Even though he considers himself well read in history, Eastern graduate Tim Harrington was not aware of the effects the Hanford site is having on people to this day. That is, until he took the introductory history course, History Today.
The class, taught by history professor Ann Le Bar, gives students the opportunity to search through interview archives featuring the Hanford downwinders — the communities that had radioactive materials carried on the wind to them from the Hanford Nuclear Site in Richland, Washington.
“The development of the nuclear weapon was a global event,” Harrington said. “And the fact that a little small town in Washington played such a vital role in that is lost on so many people. The people that do address it, they only talk about the importance of the little town, not the cost, not the collateral damage that was done by the government.”
Sometime between 2014 and 2015, Gonzaga University shared a collection of documents about the Hanford downwinders with the state archives on Eastern’s campus, Le Bar said.
Shortly after, a park ranger reached out by chance to Le Bar for help in creating articles for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park website.
“It’s the newest national park in the United States,” Le Bar said. “And it is centered on three sites that were the key bomb producing sites in World War II, that produced the two bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
The two other sites that are a part of the park are Los Alamos, NM and Oak Ridge, TN.
In 2022, Le Bar received a grant from the university which funded the first group of students to research and write articles about the Hanford downwinders as a summer research project.
“I’ll just give them topics and have them write using the oral history collections and the information that’s available,” said Le Bar. “There’s a ton of information available about the downwinders. You just have to pull it together.”
Students have written articles about different populations of people affected by Hanford, some of which are now featured on the National Park Service website.
Harrington was a part of the group that did the summer research and focused his project on people who grew up in the area.
“It was a real treat. I felt like a real historian,” Harrington said. “I learned and I’m talking about what I learned to teach others and I feel like there’s almost nothing more important for someone to do than that.”
Another student, John Allison, chose to research the Green Run Experiment, which was a failed experiment conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and the United States Air Force in which they released radioactive iodine-131 in hopes of finding a way to detect nuclear weapon production.
“I thought it wasn’t really talked about as much as it should’ve been,” Allison said.
Allison will graduate this year with a major in history and a minor in journalism.
“I hope to be able to write for the history column for the Spokesman Review and so just being able to get more practice doing that kind of work was really important,” Allison said. “I just feel a lot more motivated to also teach people about Hanford.”
Former student Saul Bautista was able to understand audio recordings that are in Spanish
and focused on the experience of migrant workers.
“The Hispanic communities are the most under researched group of people when it comes to downwinders,” Bautista said. “For multiple reasons, one of them is that a lot of Bracero workers, or Hispanic migrants, don’t want to talk about it. They’re scared.”
History students at Eastern will continue to work on projects about Hanford.
“A second batch of articles are now being written using that national park funding,” said Le Bar. “And then a third batch of articles, hopefully focusing on the Native Americans and the Native American experience is going to be written by a couple of native students.”
