to hot to handle

Now For the Rest of the Story

    geiger counter my grandpa used

   

      Back in 1-10-2012 I told this story in two part form , With the first part being me witnessing the plane crash and eventually seeing the plane, and later on in my life drawing a picture of what i saw as it may be the only graphic representation of what happened as surely the government and in particular the Forest Service and its band of fools would hardly want the public to know they were spraying radioactivity hot enough to kill small animals on 160 acres of forest. And that would eventually watershed itself to a major river and be upstream of many public water systems that draw off the same water aquifer, not counting the private well systems also in the Tuscarawas river valley. Let alone harvesting the timber and then selling it to a local lumber company specializing in veneer paneling of which a lot of that old growth timber was sold as , And then shipped across the United States to inhabit a lot of living rooms and bedrooms in our nation. All radioactive, as that was where the majority of the radiation would have landed in the tree tops and on the leaves to be permanently sequestered in the logs making the paneling. Its amazing how many scientists it takes to screw up a good thing some times , and with the government , it just takes more.
      Now the sad part is that we have to still live with the radiation, In fact it is still public hunting area as well as another area that is isolated and available to the public to still hunt. In their infinite wisdom and desire to avoid paying property taxes the federal government transferred ownership to the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District who in turn have made available to the public this area for public hunting and is prized among hunters as an area where they can harvest deer without buying a special permit. Deer and squirrel eat acorns and inturn those acorns come off oak trees that are grown on ground that was sprayed with radiation. How much radiation does one need to grow a goiter the size of bowling ball? I dont know but that would be a good question to ask as to why we allow public hunting on an area we tried to kill the small animals off with radiation years before.
      Has the radiation went anywhere ? I doubt it and it has a half life of I assume 4500 years meaning it would take 9000 years to fully disintegrate or lose its radioactivity in nature. Heck its only been about 53 years, so I  think we have a ways to go. At first i believe it was embedded in the trees as the canopy was quite dense then and then it would have ended up in the nuts by transference of tree sap nourishing the nuts, and then to the ground in terms of root transference and nut and leaf droppings as well as natural aging processes of trees. Eventually to animals that would eat the nuts and die naturally or be killed by hunters or absorbed into mushrooms lter harvested by humans. I still feel it is probably in the area,  but no assurance of how much is there or if it is still hot.
    I still have an old geiger counter my grandpa had and i assume it was his, as it was still in his possession when he died and now i own it. I always thought it would be interesting to take some readings and just see how hot that area is . I had worked with radiation at different times in my life and know enough to make me dangerous, so this could be fun and enlightening, and maybe another part to the story. Also i was told by the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District that they were an open book,  but i assume  probably missing a few pages i am sure, And that i was welcome as well as any other citizen was to come and view their records concerning the property.
    I doubt the information lies there an instead lies within classified documents buried in the bottom of a warehouse in Washington D.C. somewhere. One may never know the exact amount or what was used in terms of radioactivity, or if it migrated of site into any water supplies. Anyhow here is the rest of the story i told as a follow up on 1-12 2012 and posted on my blog.

my old dog bud , he just loved to ride anything but a boat. 

     Today being jan. 10th. 2012, and here is the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would have said. The tractor and the dog pic is about the same place as I was when the plane went down. the dog is Bud named for one of Cosbys kids in his series on tv. Anyhow Bud was a good dog and  stayed with me many years and I finally had to put him down, as i was enabling him to live by carrying him around. It was tough and I like to think i am over it but don't think I will ever be. Anyhow one day I was having a particularly miserable day and I had taken the tractor to the back field to fix the fence the cows tore down.  Anyhow I had parked the tractor up the hill and set the brakes and  i started down over the hill in a drizzling rain  pulling the fence behind me, I noticed bud wasn't with me. I looked all around the field, and he was no where in sight.. I looked up the hill and there he was sitting on the tractor looking much like he was on here. I always wished i had a picture of him on that tractor that day, and so I staged this pic of him on a little better day.
       The pilot in yesterdays story lived and things calmed down and eventually they closed down all operations in the woods up there and didnt do anything for years, Then we heard that another government agency had taken over, and they posted signs on the sprayed property saying public hunting. Hunters would park at our farm and head up the access road and hunt deer and whatever else they could shoot that moves or doesn't move. they were an annoyance at best. That woods was also always a mushroom hunters delight in the springtime also. At the same time,  the government agencies knew all along radioactivity of sufficient strength to kill small plants and animals was sprayed there, but no cautionary signs have ever been posted on the property or studies that anyone locally knows about to determine the site is safe to hunt on, or whether game should be permitted to be taken as well as lumber to be sold from for the purpose of harvesting for sale. .
       Instead to hide the paper trail and all emotional guilt the Department of Forestry transferred this site to the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District to be used as a public hunting area. To top it off  things get worse as they take major cuts in the woods,lumbering out virgin timber and selling it to Marsh Lumber in New Philadelphia , Ohio, to make paneling out of. Now if you are spraying radioactive material in a suspended liquid over treetops and it would first  normally fall onto the leaves first.  The leaves would suck up the radiation preventing it from actually reaching the forest floor. This uptake would permanently lodge the majority of the radioactive material in the fibrous wood pulp.as an interesting side point to this story, that we as kids about a year after the crash the supervisors at the site would pay us a penny a piece to find dead animals and bring to them. We found some, but no major corpses were to be seen. Anyhow I feel the wood stored it all till they logged the woods repeatedly totally restructuring and obliterating the forest floor in the area of the plane crash.
     So now they are on a 20 year cycle of harvesting trees and raping what ever natural resources they can from the area and have recently signed contracts allowing shale production of well sites along with fracking in the area. And what ever the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy doesn't get, then the hunters who scour the woods in search of the glow in the dark bambies , that frequent the area, manage to get . Mushroom hunting is still popular. and they now have the ability to drive and park in the woods as opposed to using our farm. I'm still concerned about water quality , and not quite sure how deer eating nuts from trees are fairing. or any of the small plants and animals are doing in comparison. Kind of late to do anything but warn people and i guess that is what this is all about. it is a tragedy, that they used radioactivity to test in our backyard, But this was early 1960's and they were still learning what the effects of radiation, were both good and bad.Now if you can imagine that marlite manufactured paneling and this paneling was sold around the United States and around the world when it could, a lot of that may still reside in your own house. So to find out,  tonite when you go to sleep and you turn off the lights , if your paneling glows green you too might be one of the lucky ones to understand how that shit happens.