Toxic Utah: Ghosts in the wind

ST. GEORGE — It's an exquisite fall day in Utah's southernmost corner, and Michelle Thomas takes an appreciative look around this green space to which she has returned before exiting her car with the deliberateness of a person soaking in her environment. She greets visitors cheerily.

"Welcome to the home of my family and friends!"

And the irony of her comment is only clear under consideration of the contrast this place holds:

That magnificent Washington County, feature of spectacular scenic postcards and landscape legends, was also the place where the U.S. government's own Atomic Energy Commission perpetuated some of the nation's ugliest health and environmental atrocities;

That Thomas' intentioned movement from her car isn't really that at all, but the degenerative repercussions of a muscle disease that is winning the battle over her legs and body;

And that her cheeky call — "Welcome to the home of my family and friends!" — could have come from a garden or a porch or patio, but it doesn't. It comes from the city cemetery.

"Utahns have experienced an epidemic of cancer and other radiation-related illnesses as a result of radioactive fallout from U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) nuclear weapons testing in the Fifties and Sixties. AEC's dishonesty and manipulation of information are indelible lessons. We are painfully aware of the risks we face from high-level nuclear waste." — Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, Nov. 9, 2000, in a letter to the Minnesota Public Utility Commission opposing Private Fuel Storage LLC's proposal for a spent nuclear fuel storage facility in Utah.

They were bombs with names like Morgan, Charleston and "Dirty Harry" that showed themselves in faraway flashes, in the snowy ash they left behind and in reverberations that rumbled through southern Utah towns of St. George, Cedar City and Parowan like a freight train through the living room. Ninety-three atom bombs were detonated in the Nevada desert between 1951 and 1963. Nearly one-third of these were bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The arid western site was chosen, because as long as winds were blowing east, the fallout avoided big cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles and traveled over sparsely populated areas of southeastern Nevada and Utah instead.

But as pink clouds of fallout passed, rural residents sucked in their powdery, radioactive dust. It fell on their skin, it leeched into the ground and into the vegetables they ate. Many got sick and died right away. Others got cancers later.

Later, the federal government stopped the tests, and reluctantly admitted its responsibility for these illnesses.