated for thyroid problems in the Tri-Cities and that all radiation-sick people were spirited away to hospitals in Portland or Seattle.
But the conspiracy went higher, much higher.
“If I tell you what I really think happened, it is not very pretty. I think a small elite group of bitter, angry, arrogant, highly intelligent men got together and took control of what we now know as the Atomic Age.
“They proceeded to slice up the atomic money pie. Ignorant Congress and the president accepted them because of their awesome power. There was no oversight, no accountability. These men created the Cold War by helping arm Russia so it could continue the arms race and allow the military-industrial complex to continue feasting on our nation’s resources. The number of loyal, trusting American citizens who are victims of this nuclear gang is truly uncountable.”
Tom Bailie’s hometown of Mesa, Washington (population 252), lies on the state highway that connects Moses Lake with Hanford. On my trips back and forth to the nuclear reservation, I occasionally stopped off in Mesa to talk to him. He could be found in the late afternoons in the town’s one restaurant, the Country Kitchen, where he was the loudest and most exuberantly opinionated of the sunburned irrigators who gathered for coffee and gossip.
In his neighbors’ eyes, Bailie was part celebrity, part pain-in-the-butt. He had got himself on national television talking to Connie Chung. His picture had appeared at the top of the front page of the New York Times. He had been featured as a heroic rural American in a book called Atomic Harvest. He was a member of the Hanford Downwinders Coalition and the most vocal of the 1,400 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Department of Energy contractors at Hanford.
Some of his neighbors said Bailie was in love with the sound of his own voice and never knew when to shut up. They called him the “glow-in-the-dark” farmer. I heard one of his neighbors sneer, under his breath, “I wonder who is out to get him now?” His own cousin, a potato farmer named Matt Bailie, told me that after he talks to Tom he gets so anxious that “I find it hard to concentrate on my potatoes.”
Scientists studying the effects of radiation releases on civilians living downwind of Hanford find Bailie entertaining but sensationally ill informed. “He provides the media with very interesting stuff. But I would discount what he is saying,” said Genevieve Roessler, a specialist in radiation dosimetry and a member of a federal panel studying downwind doses from Hanford. “I don’t want to discount the doses [of radioactive iodine] that he may have received. They are high enough to warrant study. But I don’t believe the effects he is talking about. Those sort of effects [headless, eyeless, hipless babies] have not been observed in the children of people who have been exposed to even very high doses of radiation in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. What he is saying is sort of off the wall.”
Talking with Bailie was like trying to catch your breath at the business end of a fire hose. I often drove away from Mesa with a headache and an upset stomach, after struggling to get him to sort out fact from fantasy. I could not decide what to make of him. He was one of the most shameless blowhards I had ever met. But he was also an intelligent, angry, overwhelmed victim. Bailie himself seemed comfortable with both characterizations.
“The reason I can espouse this crap without someone shooting me,” he told me, “is because it is too far out.”
Bailie grew up in a Columbia River farm community where soldiers with Geiger counters came around regularly to test the wheat and the cows. They never explained what they were looking for or what they found, except to assure farmers that everything was okay.
When Bailie was two years old, the Atomic Energy Commission publicly guaranteed the complete safety of the air around Hanford, saying that “discharge standards . . . are at a rate so low that no damage to plants, animals or humans has resulted. . . . The methods of safe handling used to date have successfully protected workers and the public.” That same year the government staged the single largest release of atmospheric contamination in the history of Hanford. It was a secret military experiment called the Green Run.
It came about, in part, because the Pentagon was curious about what the Soviets were up to. By measuring the dispersal pattern of a known amount of radioactive material from Hanford’s smokestacks, the Pentagon hoped to come up with a rough gauge for guessing how much plutonium the Soviets were making. To that end, a huge cloud of radioactive iodine was spat out of Hanford’s smokestacks. It spread across most of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon. Vegetation samples taken not far from Mesa in the week of the experiment showed radiation counts as high as one thousand times the then-tolerable limit. The amount of radiation pumped into the air during the Green Run was more than seven hundred times greater than what was released during the 1979 partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Three Mile Island, America’s worst civilian nuclear accident, released about 15 curies of radiation, causing alarm across much of the East Coast and forcing the confiscation of milk and vegetables. The Green Run released at least 11,000 curies of radiation and remained secret for thirty-seven years.
