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On April 27, 1953, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, Professor Herbert Clark and his students entered a metal shack that served as a laboratory for their radiochemistry class. All the Geiger counters were registering radiation many times the normal rate. The students carried the radiation measuring devices to areas on campus noting the high readings. Assuming the previous night's heavy rains had washed some atmospheric radiation onto the campus, Dr. Clark contacted John Harley, an associate at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Health and Safety office in New York City. Dr. Clark summarized the details of campus measurements from his class. Gamma radiation on the ground was ten to five hundred times normal; beta ray radiation was even higher and hot spots of even high readings were found in rainspouts and puddles.
Later that day, Dr. Clark learned there had been an atomic bomb test conducted by the AEC in the Nevada desert two days earlier. The mushroom cloud had reached 40,000 feet into the atmosphere then drifted 2,300 miles across the United States in a northeasterly direction. It passed over Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania before being caught up in a storm that dropped rain on upstate New York, southern Vermont and parts of Massachusetts.
Dr. Clark's students took their geiger counters on the road and began measuring the radioactivity on the ground, roof shingles and vegetation wherever they stopped in Albany, Saratoga Springs, and Schenectady, New York. Typical readings were twenty to one hundred times higher than normal. This has become known as "the Troy incident." - Source: http://www.akitarescue.com/Hiroshima.htm, accessed 3/14/05
Thunderstorm in Troy
ON MONDAY MORNING, April 27, 1953, the small group of students in Professor
Herbert Clark’s
radiochemistry class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute walked into the
metal shack that served as
their laboratory, located high on a hill overlooking the city of Troy
in upper New York State. The
students set about making preparations for the day’s experiments,
but then Professor Clark interrupted
to draw their attention to something unusual. All the Geiger counters
were registering radiation at
many times the natural rate.
Since instruments nearest the outer walls were giving the
highest readings, several students
immediately went outside with a portable Geiger counter. At once they
found that wherever they
walked, the count rate on the ground was far above normal, in some places
a thousand times as high.
In particular, beneath the spout of the gutters that carried the rainwater
down off the roof of the shack,
the needle gave a disconcertingly high reading. Evidently the previous
night’s heavy rains had
brought down large amounts of radioactivity.
Dr. Clark quickly guessed the source. Such high readings could only have
come from heavy
deposits of fallout, the drifting clouds of radioactive debris created
by the explosion of a nuclear
bomb in the atmosphere. To verify his guess, he phoned John Harley, a
friend and former colleague
who now worked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Health and
Safety Laboratory in New
York City. As one of Dr. Clark’s students recalled the story many
years later, Harley’s first reaction
was that Clark must be kidding, and, expressing amused disbelief, he hung
up. But a few minutes
later, New York called back. Dr. Clark summarized the details of the morning’s
measurements: how
the count rate from the gamma radiation on the ground was anywhere from
ten to five hundred times
normal, how the activity from beta rays had gone up even more, and how
"hot spots" beneath
rainspouts and in puddles on the pavement showed still higher readings,
much higher than he had ever
observed after other nuclear tests, when it had been hard to measure any
additional radioactivity at all.
Thoroughly alarmed, the director of the New York Laboratory, Dr. Merrill
Eisenbud, promised to
check personally into the situation, to send some of his top people to
make their own measurements
on the spot, and to take any steps that might be called for to protect
the public health.
For, as Dr. Clark had just learned, there had indeed been a recent atomic
bomb test, conducted by
the AEC in Nevada two days earlier. The bomb, code-named Simon and equivalent
in power to
43,000 tons of TNT, had been detonated in the atmosphere some 300 feet
above the desert. The upper
portion of the mushroom cloud had reached an altitude of about 30,000
or 40,000 feet and then drifted
2300 miles across the United States in a northeasterly direction, passing
high over Utah, Colorado,
Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it
encountered a severe
thunderstorm in progress over most of upstate New York, southern Vermont,
and parts of
Massachusetts.
The storm was an extraordinarily violent one, accompanied by extremely
high winds, hail, and
torrential rains that flooded streets and basements, undermined foundations,
and caused heavy damage
to trees and houses. It was one of the heaviest flash storms Dr. Clark
could remember. The sudden
cloudburst, he surmised, had probably brought much of the fallout down
in concentrated form. Dr.
Clark quickly put his students to work in an effort to determine just
how serious and widespread the
danger might be.
Students set out with portable radiation detectors and began measuring
the radioactivity on the
pavement, on pieces of cloth, on asphalt roof shingles, on burdock leaves
and other vegetation—any
place it would be likely to collect and adhere. Samples were also taken
of water from reservoirs and
household taps. Within a matter of hours the students were reporting back
from such nearby towns
and cities as Watervliet, Mechanicville, Saratoga Springs, Albany, and
Schenectady that everywhere
the radiation levels were about the same as on the campus. Typical readings
were twenty to a
hundred times normal, with hot spots up to ten times higher than that.
