Utahn a part of 'low-use' N-test legacy

ST. GEORGE — She lost a father to a brain tumor, a sister to skin cancer, a daughter to leukemia, a father-in-law to lung cancer, and she herself has autoimmune disease.

Unless you've had your head stuck in the red dirt for the past 50 years, you know that there's as much chance all these illnesses are a result of nuclear fallout as there is that Queen Elizabeth speaks English because she was born in Britain.

But Claudia Peterson admits that she still is capable of waking up in the morning, and before she can brush the sleep from her eyes, catching herself disbelieving that it ever happened . . .

. . . and especially that it happened here.

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For a week now, the Deseret News has been publishing stories about the polluting of Utah, chronicling abuses of the past and, in some cases, the present. As a well-known activist, Claudia Peterson has been a willing source for reporters about the nuclear fallout that persisted in southern Utah from 1951— 50 years ago — through 1992. Reporter Lucy Dillon chronicled much of her grim story this past Thursday.

In many ways, Claudia is the quintessential poster person for what happened in southern Utah for far too long and far too high a price. She was born south of Cedar City in 1955, four years after the U.S. government began outdoor nuclear testing at its Nevada Test Site some 100 miles southeast of Utah's border. She was 8 years old when the outdoor testing ended in 1963, although underground testing would last another 28 years.

She and her family lived on a farm, where they raised their own cows for beef and milk, their own fruit in the orchard and their own vegetables in the garden.

A majority of everything they consumed was coated with undetectable nuclear fallout as it wafted downwind from the test site on "hot" days, which, translated, meant those days when the wind was blowing east. On days when the wind was blowing west, toward Southern California and all its freeways and centers of population, the Nevada Test Site would shut down.

Claudia and the rest of her family were "downwinders" even if they didn't know it.

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The sober reality, of course, beyond all the cancer and the high incidence in southern Utah of awful diseases such as Down syndrome and multiple sclerosis and all sorts of immune system deficiencies, is that the government did it on purpose.

They knew the St. George-Cedar City area had people in it, but not that many.