The Downwinders: Atomic Testing and Southern Utah

On a clear morning in the early nineteen fifties, residents of St. George, Utah, sometimes woke to a distant rumble from the west and a sky that turned briefly strange colors. The Nevada Test Site was eighty miles away, across the state line. The Atomic Energy Commission had told people in the region that the tests were safe. The fallout drifted northeast.

Between nineteen fifty-one and nineteen sixty-three, the United States conducted nearly one hundred atmospheric nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site. Prevailing winds carried radioactive material into Washington, Iron, and Kane counties in southern Utah, the communities that sit in the corridor directly downwind of what is now Zion and Bryce Canyon country. St. George received enough fallout that some epidemiologists later called it the most bombed city in America.

The government's reassurances were explicit. Residents were told to stay indoors during tests, then told the risk had passed. In the spring of nineteen fifty-three, several thousand sheep died in the Cedar City ranching district days after an above-ground test. The Atomic Energy Commission conducted its own investigation and determined the deaths were caused by malnutrition. Affected ranchers took the government to court and initially won a nineteen eighty-four federal ruling; that ruling was later reversed on procedural grounds. The exact number of sheep that died is documented by ranchers and by KUER RadioWest's oral history archive; the federal government's accounting differed.

Cancer rates in the downwinder counties rose measurably in subsequent decades. Leukemia, thyroid cancer, and other radiation-linked conditions appeared at elevated rates in communities where families had watched the flash through their windows and called it patriotism.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed in nineteen ninety and amended in two thousand, eventually recognized downwinder claims from three Utah counties. The survivors who organized to win that recognition, many of them elderly by the time it came, described the process as a second fight longer than the first. Some died before the legislation passed.