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Jul. 1st, 2003 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dotintheskyIn the early 1980s, (Carole) Gallagher moved from New York City to St. George to work full-time on her oral history of the casualties of the American nuclear test program. Beginning with its first nuclear detonation in 1951, this small Mormon city, due east of the Nevada Test Site, has been shrouded in radiation debris from scores of atmospheric and accidentally "ventilated" underground blasts. Each lethal cloud was the equivalent of billions of x-rays and contained more radiation than was released at Chernobyl in 1988. Moreover, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s had deliberately planned for fallout to blow over the St. George region in order to avoid Las Vegas and Los Angeles. In the icy, Himmlerian jargon of a secret AEC memo unearthed by Gallagher, the targeted communities were "a low-use segment of the population."
As a direct result, this downwind population (exposed to the fallout equivalent of perhaps fifty Hiroshimas) is being eaten away by cumulative cancers, neurological disorders, and genetic defects. Gallagher, for instance, talks about her quiet dread of going into the local K-Mart and "seeing four-and five-year-old children wearing wigs, deathly pale and obviously in chemotherapy." But such horror has become routinized in a region where cancer is so densely clustered that virtually any resident can matter-of-factly rattle off long lists of tumorous or deceased friends and family.
- taken from "Dead Cities and Other Tales", by Mike Davi
As a direct result, this downwind population (exposed to the fallout equivalent of perhaps fifty Hiroshimas) is being eaten away by cumulative cancers, neurological disorders, and genetic defects. Gallagher, for instance, talks about her quiet dread of going into the local K-Mart and "seeing four-and five-year-old children wearing wigs, deathly pale and obviously in chemotherapy." But such horror has become routinized in a region where cancer is so densely clustered that virtually any resident can matter-of-factly rattle off long lists of tumorous or deceased friends and family.
- taken from "Dead Cities and Other Tales", by Mike Davi
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on 2003-07-01 09:56 am (UTC)i've been to st. george. they have red dirt and it stains.
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on 2003-07-02 02:06 am (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-02 11:01 am (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-02 03:57 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-02 04:15 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-08 07:59 am (UTC)which part of California?
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on 2003-07-08 10:19 am (UTC)You should DEFINITELY come visit.
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on 2003-07-09 08:31 pm (UTC):o)
and you'll have to show me all these plasticky people and movie stars.
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on 2003-07-02 03:50 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-08 07:54 am (UTC)so quit yapping da foo
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on 2003-07-09 08:35 pm (UTC)uhh, who's the bad kitty?
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on 2003-07-11 09:28 am (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-12 02:02 pm (UTC)give me give me give me
the honkey ponkey please
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on 2003-07-13 07:24 am (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-14 07:48 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-18 02:51 am (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-18 04:38 pm (UTC)Re:
on 2003-07-21 09:22 am (UTC):oP
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on 2003-07-22 02:16 am (UTC)ok.
:o)