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White Picket Fences of Hanford, Declassified
White Picket Fences of Hanford, Declassified
2006
20 by 13 inches
Digital Painting
Based on a photo from the “Hanford Historical Photo Declassification Project”.
Click on the image to view larger version in a separate browser window.
Not everyone lived in the government-built Alphabet houses in Richland. Many in construction lived at Hanford. If you've ever wondered how those who helped make The Bomb possible did live, then you need wonder no longer because above is a home in the Hanford Trailer City which housed construction workers at the Manhattan Project's Hanford facility. There were more than 3000 trailers in the trailer city with 3.7 people living in each trailer. Hanford at its peak had a population of 51,000, being the 3rd largest populated area in Washington state, and I read that those who arrived without trailers resided in barracks, but I imagine there were also trailers available for renting.
The below pics show the northern and southern portions of the Hanford Trailer City, but it's difficult from the images to grasp the reality of what it was like.
There are pics in the database of the interior of a model uninhabited trailer.
This is your model living/dining room, equipped with Better Homes and Gardens magazines so that the lady of the residence could take her discontented mind elsewhere.
This is your model kitchen, which as you can see is half a footstep from the model dining/living room.
Below is another kind of model trailer, made by a resident at Hanford.
Imagine 3.7 people living in each one of these trailers.
Some were nice...
...but I imagine those nicer trailers were the exception. (I love the above pic. One day I'll get around to painting it. Don't have a clue how she protected her fish from the cat she's holding.)
With its trellises and the white picket fence, the home I selected to paint is being shown off as a miniature of the American dream. It says, "Look, you can lead a miniature American Dream Life at Hanford in a veritable rose-covered Honeymoon Suite."
One wonders how in the world people survived frigid winters and boiling hot desert summers in those trailers. One wonders too how these dwellings and sheds survived the dust storms that can roar through the area in the spring with wind gusts of up to 80 miles an hour.
Indeed, it's said that after a dust storm, a number of people would quit Hanford, would pick up and leave.
I well remember the violence of those dust storms in the 60s. Their winds would grab a car door and slam it shut on your fingers. When I was eight and walking home from school a dust storm unexpectedly blew up. The winds were strong enough that they were lifting me off the ground. I was a small eight-year-old and two girls from second grade, passing by, each took one of my arms to help hold me to the ground and we struggled down the street, down George Washington Way, against the wind.
Weirdly and insanely enough you can become so used to those storms that you miss them. When I was visiting Richland with my husband a few years ago, the bright sunshiny spring day began to chill and dim. "A dust storm's rolling in," I told him. I wasn't absolutely certain one was, but I recollected how they were like this. How the weather could change in an instant and suddenly there would be a brown storm swallowing you. And I was excited that he was fortunate enough to be there for a dust storm. Which was stupid of me because it meant we'd be driving to Seattle in the thick of a dust storm. Yet I was thrilled that he'd know what it was like to be in a Richland dust storm.
Out on the range, those dust storms pick up radioactive tumbleweeds and carry them from here to there. I'm not sure where there is but seems to me that probably a number of radioactive tumbleweeds have rolled off the Hanford Reserve and down the road over the years. At some point, I don't know when, they began efforts to corral and destroy them.
The Cold War may be over, but the Hanford Nuclear Reservation continues to battle Russian invaders -- tumbling, radioactive tumbleweeds. Russian thistle is a dead menace here on the windswept desert of south-central Washington. Each winter, the deep tap root on the plant decays, and the spiny brown skeleton above ground breaks off and rolls away. "Our dream is that we have this place tumbleweed-free," says Ray Johnson, a biological control manager for radiation protection at Fluor Hanford, the contractor managing the U.S. Department of Energy site. But that's about as likely as a Soviet revival.
While less than 1 percent of the tumbleweeds corralled and compacted at Hanford are radioactive, the ones that are cost a bundle to clean up.
Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, built in 1943 for the top-secret Manhattan Project. For 40 years, Hanford would make plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal, including the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Russian thistle, a non-native or invader species, is a particular problem at underground burial sites for radioactive waste, where their tap roots reach down as far as 20 feet and suck up such nasty elements as strontium and cesium. A stiff winter wind can send the tumbleweed as far away as four miles, and then "we've lost control of our contamination," Johnson says. But most get hung up within a few hundred yards, usually on sagebrush, fences or in stairwells at the buildings scattered across the site. Two years ago, uncontrolled contamination spread by fruit flies at the site made Hanford a national laughingstock, spoofed by humor columnist Dave Barry and in the syndicated comic strip, "Sylvia."
The flies had been attracted to a soil fixative with saccharin in the base that was being sprayed on a contaminated site. They flew to a lunch room and spread the taint to nearby Dumpsters, which wound up at the Richland municipal landfill. Johnson can laugh -- a little bit -- about it now, recalling attempts to find the source of the contamination. As crews ran radiation detectors around the lunch room, and passed over a fruit fly, "the contamination flew away," he recalls. The journeys of a few thousand fruit flies cost $2.5 million to clean up.
Riding herd on Hanford's tumbleweeds, and its flying insects, is part of an annual $4 million integrated soil, vegetation and animal control (ISVAC) program, run by DynCorp. for Fluor. Radiation control specialists survey the tumbleweeds on the 560-square-mile reservation, using Geiger-Mueller counters that click when radioactivity is present. If contaminated tumbleweeds are found, an ISVAC crew is called in for disposal duty. "The weeds are fairly low danger," says Todd Ponczoch, a radiation control technician, scanning tumbleweeds along a fence line with a Geiger counter. None was registering as radioactive on a recent trip. A large, three-pound radioactive tumbleweed might measure out at 150 millirads, or about 1/100th of the allowable annual dose of radiation per person at Hanford...
Source: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~bart/decrypter/DecryptDemo/plain5.txt
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