Idaho downwinders face struggles

POCATELLO — Six-year-old Valerie Brown didn't know what the wind brought.

She skipped rope with other kids at Greenacres Elementary and paid little attention to the breezes whistling northbound through the Portneuf Gap.

Brown graduated from Highland High School in 1968 and left Pocatello to attend college in Oregon. But the wind caught up with her.

Brown was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at age 24 in 1975, the result, she strongly believes, of exposure to radiation caused by bomb tests in Nevada in the 1950s.

She has suffered several benign tumors and takes synthetic hormones to help the scarred remnants of her thyroid function properly. She isn't bitter, but sometimes she can't help wondering, "What if I had been a healthy person?"

Many Idahoans have come forward with similar stories of cancer, joining hundreds of others across the country known as the generation of the afflicted — the downwinders.

The consequences of 90 bomb tests that took place between 1951 and 1962 weren't made public until a National Cancer Institute study was released in 1997.

The study identified four Idaho counties — Gem, Blaine, Custer and Lemhi — among the five hardest hit counties nationally in terms of doses of radioactive iodine.

Since winds from the Nevada Test Site typically carried the radioactive nuclear fallout, specifically iodine-131, to the north and east, certain counties in Utah, Arizona and Nevada are eligible for compensation. But not Idaho.

Many were exposed to the radiation by drinking milk at a young age. Winds carried the fallout to alfalfa fields where it was ingested by cows, distributed in milk and consumed by people, especially children.

But despite the evidence presented in the 1997 study, Idahoans still are not eligible for the $50,000 compensation.

With the NCI study, it's apparent the harm was far more widespread than the law takes into account, said Beatrice Brailsford, program director of the Pocatello branch of the Snake River Alliance, a nuclear watchdog group.

Brailsford and many others are pushing for Idaho to be included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

"We're all in the red," she said in regard to radiation maps of Idaho. "Some areas are a little lighter red, but none of us are unaffected."