Morning News Online - Florence, Myrtle Beach | Mississippi residents remember their nuclear bomb blast: "Jul 10, 2005
Mississippi residents remember their nuclear bomb blast
By JAMES W. CRAWLEY
Media General News Service
BAXTERVILLE, Miss. - Billy Ray Anderson remembers the day the earth kicked up waves, the ground cracked, chimneys tumbled and the creeks turned black in this corner of the Deep South.
“The ground swelled up,” Anderson said. “It was just like the ocean - there was a wave every 200 feet or so.”
It was the day the government nuked Mississippi.
At precisely 10 a.m. on Oct. 22, 1964, a nuclear bomb exploded 2,700 feet beneath the loblolly pines of Lamar County. Within a microsecond, the clash of plutonium atoms heated an underground salt dome to the temperature of the sun.
This Saturday (July 16), the world will mark the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb. The anniversary is significant to Billy Ray Anderson and his neighbors because no Americans live closer to a nuclear test site. The 1,052 other U.S. nuclear blasts occurred in sparsely populated sections of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Alaska or in the Pacific Ocean.
Time has erased much of the evidence and memory of two underground nuclear explosions here - the only times the United States detonated atomic bombs east of the Mississippi River.
Some residents fear the bomb has caused cancer. Others think that’s just a bunch of hooey.
Federal and state officials say residents are safe.
Cold War origins
The story of Mississippi and the bomb begins in the Cold War.
By the early 1960s, atmospheric nuclear testing had spread fallout around most of the world.
The Pentagon and Atomic Energy Commission feared the Soviets might cheat on a test ban treaty by muffling a nuclear explosion inside a salt dome. Officials decided to test the theory.
Project Dribble would explode two nuclear bombs in Mississippi’s Tatum Salt Dome, about 20 miles southwest of Hattiesburg, as a test.
Before dawn Oct. 22, 1964, scientists and engineers towed the 1,113-lb. nuclear device, called Salmon, behind a Dodge sedan from the heavily guarded assembly building hidden deep in the pine forest to Ground Zero. A crane lowered the bomb underground.
Living at Ground Zero
Anderson, 69, lives less than a mile from the Salt Dome - the residents’ phrase for Ground Zero. No one lives closer.
Most days he is at his fishing camp, an eclectic wood and sheet-metal building next to a pond and topped by Santa’s sleigh and reindeer stenciled in Christmas lights. It’s a place he can fish, take a swim, drink beer and tend his tomatoes without interruption.
He remembers the day the bomb exploded as if it were yesterday.
State troopers started knocking on doors at 5 a.m. to evacuate everyone near Ground Zero. Each adult received $10 and children $5 for their inconvenience.
Anderson drove a water tanker at the test site and he waited at the command post as the countdown ticked toward zero.
Local and state officials were inside an air-conditioned trailer, watching it on closed circuit TV, he said.
When the clock hit 10 o’clock, the bomb exploded with the force of 5.3 kilotons of TNT - one-third the size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
“It was like you hit a big drum on top,” he recalled. “It made such a big bang, it shook things for miles.“
The ground rose. Forty-one years later, Anderson demonstrated the groundswell’s height by holding his hands about 18 inches off the ground.
“It really did jar things,” he added.
The trailer rocked and rolled. “Those politicians came running out of the trailer, grabbing their handkerchiefs and wiping the sweat off their foreheads,” he said. The TV inside was knocked over and the command post’s radios were damaged.
Seismographs throughout the United States, plus some in Europe, recorded the shock waves.
After the explosion, Anderson drove to the forward control shack, less than a mile from Ground Zero.
“The creek was black … it was running black as it could be,” he recalled. Anderson would stay busy for days delivering water to neighbors because the blast soured wells, also turning them black with silt.
Cracks - “big enough to put your hand in” - fractured roads, he said.
Many foundations, walls and chimneys were damaged.
While the seismograph needles jiggled, the meters on government radiation detectors were still. No radioactivity escaped during the blast. No one was hurt.
“If (the bomb) had been on top of the earth, it would have scorched (nearby) Purvis,” Anderson said.
The worrying begins
In 1964, residents didn’t worry about the bomb.
The government said everyone was safe. The bomb was a paycheck for hundreds who toiled as laborers, drivers, carpenters and caterers.
The worrying came later.
In 1979, University of Mississippi scientists reported finding a radioactive frog at the Salt Dome.
The governor ordered an evacuation. A few days later, the college professors realized their equipment was contaminated. The frog was fine, not radioactive at all.
Since the 1970s, federal and state officials regularly visit the site to monitor the water and soil for radiation. During the 1990s, inspectors discovered tritium - a radioactive isotope of hydrogen - at levels above federal safety limits. Today, tritium levels have fallen to safe levels.
The Energy Department’s site manager, Pete Sanders, said no contamination is present on the surface or off the site.
“We’ve never seen anything off the site,” he said.
State officials continue quarterly water and radiation tests, said Robert Goff, director of radiological health for the Mississippi health department. So far, nothing bad has shown up.
“In the past, present and future, our concern has been for public safety,” Goff said. With radiation dissipating naturally, Sanders stands by reports saying the Salt Dome is safe.
Some residents are not so sure.
Cancer has taken many of their friends, neighbors and family members.
One and a half miles from the Salt Dome, Grace Burge, 62, spent a recent morning sorting crowder peas for sale at The Old Mill Store she and her husband own.
Asked if the bomb had killed people in Lamar County, she stopped sorting for a second, gazed toward the road and answered:
“I would say so, but the government says no."
