Fire Burns 25 Homes Near Hanford Nuclear Facility

A fast-moving wildfire racing across the Hanford nuclear reservation jumped the Yakima River late Wednesday and burned about 25 homes in Benton County, officials said.

Residents of Benton City and portions of West Richland were told to evacuate their homes as the fire, which had consumed about 100,000 acres, continued to rage out of control.

“Multiple structures have been burned,” Michael Minette, of the Hanford Joint Information Center, said.

There were no reports of injuries.

Dale Brunson of Benton County Emergency Services said at least 25 homes had burned.

All 1,800 residents of Benton City, located just south of Hanford, were ordered to leave their homes.

The fire briefly threatened a Hanford reservation laboratory containing radioactive waste earlier in the day before winds pushed the flames south and east.

“There are no known radiological releases as a result of the fire at this time,” said Keith Klein, manager of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site.

The flames crossed Washington 240 in three places, pushing into the 200 West Area of Hanford, where waste is stored from the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.

That prompted the U.S. Department of Energy, which owns the former nuclear weapons production site, to declare an emergency.

The fire was in the vicinity of the 222 S Building, an analytical laboratory containing some nuclear waste, and a mile from the Central Waste Complex, where solid wastes are stored.

“All Hanford facilities are in safe status,” Minette said. “The 222 S Building and the Central Waste Complex are not considered threatened at this time.”

The Central Waste Complex is a block of warehouses that contain low-level radioactive and mixed wastes, Minette said.

The fire, started Tuesday by a fatal auto accident, has been burning in arid sagebrush that makes up most of the 560-square-mile reservation in central Washington.

The 200 West Area contains some of the huge underground tanks that contain Hanford’s most dangerous radioactive wastes. None of those tanks was threatened, Minette said.

But an anti-nuclear group warned that the fire could burn radioactive soils and spew contaminated particles into the air.

Earlier this month, the federal government warned that radioactive-contaminated soil from the Los Alamos National Laboratory could flush into the Rio Grande River after a fire raced through the New Mexico site.