Now knowing the radiation levels as well as the source and age of the
fallout, Dr. Clark could
calculate that during the next ten weeks the total gamma radiation dose
to the population from the
radioactivity in the environment would be, on the average, roughly equivalent
to that received from a
typical diagnostic X-ray exposure. This was reassuring, since such a dose
was not very different from
what most people in the world receive each year from the naturally occurring
cosmic rays that
penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. And it was well below the maximum
permissible dose limits set by
government agencies.
However, there was also the high radioactivity in the rainwater, which
was certain to contaminate
the reservoirs and thus the tap water. The samples of rainwater collected
from a puddle on the
campus had shown a radioactivity level of 270,000 micromicrocuries per
liter, thousands of times
higher than the maximum levels then permitted by AEC standards, which
were set at 100
micromicrocuries per liter. Normal drinking water usually had an activity
of about 1 micromicrocurie
per liter.
There was, accordingly, much apprehension among the students until the
samples of actual
drinking water from the taps and reservoirs could be analyzed early the
next day. When this was
done, the first of the tap water samples, taken Monday night, showed an
activity of 2630
micromicrocuries per liter—not as great as was feared, yet still
well in excess of the limit. But by that
evening, the same tap gave a sample with a greatly decreased activity
of 1210 per liter, while samples
from nearby Tomhannock Reservoir ranged from 580 to 960. The radioactive
rain was evidently
becoming heavily diluted in the reservoir before reaching the taps in
the households of Troy.
Thus, all concerned were greatly relieved that the total radiation doses
received by the populace
would probably turn out to be relatively small. It would not be necessary
to filter the drinking water
or decontaminate the streets and rooftops by means of elaborate and costly
scrubbing procedures, a
monumental task in view of the tenacity with which the radioactivity had
been found to cling to rough
surfaces such as pavement, asphalt shingles, and burdock leaves, and especially
to porous materials
like paper and cloth. Dr. Clark and his students found that even treatment
with hot, concentrated
hydrochloric acid—an extreme method—was only partially effective
in removing the radioactivity
from the objects to which it clung. The class also conducted tests to
determine the strength of this
radioactivity. Surprisingly, they found that it was comparable to that
reported the previous year by
the AEC’s New York Laboratory for fallout in desert areas only 200
to 500 miles from the point of
detonation at the Nevada test site itself.
But the possible health effects of any internal doses that might result
from eating, drinking, or
breathing the radioactivity were considered negligible by the New York
State Health Department and
the AEC. And so it was decided that nothing further need be done. An editorial
in the local
newspaper expressed some concern, but soon the whole incident was forgotten.
Meanwhile, however, Dr. Clark, under contract to the AEC, continued to
monitor the levels of
radioactivity in the reservoirs, while AEC physicists, using an
extremely sensitive gamma-ray
detector mounted in an airplane, conducted extensive surveys of the entire
region. Detailed reports on
the findings were written by the staff of the New York Lab, but, since
they were classified "secret,"
the public never learned of their contents. All that appeared
was the following brief statement in the
14th Semi-Annual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission for the first
half of 1953:
After one detonation, unusually heavy fallout was noted as far from Nevada
as the Troy-
Albany area in New York. Following a heavy rain in that area on the second
day after the
detonation, the concentration of radioactivity was from 100 to 200 curies
per square mile. It is
estimated that this level of radioactivity would result in about 0.1 roentgen
exposure for the
first 13 weeks following the fallout. The exposure has no significance
in relation to health.
One fact the AEC did not announce, and the general public did not learn,
since it was later
published by Dr. Clark in the obscure, highly specialized Journal of the
American Water Works
Association, was that, as the AEC continued its nuclear testing in Nevada
during the spring of 1953,
further rainouts repeatedly raised the radioactivity in the reservoirs
serving Troy to levels comparable
to those measured by Dr. Clark and his students the morning after the
"Simon" rainout in April.
The paragraphs of "Thunderstorm in Troy" are excerpts from "Secret Fallout: Low-Level radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island," by Ernest Sternglass. Read it online at http://www.ratical.com/radiation/SecretFallout/
See also "A Good Day Has No Rain: The Truth about How Nuclear Test Fallout contaminated Upstate New York," by Bill Heller, January 2005 ISBN 0878755462.
Amazon.com Editorial Reviews:
In the early 1950's, Cold War tension reached its most fervent level.Despite the risk of exposing innocent Americans to cancer causing radiation, the United States Government decided that domestic atom bomb testing was "essential to the national defense." This decision, combined with an extremely violent storm, caused New York's Capital Region to receive excessive amounts of radioactive fallout in April of 1953. Fifty years later, this information is still widely unknown because of government cover-ups. Following 15 years of research, Bill Heller has produced "A Good Day Has No Rain" which contains what may be the only independent scientific data from these tests. This moving work introduces us to the storm's impact on the region, exposes government deception, and documents the 50-year process in which scientists and journalists gradually uncovered the truth. Teeming with startling facts, "A Good Day Has No Rain" opens eyes, and forces the reader to consider the dramatic lengths that the U.S.government went to in order to disguise the true impact nuclear testing has had on the American public.