Toxic Utah: Ghosts in the wind

"I think that is something that is totally overlooked in this discussion. These people were lied to and told — while they were dying — that they were wrong," Nelson said. In Margaret Nelson's last few weeks, she wanted desperately to keep up with news of how the legislative bill to compensate Downwinders was moving through Congress. But her body was a frail 80 pounds by then, and she was too weak to read, so Margaret asked her sister-in-law to read the bill to her, Denise Nelson remembers. When Denise got through the text, Margaret was quiet, then made a final request of her sister-in-law.

"She was emphatic," Denise Nelson said. "She told me, 'Don't let them forget what they did.' "

"I was asked to speak at a conference in New York in August 1987. I looked at it as a free trip, but when I got there, there were people from all over the world who had the same stories. There was a guy from Hanford, some people from Savannah River where Three Mile Island happened, from Rocky Flats . . . . I was blown away, and I thought I am never going to go home and be a guinea pig or be silent again." — Claudia Peterson, St. George.

Claudia Peterson's was a Norman Rockwell upbringing just outside Cedar City in all respects but a few.

Born in 1955, she had a great childhood, she says, played outside like every other kid, went to East Elementary against the mountain on the east side of town. The family lived out of their own gardens — raised their own meat, drank raw milk from the neighbor's cows.

"We were getting it from every direction and didn't know it," she says now reflecting on her exposure to radioactive fallout.

As she looks back on things now, there were certainly oddities in an otherwise staid community.

She remember seeing piles of dead lambs at the neighbors' house and thinking that was normal. Then a group of men in black dress suits came to her school one day with Geiger counters. One man waved the hand wand across her throat with the mechanism.

"It was beeping up a storm," Peterson said. "I was proud. I thought, 'Oh, I made it go off.' I asked the man what it meant and he said it showed I had had dental X-rays. But my mother was a nurse. She knew and I knew I'd only been to the dentist a couple of times."

Forty years later, Peterson still remembers the huge orange ball that came up in the west horizon. She and her friends thought it was a flying saucer, then it dissipated into a huge cloud. Now she knows she should have been terrified by what she saw in the sky, but back then, few were. "We just didn't dwell on it."