When Bailie was between five and seven years old, a Hanford chemical plant called REDOX repeatedly spewed carcinogenic particles of ruthenium into the wind. The risk was considered serious enough behind the fences on the Hanford site to restrict travel to main highways. But in nearby Mesa, where farms were showered with ruthenium, no warnings were given or restrictions imposed. “Nothing is to be gained by informing the public,” Herbert M. Parker, the head of health and safety at Hanford, wrote in 1954. “Not all residents will be as relaxed as the one who was recently quoted as saying, ‘Living in Richland is ideal because we breathe only tested air.’ ”
In Bailie’s less-than-ideal neighborhood, the government knowingly risked the health of thousands of civilians, lied about it for nearly forty years, and only reluctantly began to disclose some of the facts in 1986 when forced to do so by Freedom of Information lawsuits. The doses of radiation and deceit that set off Bailie’s imagination have affected most other downwinders in ways more predictable, less quotable, more piteous. Numbed by betrayal, they live out their lives on the East Side of the Columbia in a murk of anger, fear, and cynicism.
I attended a midweek meeting of downwinders in the Blue Mountain Mall in Walla Walla, Washington, about sixty miles east of the Hanford Reach of the Columbia. Just off the mall’s food court, a dozen late-middle-aged and elderly people congregated in a windowless community room. They breathed the greasy smells of the mall’s fast-food emporiums, sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups, and listened intently as a stocky woman in a tent-sized purple flower blouse explained why the federal government is evil.
“They have spent five million for this Hanford Health Information Network, which is money that is supposed to help each and every one of us understand what Hanford did,” said Kay Sutherland. “Tragically, it has gone for denial and downplaying the damage to our health.”
Sutherland, like the members of her sad, small audience, was a physical wreck. She reeled off her maladies like a bailiff reading an indictment. The fifty-four-year-old housewife-activist blamed them all on Hanford. She grew up on the rural edge of Walla Walla, a town in the middle of Hanford’s downwind path. Throughout the late 1940s, when surrounding pastureland was laced with Hanford’s radioactive iodine, she drank milk from local cows and ate locally grown produce.
“I am as round as I am tall from a lifetime of thyroid problems. I have cysts and nodules all over my body. I have had four miscarriages, and two of my children died after birth. I have an autoimmune syndrome called Sjogren disease. I have had kidney cancer. They removed a four-and-a-half-pound tumor.”
As Sutherland ticked off her diseases, members of the audience nodded. They, too, blamed Hanford for all manner of misery. In the front row, for example, Mary Pengelly, age sixty-two, who lived in downwind parts of Oregon and Washington in the 1940s and 1950s, had hypothyroidism, digestive problems, ulcers, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic weight problems. Pengelly stood up and told the meeting that she has eight brothers and sisters, all with hypothyroidism.* She and her siblings have together tallied forty miscarriages, stillbirths, or birth defects. Her four children, she said, have been cursed by rare diseases. The oldest had a brain tumor removed at age seven. The second-oldest weighed two pounds, eleven ounces at birth. There was a large tumor attached to his placenta. The third child started passing out at age three and has been diagnosed with Raynaud’s disease, a circulatory problem. The fourth child has had three operations for degenerative spinal disease.
“Something has happened to the genetic system of my family,” Pengelly said. “I will be dead in a few years and I have got to know exactly what Hanford did.”
The federal government attempted to find out and tell Pengelly and other downwinders what Hanford had done. In response to the public alarm that followed disclosures about radiation releases, Congress funded two massive long-term health studies, as well as the Hanford Health Information Network. A dose reconstruction survey that took seven years to complete and cost twenty-six million dollars plotted the spread of all the radiation released to the air and the river from Hanford between 1945 and 1992. It allowed downwinders to calculate their probable radiation dose depending on where they lived, how much milk they drank from a backyard cow, and how much time they spent out of doors. A thyroid disease study tracked down three thousand randomly selected downwinders and examined them for thyroid ailments. It found “no association” between Hanford’s releases of radioactive iodine and thyroid disease. It also concluded that rates of thyroid disease among downwinders were “generally consistent” with rates of the disease found in other populations.
But in the community room of the Blue Mountain Mall, the assembled downwinders called the studies an elaborate cover-up. They said they could never again trust anything paid for by the government.
“People are getting harder to fool,” said Barbara Howard, a forty-six-year-old downwinder from eastern Oregon. “You will never get my generation to fight in another war. There are enough things about Hanford that concern me that I can never not be cynical.”
Sutherland and Howard later resigned as members of the advisory board for the Hanford Health Information Network, which was set up to inform and comfort downwinders. In a letter to the Department of Energy, they said the network withheld information from the public and harassed Hanford’s victims as “troublemakers.” The letter said that the department remains “unable to shake off a fifty-year tradition . . . of making light of citizens’ worries about radiation exposure.”
