BoomerZoo Almanac
BoomerZoo Almanac for November 25-December 1, 2007: Pacific Northwest, home of the boom-boom Boomers
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INTRODUCTION: Marcia and her granddaughter Layli tell you about Kids Review, a new series of podcasts, in which they review family-style movies for moviegoers of all ages.
RECENT EPISODES
ENCHANTED
Marcia, Layli, and Anya interview each other about the movie they just saw, "Enchanted." All three give this one their highest rating yet, and they explain why.
NANCY DREWMarcia and Layli talk over the highlights and disappointments of the "Nancy Drew" movie they've just seen, and compare the film to the books.
UNDERDOG
Layli and Anya chat with Grammy about the movie "Underdog" and share personal reviews. The girls also consider how their own dog might fit the role.
Adventures in Aging
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AT HOME IN CHINA
Stories from Westerners gone East
Boomers, Movie Lovers, Parents, Grandparents
When I was a kid, the Pacific Northwest region was still pretty much an outpost in the U.S. In 1960, Seattle, with just over a half million people, was ranked in the top 20 cities by population, and the 1962 World’s Fair drew attention to that city, but let’s face it, not a lot of Americans outside the Pacific Northwest knew much more about Oregon than that it was at the one end of the Oregon Trail. Some people Back East, according to my high school history teacher, Tim Corfield, wondered if we had “Indian problems.” Nope, nary an uprising in recent memory—though that would change…
Maybe it was that very obscurity (and perhaps the proximity to large Native American populations) that made our home region the obvious place to put dangerous things. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation—which is what I remember it being called—was situated way out in the vast open reaches between the Cascades and the Rockies, where the U.S. government plunked a lot of its early nuclear reactors, the first in 1943. Among the nine reactors five massive plutonium processing complexes that would eventually be housed there was our nation’s first atomic reactor for research and development, the Hanford Atomic Products Operation, a facility run by GE for the Atomic Energy Commission, which opened November 30, 1960.
Like New Mexico, the area referred to in the West as the Inland Empire has a pretty sparse population, so putting reactors, weapons grade plutonium and bombs there seemed like it wouldn’t be such a big issue—not like Three Mile Island, surely! At the time, of course, no one realized that siting a nuclear reactor along a major river like the Columbia could eventually lead to a rash of downstream problems, such as thyroid cancers. And, since the nuclear business worked so well, and the farmers out there who mainly wasted the land by growing wheat on it didn’t seem to mind, in 1962 the U.S. government decided to park old unused chemical weapons at the Umatilla Army Depot (now called the Umatilla Chemical Depot) a mere 75 miles from Hanford.
The dump, originally called the Umatilla Ordnance Depot, originally stored items from blankets to ammunition for the military. My grandfather actually worked in the munitions storage area as a young man, sacrificing a thumb and one eye for his country.
Nowadays Hanford is the site of the biggest environmental cleanup in the nation. And the Umatilla Chemical Depot, one of seven Army installations in the U.S. that currently store chemical weapons, including mustard gas and blister agents, is once again providing employment for those willing to help destroy the chemicals and other munitions stored there. I’d complain that all this clean-up is taking such a huge bite out of our tax bill, but storing nuclear waste, old chemical weapons and even standard ammunition costs more—at least the price of an eye and a thumb or perhaps an arm and a leg, and maybe as much as a few lives.
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