we didn’t tell them. Site families should know, and non-Site families shouldn’t. Many of them caught on and hosed down their driveways and sidewalks too. One day I was given the chore of hosing down the driveway to remove oil from our leaky car. Within a few minutes, half a dozen driveways on the block were being hosed down. As I worked, I debated whether to tell them or to go through the whole ritual so as not to raise their ire. Then I realized that a call might have come in at the same time I happened to be washing the oil off. I did the whole thing. ^ L -7 T”he big one, of course, they couldn’t keep quiet. I don’t remember how I got the news. The earliest I remember, the whole town was in a buzz. SL-1 had blown up. People had died. Official assurances started coming in early. The explosion was over and there was no chance of another one. There was no danger. The inner shell around the reactor was broken, but the outer shell was intact. No radiation had escaped into the air, and none would. This was proof of the safety of their work. They were proud of their system, proud of the brave men who worked at The Site, and most of all, proud of the citizens of Idaho, who stood by them in what turned out not to be an emergency after all. They might have been able to downplay the affair and bury it in technical garble within a few days, except for the problem of the missing body. Three people had been working on the pile at the time it went up, but only two bodies had been found. A family friend who lived across the street was on the rescue team, and was the first one into the compound after the explosion. Hadn’t he looked around for the third body? “No,” he grinned. He was a quiet, modest man, considerably embarrassed by his new hero status. He made light of the whole affair to us neighborhood kids. “ No, I just ran in, grabbed the first body I saw, and ran out as fast as I could.” There hadn’t been time to put on a radiation suit. He knew when he took the job there might not be. He shrugged and said that at that level of radiation, it wouldn’t have helped anyway. In the three seconds he was in the compound, he got well over his lifetime quota of radiation exposure. He was immediately transferred to A.E.C. Headquarters in town so he wouldn’t be exposed to any more. Later he was transferred to Washington D.C., because even Idaho Falls was too hot. The high radiation level continued to hamper the search for the missing body. It would be years before people could go in, even with the heaviest radiation suits. They pushed television cameras in again and again for several days, and could find no body. Meanwhile, they said, they were getting a lot of valuable information on the blast itself and the effects it had on various.materials and instruments. I was told at the time that the local media were being cut off from the main news sources. All the interviews, press conferences, off-the-record background talks and hints from “informed sources” were going to the news syndicates and the networks. Local reporters could interview peripheral people, maybe even the widows. But no one with hard information was available. That didn’t matter much to us. The local media were put out by and for the townsfolk. We Site people cared more what the people in Washington were telling the nation about us than what a small time TV station was telling our neighbors. And our real information came through our regular sources, the men who worked at The Site. So while the official investigation took weeks to reach a verdict of “operator error,” we knew within a day or two how it had happened. One of the three men was always bragging about his strength. Several times people had seen him showing W e learned early that “dirty” meant contaminated and “hot” meant radioactive, and they weren’t the same. Dad had several shirts and pants, pairs of shoes, dozens of pairs of gloves, buried out there. off by standing on top of the pile and lowering the damping rod into the core by hand (rather than by whatever mechanical device was generally used). Most likely, he was doing his little stunt again and got the rod jammed in its sleeve. Without the damping rod to absorb radiation, the reactor had gone critical in a few seconds. Maybe that’s why they finally thought to tilt the camera up, and found the third Continued on Page 35 Visit BridgePort Public Tap Room open in September! Columbia River Brewery is the first operating microbrewery in Portland in 60 years. Our 20 barrel brewhouse and public tap room are located in Portland’s oldest industrial building. 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