Downwinders showed up to sneer at the results of the dose reconstruction survey and mock the specialists who put it together. Their necks bearing the scars of thyroid surgery, they told the demographers, meteorologists, epidemiologists, and physicians that it was a waste of time to draw up maps charting how many rads of radiation fell where. The experts should have listed how many patriotic Americans were killed by their own government.
“I didn’t expect this level of anger. We perhaps didn’t handle this very well,” Genevieve Roessler, of the dose reconstruction survey, told reporters after a meeting in Spokane.
The unsatisfying truth about radiation releases from Hanford is that the health effects are not nearly as clear, as extensive, or as diabolical as one might believe from hanging out in the community room in the Blue Mountain Mall.
As for downwinders’ complaints about ills ranging from arthritis to heart attacks to Hodgkin’s disease, Dr. Glyn Caldwell, a leader of the dose reconstruction panel, told me that the cause may be as much political as radiological.
“These people don’t like Hanford. Anything that happens to them is blamed on Hanford. There is no population in this country that never dies and is free of disease. Cancer occurs everywhere. There is no reported bunching of cancer deaths in eastern Washington.
“I would not suggest that nothing is happening to these people. They felt they were more patriotic than most Americans because they tolerated Hanford. They were reassured it was safe. Now they don’t seem to believe anything. We have accepted that they are not going to believe us, at least not for a long time,” Caldwell said.
As for the birth defects that Tom Bailie describes so vividly and the genetic damage that Mary Pengelly insists has afflicted her family, studies so far have found no evidence around Hanford of radiation-related problems. Dr. Lowell Sever, an epidemiologist in Seattle who works for Battelle Laboratories and is one of the country’s leading researchers on the relationship between environment and birth defects, said there are no solid studies anywhere in the world that suggest an association between birth defects and low-level radiation exposure of the kind that occurred downwind of Hanford. Sever participated in a study that did find elevated rates of birth defects around Hanford between 1968 and 1980, a period when atmospheric leaks from the plutonium factory were all but nonexistent. But he and his colleagues attributed the cluster of birth defects to intensive use of pesticides by farmers.
Tom Bailie told me that “so-called experts” like Glyn Caldwell and Lowell Sever are not to be trusted. Dose surveys, thyroid studies, and the multibillion-dollar Hanford cleanup are all, in his words, “a joke.”
“The reason they are putting in the money—hush money I call it—is to confuse everybody. Studies and the cleanup are cheaper than settling lawsuits and taking care of sick people for the rest of their lives,” Bailie told me.
We were sitting in his pickup after the “death mile” tour. For some reason, I had mentioned to Bailie that I had had a tour on the Hanford side of the river. I said I had gotten to know an engineer from N Reactor and that Jerry Erickson struck me as a decent, intelligent guy. I said that since I met Erickson and his family, Hanford made a lot more sense to me. It was bizarre, I told the farmer, but at least it was human. Bailie did not want to hear it.
“Oh, sure they may dress normally, but their eyes look strange. They are robotic, almost like followers of a cult.” Bailie warmed to his harangue. “When we were kids growing up, those people didn’t want us dating their daughters. We farm boys would go to Richland and they’d have the cops waiting for us.
“You know those Hanfordites wear security tags around their necks wherever they go. Oh, boy, they remind me of registered cattle.”
Hanfordites and downwinders, even though they disdain each other, shared a common sentiment toward the river that separates them. Apathy.
Tom Bailie has lived his entire life within ten miles of the Columbia. But he told me he had no idea when salmon migrated in the river that he relies on for water for his crops. He was puzzled and annoyed by the possibility that he, as an irrigator and downwind victim, might be implicated in the extinction of salmon.
Across the river, I asked Jerry Erickson’s son, Tim, the bright young engineer at the plutonium finishing plant, if he had any ideas about what should be done to revive the Columbia and its famous salmon runs. The question stumped him. It was not his department.
“I sort of always felt that if you throw enough money at the river, if you build more hatcheries, then you could solve the problem. As far as the salmon and the river were concerned, I didn’t hear anything about the dams being a problem. I had heard around here that it was the Indians’ fault.”
The massive federal presence that had alienated Hanford’s believers and victims from each other had also alienated them from the one natural resource that kept their fractured desert community from drying up. The Columbia, for most of the people I met around the Tri-Cities, was merely an object, not unlike an irrigation ditch, a dam, or a tank farm. Talking with them about the spirit of the river was like talking about the spirit of the asphalt in State Highway 395, the four-lane that slants northeast to Spokane.
To find people in the desert who were eager to talk about the river, I had to ride that monstrous barge with the peas, the lentils, and the angry river men who feared that the Columbia was going to be ruined in favor of fish.