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  “I stopped the ambulance from going out onto US 20,” he remembers. “I threw open the door. What I saw when I opened the door was just a bunch of matted, wet hair. I had a five hundred R meter, and I was reading four hundred R, and the nurse was in the ambulance. I got her out.”

  Spickard quickly hopped into the back of the ambulance, checked Byrnes for a pulse and a heartbeat, and then scrambled out. He shook his head. Byrnes was pronounced dead at 11:14 P.M. And Bills had a problem: The broken body in the back of the ambulance was giving off lethal amounts of radiation. It couldn't be driven to the morgue or a mortuary in Idaho Falls. Besides, the driver would absorb a fatal dose of radiation before he could get anywhere near the town. The site's medical clinic was miles away, and its decontamination equipment seemed laughable—a shower constructed under some stairs, built on the quaint notion that contaminated workers could come from the reactors and wash themselves off. Bills had to improvise.

  “We got a lead blanket around the driver and had him drive the ambulance back out in the sagebrush maybe a half-mile.”

  Bills watched the bullet-shaped taillights of the ambulance buck and weave as it bumped through granular snow, sagebrush, and wind-scoured sand. The taillights suddenly brightened, then went dark. Bills saw the driver bail out of the ambulance and scramble into the desert to put distance between himself and his radioactive cargo. The scene was nothing short of surreal. Bills then turned and ordered health physicists to begin decontaminating the handful of workers who had made forays into SL-1. Two decontamination trailers had by that time arrived at the checkpoint. Workers were told to strip off their radioactive clothing in one trailer and then move to the other, where radiation detectors were passed over their skin and preliminary scrubbing began. Most of the initial rescue crew was sent on to the site's chemical processing plant, where they underwent secondary decontamination. Although they showered in earnest several times, readings on their hands, between their wrists and fingers especially, remained high. As a last resort, the team was instructed to scrub their extremities with potassium permanganate and Turco Decontamination Hand Soap. The purple salt and the detergent lowered the radiation readings only slightly and left their skin with a mauve tinge.

  At about the same time, in the SL-1 yard, four more men—health physicists and soldiers—shrugged on respirators and masks for another foray into the reactor. Their main objective was to locate the third member of the crew. Vallario had already located the second crewman, presumably Legg, and judged him dead. But where was McKinley? Those gathered outside the reactor were perplexed. Why hadn't anyone who'd entered the shattered room seen him? Although the circular operating floor was dim, shrouded in a brown fog of radioactive gas, it was small, just thirty-eight feet in diameter, and the few lights that hadn't been smashed in the blast were still burning.

  Within two minutes of entering the reactor silo, the four men rushed back down the covered stairway entrance. Their colleagues noticed that the men looked ashen and shaken. They'd found the third man, they said, after one of their flashlights lit briefly on the ceiling above the reactor. He was pinned to the metal roof above the reactor by a control rod and a heavy, stainless steel shield plug that normally kept control rods deep within the reactor core. The rod and plug, apparently driven out of the reactor with tremendous force and speed, had slammed into the crewman's pelvis and carried him into a violent collision with a steel beam before pinning him about thirteen feet above the demolished reactor top. One witness recalls a rescuer saying, “I looked up and thought I was looking at a bundle of rags hanging down.”

  The discovery of the third crewman put a halt to the frantic entries into the reactor. Everyone was again ordered away from the SL-1 compound and back to the checkpoint. The three men were dead, and there was no point in risking anyone else's life. As the nuclear workers gathered in small groups at the junction of Highway 20 and Fillmore Avenue, shivering, firing up Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes, seeking warmth in the AEC Studebakers, the implications of the events they had just witnessed began to hit them. Something unprecedented had happened up there on the small hill to the north, something none of them had ever contemplated. The atoms they had corralled out there in the desert had broken free. On the loose, they had shredded building materials and wrecked the bodies of three men. And they continued to leak through cracks and under doorways and gnaw through anything not shielded by lead. It was unthinkable.

  At 11:52 P.M., the site's command center took another call. It was from a crewman's wife, asking why she couldn't reach her husband on the phone at SL-1. The woman's name has been blacked out in the log but not the message given her: “She was told no info was available at this time.”

  About an hour later, Stella Davis was awakened by a call from Captain James Westermeier, the commander of the military cadre at SL-1. He was top brass; Stella's husband, a sergeant, reported to him. Groggy, Stella thought the captain was calling for her husband. It took a second for it to register that he was talking to her.

  “The captain ordered me to be over at Arlene's house. I think it was about one o'clock in the morning. He said, ‘I want you there, and I want you there right away.' I didn't know why. It didn't dawn on me what was happening. My husband didn't know. And so I went. When I got there, a sergeant and the captain came and escorted me to the door. And that's when the captain said, ‘You have to tell her.' And I said, ‘Tell her what?' He said, ‘Her husband has been killed.' You can imagine. It's one o'clock in the morning. It's your best friend. And having to do that is a big job.

  “The captain knocked on the door,” Davis recalls. “When Arlene opened it, she saw me standing there. I didn't even have to say anything. She just knew something had happened. And she just fell into my arms. They didn't really tell her what was going on, because it was top secret. All I did was keep her comfortable.”

  After the captain and sergeant had left, sometime close to 2 A.M., Davis told Arlene, “‘Pack your clothes and get Jackie.' She stayed at my house until the plane took her back to Rome, New York. As a matter of fact, I had a birthday party a few days later, while we were waiting. It made her feel good that little kids came to play with her son, that he was able to have a third birthday party.”

  That early morning, similar scenes played out at the homes of Dick Legg and Richard McKinley. The trainee and his wife hadn't even finished unpacking from the move to Idaho Falls a month earlier; when Carolyn McKinley opened her door, the group of officials standing on her porch could see the boxes still stacked in neat piles over her shoulder. The military officers, cadre wives, and priests who went to the homes of the victims didn't discuss specifics. The women were simply told that there'd been an accident and that the men were still in the SL-1 building. They were kept in the dark about the gruesome scene inside the reactor silo. In the coming weeks, army and navy officers would jump through linguistic hoops to make sure the women didn't learn which man had been impaled on the ceiling.

  * * *

  Out in the Lost River Desert, meanwhile, officials of the Testing Station were confronted with a situation not covered in any government manual. They now had to deal with three highly radioactive bodies: one hung suspended above a potentially unstable reactor, one stretched out next to a concrete reactor shield, and one contaminating the site's new ambulance. What should be done? No one was quite sure.

  Dr. George Voelz, the director of medical services at the site, recalls the extreme danger and the difficult problem the bodies posed: “All of these individuals had serious physical damage and severed limbs or worse. Each . . . had been struck by pieces coming off very hot reactor fuel rods.” In other words, the bodies were practically glowing.

  Voelz said the radiation levels in the reactor were simply too high to think about bringing the other two men out that night. Instead, the gathered officials decided to see what they could do about the body of Byrnes.

  “Because his radiation level was so high, we had no place to put him,” Voelz recalls. �
��We left him in the ambulance until we could figure out what we were going to do next. The ambulance was sitting out in the desert, amongst the sagebrush. We decided the first thing we would do is see how much radioactive material we could remove by taking off the clothing. We wanted to get this done before the morning traffic came on the site. It was about four o'clock in the morning when we decided to try to take the clothing off under the lights of a couple automobiles. Because the radiation levels were five hundred [roentgens] per hour, we decided to work outside at twenty below zero in anti-C [anticontamination] coveralls. Another fellow and I . . . were the first crew to try to get the [victim's] coveralls off. The legs on the coveralls had been blown up to his thighs and were all wrapped up into one big ball around his thighs; with the moisture and the cold temperatures, they were just one solid chunk of ice, having sat out there most of the night.

  “The health physicists had given us about a minute's working time,” Voelz says. “But we had anticipated this and had some pretty heavy-duty tools that we could use on these coveralls. We thought we could do it with two crews. Actually, we were able to get the job done with one—this other fellow and me. They had a stopwatch on us . . . I remember we went a few seconds over. I think it was a minute and seventeen seconds. That gives you an idea of how you have to improvise when you get into accident scenarios. We were able to get the clothing off, and we put him back in the ambulance. By that time we'd arranged where we were going to do the follow-on work. Unfortunately, taking the clothes off didn't really help anything very much. [The contamination] was about the same level as when we started.”

  By about 6:30 A.M. on January 4, the crew had managed to wrap the body of the first man removed from SL-1 in blankets and drape it with lead aprons. The dead soldier was to be taken to the site's chemical processing plant, where workers normally separated highly enriched uranium from spent fuel rods so the radioactive trigger for nuclear fission could be used again. The building was designed to house highly radioactive materials, although no one had anticipated that one day that would include bodies.

