Downwinders turn out for annual protest of Trinity Site – Source New Mexico

TRINITY SITE – The white haze of wildfire smoke mixed with high thready clouds veiled the Sacramento Mountains in white, softening both shadows and the sun. Follow Highway 380 crossing Valley of Fires lava flows, the stark black basalt crowned in yucca, lies the mark of the atomic age. Olive creosote stretches for miles, but it is far from desolate. A golden eagle captures a bull snake, vultures lurch on thermals above.

People lived and still live here. In July, 78 years ago, the first atomic bomb shattered the peace; the fallout has rippled through the present.

‘People have been dying ever since’: Anger mixes with hope for NM Downwinders

The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium represents families in Southern New Mexico communities who lived in places touched by the bomb. These people and their descendants were marked by diseases without family histories – including leukemia and other cancers. They’re called Downwinders.

Since 2005, they’ve been fighting for recognition and payment for their medical bills and the 800 deaths that the group attributed to cancers and other diseases associated with radiation exposure since the detonation.

Downwinders gathered Saturday at the Tularosa High School and at the Stallion Gate, the entrance of the Trinity Site. They held signs and offered pamphlets on their fight to be recognized and compensated by the federal government who bombed them.

Each year, the military opens The Trinity Site to the public. Once in April and again in October, the military allows for self-guided tours to the basalt obelisk commemorating Ground Zero and the outside of the McDonald Ranch House, where the plutonium core was assembled in 1945.

Visitation was “just under 4,000” people, said John Drew Hamilton, a spokesperson for the White Sands Missile Range. That’s slightly higher than the 3,000-person average, but smaller than the expected crowds with the recent release of “Oppenheimer.”

Early in the morning, with the gates to the site shut, thousands of attendees sat in line, traffic snaking for several miles. After the gates opened, the highway cleared.

‘We’ve never been this close before,’ Downwinders cheer RECA amendment in defense bill

As the generation who witnessed the bomb ages, and they and their families die, “the hope for justice waivers,” said Tina Cordova, one of the founders of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

An effort to expand a federal fund for victims of radiation exposure to include New Mexicans for the first time is their current hope.

An amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act would extend the life of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act – nicknamed RECA – beyond its 2024 expiration. The amendment to the $800 billion bill which funds military and defense programs passed the Senate but would need a bill after a conference with the House, to fully pass.

‘If you do something wrong, you should make it right’

Marissa Lillis, in a tie-dye cap, proffered her sign reading “Trinity killed my Grandpa.”

Lillis, 10, traveled from Pennsylvania with her mother Cynthia Lillis and grandmother Christine Pino to speak about Greg Pino, the grandfather she never met.

“I feel like they should just support us because they hurt our family members,” said Marissa Lillis. “That hurts us for generations past – like for my grandpa, my mom and now me because I never really got to meet him.”

Pino lived on a ranch outside of Carrizozo, about 40 miles east of the Trinity site, his younger brother Paul said. He was asleep at the ranch when the bomb detonated in the early hours of July 16, 1945.

Cynthia Lillis said her father’s death in 2007 at 68 was sudden, coming just months after a diagnosis of stomach cancer.

“We want to do anything we can to help,” she said. “My father may have passed, but there are so many people living with cancer.”

She said the demonstration is just one way to introduce people to Downwinders.

“We don’t want to be too in their face, but hopefully when people see the signs, they look it up, and it builds awareness that they can call their representatives, they can help people with their medical bills,” Cynthia Lillis said.

Marissa Lillis said she’s never met any lawmakers, but said she would tell them: “If you do something wrong, you should make it right. We could be asking honestly for so much more from all they’ve done.”

But the harm stretches way beyond Tularosa Basin. A study released this year, shows the cloud of fallout from Trinity spread across much of the United States, and into Canada and Mexico.

Others touched by nuclear contamination joined with the Downwinders.

Sabrina Mathues Manygoats, 24, took radiation readings from the site as part of a project documenting the nuclear industry in New Mexico and on the Navajo Nation. Manygoats (Diné & Chichimeca) said her grandmother and family had to deal with health and environmental legacies of copper and uranium mining.

“We have our own history and our own poisoning of the land with Church Rock and abandoned uranium mines,” Manygoats said, describing the 1979 disaster where a radioactive tailings pool breached the dam, contaminating water and land.

For one visitor, the site brought complex emotions.

Harvard Holmstadt, 18, visited the site. Originally from Wisconsin, he stopped after visiting the Trinity Site to take photos of some of the Downwinder signs.

“It was moving because to think that something so destructive started just five miles that way,” he said.

Holmstadt said he is pursuing a nuclear science degree at the University of New Mexico, “because despite its tainted past, I do think it’s the best way forward we have for powering a clean environment.”

He said the whole experience was moving

“It’s tragic, they’ve been nothing but nice, very kind, and they want to help people understand the darker side of nuclear power and nuclear technology in general,” he said.