“The only way people won’t panic is if they receive open and truthful communication” from authorities, [Mary Dickson of Downwinders United] said. “Otherwise, it’s easy to expect the worst.”
Downwinders know quite a lot about governments lying to them. In the 1950’s, the federal government deliberately did open air nuclear tests in Nevada when the wind was blowing into Utah, then lied about it for decades.
Tests were deliberately scheduled when the wind was blowing into Utah and away from Vegas and southern California and those residents were contemptibly described in a top secret memo as a “low use segment of the population.”
TEPCO director weeps after disclosing truth about Fukushima disaster. They have lied for days about what was happening.
There is no way Obama can truthfully say no harmful radiation will reach the US because we don’t yet know how bad things will get at Fukushima.
Our governments are more concerned with PR spin and protecting corporate interests than in serving the public and being honest. The first thing they can do is be honest (assuming they still know how.)
As “downwinders” South Central and Eastern Oregon – where I grew up drinking surface water and fresh milk and eating gardened veggies and wild game – along with Southern and Eastern Idaho, Western Montana and Southern Alberta were subjected to some of the highest post Hiroshima/Nagasaki pre Chernobyl concentrations of radioactive fallout in the world. I was born with an extra thumb. Didn’t give much thought to it until I met another born within days with an extra thumb. Or till I went to work at a law firm and was assigned as one my very first Internet research projects (1995) the correlation of the hundred or so open air tests from fifty-three to sixty-one and the unusually high incidence of thyroid cancer in South Central and Eastern Oregon, Southern and Eastern Idaho, Western Montana and Southern Alberta – now a big CDC class action suit.
We’re no strangers to radioactive fallout ’round here. Or the government lying to us.
Where was the fallout from? The Nevada tests? Something else?
Nevada.
I know people here in southern Utah who as children would watch the mushroom clouds in the distance, then wait for windows to start breaking. Utah Gov Matheson, who grew up here, unquestionably died decades later from a rare cancer due to the radiation he was exposed to as a child.