Tri-Cities: Where the Bomb Was Born
Washington
In early nineteen forty-three the United States Army handed residents of the farming towns of Hanford and White Bluffs a few weeks notice and told them their land was gone. The War Powers Act made the seizure legal. Within months, a workforce that eventually reached forty-five thousand people was building the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactors on a five-hundred-and-eighty-six-square-mile reservation along the Columbia River.
The plutonium refined here fueled the Trinity test and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The three communities that grew up around the site, Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, became the Tri-Cities. The human cost was not evenly shared: Black workers were paid less than white workers and housed in segregated quarters, many in a crowded section of East Pasco, while Kennewick operated as a sundown town. The Hanford site today is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup, expected to run well into the twenty-first century.
