Have you Heard of Hattiesburg?

By: Joanie Sanders, Maggie Durnien, Melanie O’Neill

The year was 1964 and the talk around Hattiesburg was nuclear testing. Hattiesburg, located in Lamar County had a population of around 35,000 that year. Fast forward to 2015. The population has increased by roughly 11,000, 51 years have passed, and 1964 seems like a lifetime ago. Centrally located in South Mississippi, today Hattiesburg is full of arts, culture, a diverse economy, and strong neighborhoods. The talk around town is certainly not nuclear testing.

Joe Meador, 72, a five-generation Hattiesburg resident was 22 at the time and working for the City of Hattiesburg Engineering Department. He recalled the blast was strong enough to move a firetruck sideways and subtle enough to alter the chemical composition of road-leveling testing equipment.

To this day, there have only been two atomic bomb detonations east of the Mississippi River, and Hattiesburg was chosen because it was an ideal location geologically.

“I wasn’t connected enough to know particularly but I don’t recall the city having any involvement,” he said. “I think they had a few phone calls [about it] or something like that”

An underground salt dome called Tatum, 21 miles southwest of the city, was the home of the two detonations: Project Salmon and Project Sterling.

At 10 a.m. on October 22, 1964 the first bomb was detonated at 826 meters below ground level with a yield of 5.3 kilotons. The blast created a salt cavity that stretched 17 meters in radius. Sterling was detonated two years later on December 3, 1966, inside the cavity that the Salmon explosion left behind.

“I don’t remember which (blast) was the largest, but I think the first one was the one where they had so much…uh…where I’m thinkin’ we probably remember things happenin’ because it was something we had never experienced…I guess is a way to put it,” Meador said. “The second one I think they publicized it more or something like that but when it happened, everybody said,‘oh that must be it…and that was it.”

Meador said that he does not remember much detail about the blasts. “It has been so far back I just remember we had two of them,” he said.  “There were a couple of weird things that happened,” he continued, “I can tell ya two little tales that were just funny.”

Meador began working at the City of Hattiesburg Engineering Department in 1961 after graduating high school. In 1964, his job included drafting and surveying and he attended class  at The University of Southern Mississippi at night.

During the first nuclear blast, Meador was near Forest General Hospital located at 6051 US 49 in Hattiesburg. At the time, the city was building a bridge on South 28th Avenue, crossing Gordon’s Creek and located on the south edge of the hospital’s property.

“I had what they called a transit set up,” he said. A transit is a surveying instrument that has two split levels attached at 90 degree angles. This allows the survey crew to set up and keep the transit on a flat plane, “so you can make sure it’s perfectly level [on both sides],” he said. The level had two clear tubes, on on each side, with a bubble in the middle.

Meador said that he hadn’t been working with the transit long and that he was instructed to check it every few minutes to ensure the surface remained level. “I was kind of scared of doing something wrong,” he said. As he looked up to check the instrument, he noticed there was no bubble. Instead of being clear, “it was white like milk” on both tubes.

“I said, oh Lord I have done something terrible,” Meador said. After calling the boss over, he too could not figure out what was wrong. Moments later “someone said, ‘did y’all feel that?,’” he said, adding that, “well it had to be that blast because we kinda knew the schedule.” Meador and his crew came to the conclusion that, although not all of them felt the blast, the land had vibrated enough that the bubble had homogenized into milky liquid.

“It was that type of thing where it wasn’t a shakin’ or anything but just a very mild vibration,” he said. When Meador got back to his office, located on the third floor of City Hall, he noticed something else strange. On the back of the building was a fire station, with the firefighter’s sleeping quarters above it. The men were maneuvering a truck that sat in the middle of the three truck bays inside the station, to get it lined up and able to exit the bay door.

“The firetruck had moved during the blast, it had vibrated and turned,” Meador said. “It didn’t do any damage but they were sitting there and suddenly realized the truck wasn’t headed out the front door,” he added chuckling. “It had literally sat there and turned sideways.”

