Everything changed in 1951

The Black night suddenly was bright as the day.  Then, just as suddenly, was black again.  The eye and brain still seeing the desert Chaparral and cactus shadows etched in memory.  Silence returned after the soft murmuring gasps of surprise.  Then, about twenty minutes later a faint sound could be heard rumbling up the valley like a roaring freight train.  It became louder and louder and shook the hills as it rumbled by, and silence again returned.  A couple of hours later, when the sun was up and the valley began its day, a towering mushroom cloud appeared over the western mesa.  The sky was crisscrossed with the contrails of large airplanes flying back and forth in the early morning sun.  By morning recess time at school, the children went out to play into a sky filled with iron tasting dust, sometimes pink, sometimes gray and sometimes beige.  The colored dust settled upon the grass, the trees, the ground, the houses, upon everything, even the children playing.  

In 1951, the world changed, and the people of Virgin Valley hardly knew it.  In the Nevada desert, about 90 sky miles from Virgin Valley, the United States of America began testing atomic bombs.  Between 1951 and 1992, the United States conducted a total of 1,021 nuclear bomb tests.  Out of these, 100 were atmospheric, and 921 were underground.

A number of men from the Valley had found work at the test site.  However, secrecy was demanded of these men, and they could not tell anyone what was going on.  The government, if they knew, told no one about the dangers of cancer or radiation sickness. In the mountains west and north of the valley sheep herds were dying, cattle were sick.  No one knew why. 

Not many years after the atmospheric testing ended, dozens of valley residents found themselves sick with cancer and other radiation related diseases.  The path of these sicknesses could be followed through this area and Lincoln County communities in Nevada and the communities of Southern Utah.  People demanded answers but none came for years.  Then, in an effort to quiet the populace, a government fund was created to the benefit of the families who had suffered the death of a loved one due to various forms of cancer.  It was the “Down Winders Benefit”, which upon proof from the doctor that a person died of one of the accepted forms of cancer, the government would pay the family $50,000.00.   However, there was no testing being done nor studies being made of the atomic testing and radiation dust upon the changes to the cell structure of DNA changes of the Down Winders.  Still today, many residents suffer from sicknesses the medical profession cannot define or cure.  Perhaps more effects of the atomic tests remain today, unknown and unrecognized, by the medical profession.