COLUMN ONE : How Dare They! Atom Critics Cry : A report on radiation near the Hanford plant confirms residents’ fears. And the government knew all along, some say.

PASCO, Wash. —  Betty Perkes has always known that something wasn’t right. Five of the seven members of her family are on thyroid medication. So it came as little surprise when the federal government admitted this week that the radiation releases decades ago from the atomic weapons plant nearby were big enough to leave people seriously ill.

What makes Perkes furious is that the releases appear to have been intentional. The federal government knew about them; it even monitored their effects. And it is that chilling notion that fuels the worst fears of Hanford Nuclear Reservation “downwinders” like Perkes--the idea that perhaps they were part of a secret experiment.

“Yes, our government was so good to us,” Perkes said Friday in the white brick farmhouse her husband built on land the government sold at a discount to Korean War veterans during a time that the government was building up its weapons program.

“They brought us out here and they used us for guinea pigs . . . . How dare they do that to us? And without asking if we wanted to be experimented on. How dare they!”

The U.S. Department of Energy and a special investigative panel acknowledged this week that thousands of men, women and children living in the 10 counties surrounding the Hanford reservation were exposed between 1944 and 1947 to doses of radioactive iodine 131 that were large enough to cause significant illnesses, including thyroid disease and cancer. By some estimates, no other group of civilians in the world is known to have been exposed to as much radiation over such a period of time.

The iodine, produced in the process of making plutonium for nuclear bombs, is believed to have landed on vegetation and to have been eaten by cows in the fertile farmland downwind of the reservation. Iodine accumulates in the human thyroid gland and can cause abnormalities. It is believed to have posed the greatest risk to infants who were fed on locally produced milk.

It remains unclear, however, how many illnesses might have been caused by the releases, which first came to light through a public records act request by a public interest group in 1986. At that time, it became clear that the government not only knew about some of the releases but may have even planned them and set out to monitor the effects.

First Phase

On Thursday, the government for the first time admitted that the releases were enough to result in illness.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and a Seattle-based cancer research center have begun a study of the extent and severity of thyroid disease in the region.

The findings came from just the first phase of the five-year federally funded Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, which examined airborne radioactive iodine emissions in the 1940s and radioactive cooling water poured into the Columbia River from 1964 to 1967. The panel has yet to examine other time periods, including a December, 1949, experiment in which radioactive iodine and other fission products were released in a plume that extended as far as Spokane.

“Prior to yesterday’s announcement, there were very few people willing to even consider the fact that this had happened,” said Lois Camp, 48, who grew up in Kahlotus, northeast of Hanford in the path of the prevailing west-to-east winds and who fears her heart condition may be related to radioactive releases. “I don’t want to rain on the parade of this announcement, but it must be a beginning, not an end. The thyroid disease is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Word of the announcements hit hard this week in the small cities and farm towns east and northeast of the nuclear reservation, nestled between and around the Snake and Columbia rivers. This is an area that residents themselves describe as patriotic, conservative and God-fearing. As third-generation farmer Tom Bailie puts it, they take “a hairy-chested attitude to life.”

So there were some here who chose not to believe the disturbing news. They blamed the media, anti-nuclear groups, perhaps a few desperate “downwinders,” the name taken by several hundred residents who have pressed for investigations of the releases.

Orville Weiss, for example, who hauls seed potato, referred to the issue as a lot of “squawkin’ and hollerin’ ” and suggested, “If someone don’t control those environmentalists, the human race is going to be extinct.”

But there were others who admitted that the announcements had given them pause. For the first time, they said, they had begun taking stock. Carole Hackwith, 52, a mother of five whose husband is a surveyor at Hanford, began pondering her recollection that 13 people on the block where she grew up had come down with various cancers, including her parents and herself.

“I think people are really beginning to wonder a little bit,” Hackwith said Thursday evening, as the sunset turned the sky pink and the temperature dipped toward 100 for the first time all day. “. . . It makes me feel sad that this sort of thing happens. I’m sure it was just ignorance. I don’t want to believe that my government would do this thing on purpose.”

Deanna Louderback, who has thyroid disease, was even skeptical.

“I don’t think angry would be the word. Disappointed more than anything, and a little bit leery,” said Louderback, who developed the disease at age 28, along with two close high school friends. “We were deceived once, by them letting it out, and deliberately. You wonder, if they weren’t honest about it once, are they being honest now?”

Mix of Emotions

For the downwinders themselves, the news confirmed what many had suspected for years. So they spoke about it with a mix of emotions: There was some relief, at being vindicated in the eyes of their community; anger, at having been betrayed by the government; and terror, at the thought of the long-term implications of what they now know to be true.

Tom Bailie is a 43-year-old farmer in the community of Mesa. He rattles off the cancers and birth defects in his family like bowling scores. As for himself, he says he was born in 1947 with crooked legs, a sunken chest cavity and twisted fingers. His five children are adopted because he is sterile. The bones in his ankle seem to crinkle like cellophane when he pivots.

Bailie believes the government’s acknowledgement of the magnitude of the radioactive releases will begin finally to erode what he sees as the region’s unwillingness to admit there was a problem--an unwillingness he and others attribute to the powerful role Hanford has played in their lives as both the area’s largest employer and a cultural icon.

“This is a community whose entire economic well-being depends on nuclear weapons production, and people have pledged total loyalty to it,” said Bailie. In the land of the Atomic Body Shop, the Atomic Bowling Center, Atomic Lawn Care and Atomic Plumbing and Mechanical, Bailie invoked perhaps the most poignant image of that loyalty, the Richland High School football team’s symbol, a mushroom cloud.

Some farmers, fearful that they now may face a boycott of their products, were reluctant to speak about the releases. Having watched the Alar scare decimate the market of apple farmers in the Wenatchee Valley to the northwest, they fear that concerns about radioactive crops, no matter how unfounded, could do the same to their livelihood.

Yet one farmer, who asked not to be named, confessed that family members no longer eat their own beef or milk. They drink bottled water rather than rely on their well. They take those precautions despite the fact that federal officials and investigators insist there is no residual contamination in the land and in the crops and animals that grow and feed there.

When asked if he would like to move away from the area, the farmer answered with anguish, “How do you sell property that’s contaminated? How do you take everything you have earned and do it to someone else? Is that ethical?”

Many Want Help

What the downwinders want now is a comprehensive study of the health effects of the releases. Many want federal help in covering their mounting medical bills. So far, they say they have been prevented from suing by the government’s claim of so-called sovereign immunity, a doctrine that protects the federal government against liability.

Some expressed the hope that physicians would now attend more closely to their medical problems, which some said have been met in the past with skepticism and disbelief. And a few downwinders said they want names--the names of whoever it was who permitted the releases that they believe made them and their children sick.

“They have finally admitted what we have known and wanted them to admit,” said Betty Perkes. “Now I want them to have to always be careful, to set up safeguards and checks so this horrible, horrible disaster can never be repeated.”

Contamination From Hanford

One rad is the amount of radiation a body organ would absorb from about a dozen chest X-rays. Up to 13,500 people may have received doses of more than 33 rads from milk they drank. About 1,400 infants and children in the area received from 15 to 650. A small number of infants may have received doses of 2,900 rads or more.

Source: Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project