History and Culture

Hanford Site

00000179-65ef-d8e2-a9ff-f5ef8d430000The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was home to Native Americans and later to settlers. It turned into an top-secret military workhorse during World War II and the Cold War. Now, it’s one of the most pressing and complex environmental cleanup challenges humanity is facing in the world.This remote area in southeast Washington is where the federal government made plutonium for bombs during WWII and the Cold War. It’s now home to some of the most toxic contamination on earth, a witch’s brew of chemicals, radioactive waste and defunct structures. In central Hanford, leaking underground tanks full of radioactive sludge await a permanent solution. Meanwhile, a massive $12 billion waste treatment plant, designed to bind up that tank waste into more stable glass logs, has a troubled history.00000179-65ef-d8e2-a9ff-f5ef8d440000Anna King is public radio's correspondent in Richland, Washington, covering the seemingly endless complexities of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Daughters Of Hanford: She Was Heckled For Exposing Our Nuclear Past

NWNews | By Anna King

Published November 16, 2015 at 12:01 AM PST

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Michele Gerber dug out information that many Hanford managers would have preferred lay sleeping in deep files. Her research and tenacity surfaced documents from World War II and the Cold War never seen by the public.

Kai-Huei Yau

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Hanford historian Michele Gerber displays a wooden sign for the World War II Hanford Construction Camp. The signs were found and retrieved from the desert on the Hanford Site in 1991.

Michele Gerber

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Michele Gerber touring with Nikolai Egorov, Chief Minister of Russia's Minatom, in 1994. This tour was the first ever that allowed Russians inside Hanford's Plutonium Finishing Plant.

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Michele Gerber in her office doing historical research on the Hanford Site in 1995.

Michele Gerber

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Michele Gerber presents to an audience on a tour bus at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in 2006.

Michele Gerber

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Michele Gerber with Senator Patty Murray at the control panel of B Reactor in 2007.

Michele Gerber

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Michele Gerber, center, is seen with World War II Hanford veterans and officials of the U.S. Department of Interior and Department of Energy, at the dedication of B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark in 2008.

Michele Gerber

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Michele Gerber presents historical information to a tour group inside the Control Room of B Reactor in 2007.

Michele Gerber

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This letter written by Michele Gerber's father in 1972 hangs in Gerber's office.

Michele Gerber

In 1987, late in the Cold War, in a government reading room in Richland, Washington, a historian was studying newly released documents about the Hanford nuclear reservation. Then, a strange man approached her.

The tall, thin stranger asked Michele Gerber to coffee.

“And I asked him, you know, who he was and why he wanted to talk to me,” she said.

She thought he was working for the feds.

“And you know he just used some of his training, I suppose, but it was kind of oblique,” Gerber recalled. “And it was ‘Well, you know, we’re just curious.’”

She was onto the biggest story of her life. And he was interrupting.

“And I said, ‘Absolutely not, I’m an American citizen, I have a right to be here and I’m busy,’” Gerber said.

‘That was going to lead you down a trail'

Gerber was unlocking the story slowly, with government documents. Cryptic stuff.

''There would be a lot of mysteries. Key words would jump out but you didn't know what they were. Code words or just strange terminology.''

“There would be a lot of mysteries,” she said. “Key words would jump out but you didn’t know what they were. Code words or just strange terminology. And so I would go to the footnotes. And pretty soon I started filing Freedom of Information Act requests to request what was in the footnotes, because that was going to lead you down a trail.”

Gerber was a Ph.D. historian and mother of three young children when she moved to Richland. She started reading articles in the newspaper about Hanford waste releases into the air -- and about people who got sick. Gerber wondered if there was a bigger story.

She said U.S. Department of Energy officials began asking her who she was. And what she was doing.

“At the time, in the mid to late 1980s, the DOE still was a very secret organization. And they had their traditions,” Gerber said. “And they probably felt, ‘Who is this outsider? And why do we need to share information?’”

Detailing the ‘Green Run’

They needed to share it because she had requested it under federal law. And one day, it showed up at her doorstep: Eighteen volumes of typed government documents from WWII. She pulled an all-nighter.

“I could not stop reading,” Gerber said. “I remember finally just lying on the carpet and watching the sun come up and still reading.”

Those volumes, and other documents, proved the government released radioactive waste from Hanford from 1944 through the Cold War. To the air, water and land.

She detailed the infamous Green Run. That’s when the government released radioactive iodine and chemicals into the breeze. It was tracked as far away as Spokane. There were contaminated soldiers, salmon and backyard vegetables. Experimental sheep. Pasco farmers had been sprinkling their fields with sullied Columbia River water.

And most people didn’t know a thing.

Keeping her outsider perspectives

But when she shared this news at public talks in the Tri-Cities, sometimes she’d get heckled and booed -- some people would cry. They were hearing this information for the first time. Their Shangri-La was spoiled.

''The documents don't lie. And so I began bringing documents with me. Actual documents.''

“Their immediate reaction was, ‘You don’t know, you weren’t here,’” Gerber said. “But the documents don’t lie. And so I began bringing documents with me. Actual documents.”

Gerber’s book “On the Home Front” was first published in 1992 under her name at the time: Michele Stenehjem. It has since sold thousands of copies. Now she’s lived in Richland for nearly 30 years, she’s no longer an outsider.

But Gerber works hard to keep her outsider eyes.

“Hanford is different,” she noted. “It’s not your typical American place. And it’s really important to keep that perspective. Don’t let it become so ordinary that we don’t continue to think critically about it.”

She said with Hanford, you just can’t get too comfortable.

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The stories and photos in our Daughters of Hanford series are in an exhibit open now at the REACH in Richland. Find more at daughtersofhanford.org.

See more of Michele Gerber: