Farming in Hanford's shadow: the downwinders' story

In March 1943 the farmers of Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland, in eastern Washington, were told they had 30 to 90 days to leave. The Army needed the land for the Hanford Engineer Works, which would make plutonium for the Manhattan Project. About 2,000 people went. The farmers who stayed nearby — downwind and downstream — spent the next four decades growing food in the path of what Hanford released, reassured by the government that it was safe.

Farming before the bomb

Cattle ranching came to the Columbia Basin and the Yakima and Walla Walla valleys with the gold rushes of the 1860s and 1870s. In the early 1900s the Northern Pacific Railway sold irrigated land for about $40 an acre and paid for irrigation to make it pay. Farmers grew wheat — the crop best suited to the dry climate — and barley, potatoes, sugar beets, vegetables and fruit. Outsiders saw an empty desert. To families who had farmed it for generations, it was a good life, and home.

Forced off

Paul Bruggeman, a German immigrant, and his wife had bought a 227-acre ranch at White Bluffs in 1937 and, with its ready-made irrigation, turned it into one of the region's most successful fruit farms. In 1943 the government offered what it called fair market value. Bruggeman challenged it in court as unfair and lost; the family, with their two small children, moved to Yakima. Farmers across Benton County sold their livestock and boarded up their houses before the harvest, and the orchards they left withered.

Downwind

Around the site, the war meant strong demand for food, and farming grew. The Columbia Basin Project Act passed in 1943, and in 1948 the Pasco Pumping Plant began delivering irrigation water — directly in the path of radioactive material in Hanford's air and in the Columbia River.

• Between 1943 and 1987, according to the Department of Energy, millions of gallons of radioactive and toxic waste were dumped or leaked into the ground at Hanford.
• Radionuclides reached farms through the air and the river: in dust and gases blowing across the fields, and in Columbia River water drawn through aquifers into irrigation ditches and wells.
• The Atomic Energy Commission regularly sampled farmers' soil, water, milk and vegetables — and told them the results were safe.

What the families remember

The "Death Mile." Along a two-mile stretch of road near Eltopia, residents developed blood disorders and blood and thyroid cancers; by local account, every household had someone with cancer.

The Green Run. Tom Bailie, born in 1947 and raised on the Death Mile, believes his babysitter's stillborn child, in May 1950, was a casualty of the Green Run — a deliberate release of radioactive material from Hanford in December 1949. As a toddler he saw figures in protective suits, "moon people", sweeping the ground with soldiers walking behind them. His father, four of his father's siblings and both paternal grandparents died of cancer; Bailie himself was born with birth defects, had unexplained sores and paralysis as a child, and was sterile as an adult. He went on to farm 800 acres at Mesa, about 55 miles from the site.

The "night of the little demons." In the winter of 1961, lambs on farms a few miles downwind were born with fatal deformities — missing or twisted legs, no eyes or mouths, fused bones — and many ewes died giving birth, their wool falling out in clumps. Hanford never accepted responsibility. The farmer Nels Allison blamed the plant for killing his sheep and nearly costing him his farm.

From duty to betrayal

Many of these families at first saw their sacrifice as patriotic, and read the government's constant sampling as care. In the 1980s, when they learned how much radioactive material had been released around them, many felt betrayed. Farmers of Franklin and Benton Counties, as Bailie has put it, feel that they too gave their lives for the country, and are worth as much as anyone who worked at Hanford.

Sources

Written from John Allison, "Farming in Hanford's Shadow", National Park Service, Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which draws on Michael D'Antonio, Atomic Harvest (1993); Michele Stenehjem Gerber, On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Site (1992); Trisha T. Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs (2020); the Hanford History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities; and an interview with Tom Bailie (2023).