Defects, distrust left in wake of military testing
In the early 1950s, Gilbert Dean Hill worked for a contractor, painting bunker doorways, water barrels and other objects at Dugway Proving Ground, 80 miles west of Salt Lake City.
Hill would stay at Dugway from Monday through Friday and go home for the weekend. One day around 1952, when he was returning to the barracks after work, a supervisor asked, "Why were you guys out in the field today? Don't you know you weren't supposed to be out there?"
No, said Hill, "Nobody told us."
The supervisor said that some testing was going on. Then he added, "but it's OK, because it's nothing that could hurt you."
What the World War II veteran did not know in 1952 — what almost nobody in Utah knew until a few years ago — is that in addition to extensive open-air nerve gas, bacteriological warfare and simulant experiments, Dugway carried out at least 74 secret tests to scatter radioactive material in the atmosphere. Many of the tests were in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Total radiation released was 153,000 curies, or 10,000 times the level released by the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island.
"When we moved him in here, his right nerve was totally dead and his left nerve was partially, which meant that he could not lean back or lie down in his bed or he would suffocate," said his son, Nolan Hill of Kearns.
For the past 10 or 11 years of Gilbert Hill's life, he never slept in bed. "He would either sit in a chair and lean on a table, or he would kneel down by an ottoman chair in his room and lean on it."
When Gilbert Hill died in 1997, the obituary in the Deseret News began, "Returned to his loving Father's arms after years of physical suffering caused by exposure to the secret Dugway radiation test in 1952."
During a trial seeking compensation for the cancer deaths of southern Utah residents, former Atomic Energy Commission fallout monitor Frank Butrico testified he was stationed in St. George on May 19, 1953, for a nuclear test that has come to be called "Dirty Harry."
Fallout began hitting St. George at 8:30 a.m. Then, between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m., Butrico's instrument was off the dial, indicating exposure greater than 300 milliroentgens per hour.
Butrico telephoned a radiation official at the Nevada Test Site, who told him to wait. Butrico called again at 9:45 a.m., but the official had no concrete plan other than to wash cars and get people indoors.
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