While City Hall remained undamaged, and Meador did not encounter any damage personally, precautionary measures were taken for those who lived closer to the blast. Over 400 residents were asked to evacuate within a five mile radius of the explosion site, and each family was paid $10 per adult and $5 per child for their “inconvenience.” Today, this would amount to $76.76 per adult and $38.38 per child according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meador recalled that several residents had claimed “all kinds of building damage, and [the government] investigated it and some of it was legitimate and some of it was made up,” he said.

Meador described a tale he had heard about a resident who was trying to sue the government for several years, claiming that he lived on land that was affected from the blast. Turns out (the government) found out…“he lived in California when the shock went off and has bought the land since then,” he laughed. “…he was trying to get money from them.”

“The crazy thing was that there were a number of people who had claims for cracked buildings or stuff like that,” Meador continued. “There were a few legitimate damages, which I am sure there are records of.”

According to Mississippi History Now: An online publication of the Mississippi Historical Society, Horace Burge of Hattiesburg encountered damage to his home. Burge lived two miles from the testing site and returned to his home to find the chimney and fireplace badly damaged, and bricks scattered around his living room. His kitchen floor was covered in broken dishes and jars, and the shelves in his refrigerator fell, breaking several glass containers. The pipes under his kitchen sink had burst, causing the home to flood, and his electric stove was covered in ash and concrete.

While some people did experience damage to their homes or property, some can only recall the fear that resulted from the detonations. Barbara Wheat, 71, a long-time native of Hattiesburg, was a 21-year-old community college student in 1964 who lived less than 10 miles from the testing area.

“I don’t remember feeling anything or knowing that it happened,” Wheat said. “…Some people said their homes were damaged, [and] a certain distance around (the site) was evacuated for the test and they were very fearful,” Wheat recalls.

Wheat remembers people in town saying their wells went dry after the testing and the drinking water wasn’t safe. Creeks were overflowing with silt from underneath the ground, causing people to worry about radioactive material.

Many residents complained that the cancer rates were higher than the national average, but government officials continue to report that there is no health risk due to living near the Tatum Salt Dome.

In order to calm the residents’ fear about the drinking water containing radioactive material, the government built a water pipeline in 2000 in order to transport water further away, according to Stephen Creswell, PHD Professor of History at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

According to Wheat’s memory, the people of Hattiesburg took precautions because they were fearful in the moment, but also for the future. People constructed nuclear bunkers and shelters and thought about the effects the testing would leave their community in the years to come.

“When you think about water and sewage and your animals with toxic waste, nuclear debris, and pollution you think about the future not just the present,” Wheat said.

With fear growing within the townspeople the government worked to suppress it by sending in The Division of Radiological Health of the Mississippi State Department of Health in coordination with the STS projects of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Department of Energy since 1974. This division was used because of the potential for the accidental release of waste injected into deep formations. They also tested the groundwater on and off site. The site cleanup was from May 1971 to June 1972 by AEC contractors from Las Vegas. Although the site was hampered by locally inclement conditions the site was approved clean consistent with the standards imposed by the AEC as final clean up criteria according to the Mississippi State Department of Health Division of Radiological Health: Salmon Test Site Radiological Monitoring, 1995 Annual Report.

Wheat’s most vivid recollections are colored by her mother’s reactions. “My mother was a very emotional person,” Wheat said. “She was very upset and fearful and I think that’s understandable; they were worried for their children and their children’s children.”

Today the Department continues to collect samples from public creeks, ponds and public water servers to keep an eye on the radioactive particles that could be in the water. During the most recent testing done in 2012, no tritium level above the EPA drinking water standard (20,000 pCi/L) was detected in a drinkable water source. The overall tritium concentration continues to decrease consistently with radioactive decay and dilution in the absence of new sources of significant tritium active.

“As older people die off and younger people come [to Hattiesburg], they don’t know about it,” Wheat said. “Even my sister who is older than I am doesn’t even know about it,” she added. “I don’t think people fully understood what was happening.”

This entry was posted in Hattiesburg. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.