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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.

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