Continued Environmental Concerns
One of the two bombs parachuted to earth, imbedding its nose 18" in the ground directly next to Shackleford Road, thus presenting no difficulties for recovery crews. The other bomb hit the ground at high speed with no parachute deployment, disappearing in a farmer's field and leaving only an eight-foot-wide, six-foot-deep crater to indicate where it had entombed itself.

After the accident, the Army Corps of Engineers spent weeks excavating the free-falling bomb's point of impact to a depth of more than 40 feet. At the time, military workers told Gene Price of the Goldsboro News-Argus they were looking for a "lost seat."

The military was never able to recover all of the free-falling bomb's components. The deeper the excavation went, the more problematic soil conditions became. The "lost" bomb fell near Nahunta Swamp, and a high water table characterizes the land in the area. The owner of the field, C. T. Davis, told this project that military workers on the excavation said to him it finally became difficult even to keep the excavating equipment itself from disappearing into the muck.

Rather than continue a losing battle to recover all of the bomb, the military covered over the great hole it had dug, and purchased, for $1,000, an easement from Davis and his heirs. The agreement describes a circle 200 feet in radius where no current or future landowner may dig or drill deeper than five feet, nor ever again use the land "in any manner other than for the growing of crops, the growing of timber, or as a pasture."

(Davis says that two years after the accident, Congress voted him an additional appropriation in settlement for damages and loss of use of the land, but even after all these years Davis refuses to disclose the amount of money he was awarded.)

A woman living in a neat farm house very near the crash scene -- she declined to give her name -- told reporters for this project that she was living in the same house the night of the crash some 40 years ago. "Yes, I was here. It lit up the sky like daylight," she said.

This woman said that while most neighboring homes had been connected to a water main years ago, her home distinctively remains on well water. When asked whether she was aware of any on-going groundwater testing in the area as a result of the crash, she said, "Yes, they still come out and test the water from time to time," but she did not say who "they" were.

According to Dale Dusenbury of the North Carolina Division of Radiation Protection, "they" are the people of his agency. Dusenbury said in a telephone interview that groundwater testing near the Faro crash site is "generally done annually" by the state, but that nothing amiss has been discovered to this point. The tests, according to Dusenbury, have found only "levels of gross alpha, gross beta and total uranium indicative of natural soil."

When asked to speculate on the chances that any radiation would ever leak into the groundwater, Dusenbury said, "The Air Force has been evaluating this, along with other state agencies. If they clean up a place sufficiently to make it environmentally releasable, or if they can establish that what is there is harmless, they will release their ownership. At this time, the Air Force intends to keep its easement because there is still an open question as to whether a hazard exists."

Dusenbury added, "The accident report has never been released to the public or to us. So we intend to keep looking until we know everything is safe."

The last two paragraphs of the Hansen narrative indicate that it is a thermonuclear "secondary" component which remains beneath the earth unrecovered. The secondary forms the "hydrogen" part of a thermonuclear bomb. Secondaries contain not only plutonium and uranium, but a large volume of lithium salt which supplies the hydrogen fuel.

Dusenbury said he does not believe the state has tested the groundwater for lithium. "If it's something essentially inert, it's not a radiological hazard."

Back  Previous   1  2  3  4  5   Contents  Contents

Contact us at: bomb@ibiblio.org.
Last Updated: 3 December 2000