First Casualties of Nuclear Age Are Revisited--in Hanford : History: The U.S. government evicted the residents of two Washington towns 50 years ago to build a secret weapons production site. Many are still bitter at their treatment.

They stand forlornly in the desert: the wrecked shell of a school, the safe of a bank, a few other slabs of concrete that once were homes or businesses.

Fifty years ago, they were the first casualties of the nuclear age. But they are not in Japan.

They are the remnants of the towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, purchased and obliterated by the federal government in 1943 to make room for the Manhattan Project’s plutonium plants to develop the atomic bomb.

Hanford’s name lives on in the sprawling Hanford nuclear reservation in southeastern Washington.

Many of those evicted on March 6, 1943, are still alive, and each July hold a bittersweet reunion at the sites of the old Columbia River towns.

“The last thing in the world we were thinking about was that somebody was going to say you have to be out in 30 days,” said Annette Heriford, who was 22 when she and her parents were evicted from their apple farm.

“It was something that no one could ever explain unless you experienced it.”

Gertrude Irwin of Yakima recalled the human toll of the relocations.

“Longtime friends and neighbors were scattered with nowhere to go,” she recently wrote. “All of the widows died within a year of losing their homes. Boys returning from service after the war had no homes to return to.”

It was wartime urgency that doomed the towns and forced the relocation of about 1,500 people in the 560-square-mile area.

The Manhattan Project was racing to beat Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb, and needed production facilities in a place that was remote, yet had plenty of electricity and water, and was more than 200 miles inland to avoid Japanese carrier planes.

On Dec. 22, 1942, Army Col. Franklin Matthias flew out of Yakima and surveyed the Hanford area. It was just 20 days after an experiment at the University of Chicago showed that a controlled nuclear chain reaction was possible.

“When we flew over the Hanford site, I was sure that was the place,” Matthias, who was in charge of building Hanford, recently told the Tri-City Herald newspaper.

Gen. Leslie Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, flew out himself and agreed.

On March 6, 1943, residents got a letter from the federal government saying their land would be purchased and that they would have from two to 30 days to leave, depending on location.

The government would appraise the land and set the price.

Residents demanded to know what the government was up to, but officials declined to reveal details.

“If I told you what the government is doing, I’d be court-martialed tomorrow,” Matthias, who now lives in Danville, Calif., reportedly said.

The hardscrabble farms in the dusty landscape were purchased at low prices, angering many residents who had put in expensive homes, wells and irrigation systems.

In addition, farmers were not allowed to harvest their last crops, despite a bumper year with high prices. Some farms were otherwise leveled while the families were still in the homes.

That caused a lot of bitterness among citizens who were naturally inclined to be patriotic.

Bernard Worby, now of Yakima, remembered his father received $500 for a 10-acre irrigated farm. Out of that was deducted back taxes and electricity bills, leaving about $300.

“The well alone and the irrigation system cost $1,100,” Worby said.

Many of the displaced residents believe they are entitled to the same kind of payments that interned Americans of Japanese descent received from the government, Worby said.

“The government stole our property,” he said. “I still resent it that that happened.”

Groves wrote in his memoirs that he regretted paying too much for the farms, a comment that still rankles many survivors.

Although the sagebrush landscape appeared nearly worthless to the untrained eye, Worby said that irrigation made it a garden that produced Washington’s earliest harvest of apples, cherries and other fruits.

The desolate site turned out to be perfect for nuclear weapons production. Huge federal hydroelectric dams like Grand Coulee produced an abundance of electricity. The Columbia River provided cooling water for the pioneer reactors. They were miles from any population center, a requirement for public safety, but railroad and air service were available.

More than 50,000 workers were imported to the area and housed in huge dormitories. They received good wages, but were not told what they were building.

Richland, which had been a speck of a town, became one of the state’s largest cities almost overnight. It also was one of the most unpleasant; ferocious dust storms prompted so many workers to quit that they became known as “termination winds.”

Richland took on the characteristics of a gold rush town of the frontier days, a comparison made by Western historian Patricia Limerick of the University of Colorado.

“Hanford at its founding had all the classic problems of a boom town--too many people, not enough housing, and too many temptations to drinking, gambling, prostitution and fighting,” Limerick wrote in a recent article.

The desert-like terrain was considered virtually worthless by Manhattan Project planners, who also wrote off places like Nevada and Alamogordo, N.M., by turning them into test sites for detonating nuclear weapons, she said.

Like other former boom towns, Hanford is well-stocked with ruins and relics of lost times, mainly defunct reactors, processing buildings and a huge volume of waste.

Yet the construction of the site was a spectacular feat, one of the largest public works projects of all time and the biggest single construction job of the war.

Under the direction of DuPont, in 18 months the workers erected the world’s first full-size nuclear reactor, B Reactor, which made the plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Ironically, Nagasaki eventually was rebuilt. Hanford and White Bluffs were not.

Army engineers and DuPont built 500 buildings and laid 158 miles of track, 386 miles of roadway and hundreds of miles of fencing, all at a cost of $230 million.

It began a long history of boom and bust dependency on the federal government for people in what became the Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco. The near-empty desert of 1942 is now home to 150,000 people.

Heriford eventually moved back to Richland and worked for a Hanford contractor, Battelle Northwest. These days, she is a tour guide on the site.

She is a driving force behind the annual reunions.

“There is an indescribable bond among the people,” she said.

When the Cold War dawned, Hanford experienced another building boom as what eventually would be nine plutonium reactors, plus processing plants, were built.

But there also were huge environmental costs as radioactive waste was dumped onto the ground, into the river and into the air through smokestacks. Only now has the government launched studies to determine the health effects on humans.

It is the waste that is Hanford’s deepest connection to the Old West, Limerick wrote, joining with the slag piles of old mines, the erosion of plowed plains and the leaching of chemicals into water supplies that are the residues of past exploitation of resources.

Hanford was contaminated with 440 billion gallons of liquid wastes, plus 177 steel storage tanks containing lethal levels of radioactivity.

The cleanup is expected to take more than 30 years and cost upward of $50 billion.

Now, as in the time of its construction, Hanford remains one of the largest public works projects in the country.

But what has been irretrievably lost is the soul of those little towns along the river.

Many pictures and official records of the towns disappeared. Copies of their two newspapers were burned in a mysterious fire decades ago. And for 25 years, former residents were kept off the site.

The government finally let them return for a visit in 1968.

“You can’t go home,” Worby said. “It’s a pitiful thing. Nature has reclaimed the land.

“People were trying to find their old home sites and there was nothing. After 25 years, we got to look around, and there was nothing to look at.”