  Firefighter Egon Lamprecht describes the strange trip the body took. “When they [health officials] decided to transport the body in the ambulance, they took readings from the driver to the victim, who were separated by a glass divider. Then they calculated the exposure to the driver based on the miles he had to drive. They decided they had to put him in a lead-lined vest. One of the firemen was going to drive the ambulance and they told him, ‘You will travel X number of miles per hour,' something like seventy-five or eighty-five. Then they stopped all traffic on the highway and within the site. They gave him a free shot. And away they went.”

  Minutes later, the ambulance drew up at the chemical plant's large receiving bay. The driver hopped out and hot-footed it out of the area. A team of workers pulled the radioactive body out of the back of the ambulance and rushed it to a steel tank. Voelz ordered the body covered with ice and alcohol, both to preserve it and in the hopes of reducing its radioactivity, which remained distressingly high.

  Throughout the day of January 4, six military men, all volunteers, rehearsed at the checkpoint a plan to retrieve the body of the second crewman. Two government photographers had been sent into the SL-1 reactor room, each for ten seconds. The pictures they snapped showed the recovery team the exact position of Legg's badly mutilated body next to one of the concrete shielding blocks that normally encircled the reactor top. Rust-colored metal punchings and rocks used to shield the reactor core lay on and around the body, and the radiation field in that area was estimated to be about seven hundred fifty roentgens per hour. Health physicists said the rescue would have to be done in stages to prevent individual radiation overdoses. They decided to use two two-man teams. Each man would wear a respirator and two pairs of anticontamination coveralls, with the wrist and ankle openings taped shut. Each of the teams participating in the retrieval of the second crewman's body would be allowed just one minute in the reactor. Two AEC health physicists would be in the adjoining reactor control room monitoring the time with stopwatches. When the minute elapsed, they would signal that the time was up with the rap of a metal pipe. A blanket was spread on the floor of the control room to wrap around the body.

  At 7:30 P.M., nearly twenty-four hours after the accident, air force sergeant Max Hobson and army soldier David Arnold hurried into the reactor. Hobson later described to investigators a few of the most incredible moments of his life: “We were given one minute in time between the entrance door to the reactor floor and out again through that door; in other words, one minute on the floor. We went to the vehicle gate, through the main shop, came down the corridor to the control room. At that point, we stopped and adjusted our masks one more time, screwed them up tighter and everything.

  “Then up the stairway and onto the reactor floor. We had to go around the top half of [concrete shield] block No. 1. Legg was lying on the other side of this block, between it and the reactor itself. I stepped over the body—that is, the upper portion of his body—and set him up in a seated position. At this time, Arnold took the top part of his body and I grabbed his legs and lifted him off the reactor floor. About the only thing I noticed was the shot or the punchings on the floor, red in color. We now have the body off the floor and started to leave the reactor floor.”

  Then, the two had a Three Stooges' moment, which, considering the grim circumstances, didn't even come close to being funny.

  “A one-pound coffee can caused Arnold to trip partially near the entrance door,” Hobson said. “He, by tripping over the can, caused it to move to the top landing of the stairway. At this point, I stepped in the can. Getting the body through and around the door was time consuming due to the coffee can, the body, and the air bottles on our backs. Also, during the complete trip, the nose side of my mask eyepieces were fogged over.”

  Hobson and Arnold manhandled the body down the narrow stairs and into the control room. They laid it on the blanket and sprinted outdoors as fast as they could manage under the weight of their bulky clothes and air tanks. Their one-minute exposure limit had expired when they were only halfway down the stairs. The second two-man team then rushed into the control room, grabbed the corners of the blanket, and brought the body outside. There, in the open air, four other men worked frantically to cut away Legg's coveralls. There was no tact involved in the process; they needed to work quickly in order to reduce their own radiation exposure and to prevent the soldier's tattered, bloody clothes from freezing in the subzero chill. The men had heard about the difficulty the others had trying to get the clothes off Byrnes earlier that morning. As with Byrnes, stripping Legg of his clothes proved fruitless: a detector passed over the body indicated that the sailor's naked torso was still throwing out radiation levels of five hundred roentgens an hour.

  Bills remembers that he and another man had the last task involved in the rescue of Legg's body: “We had the door open to the ambulance and we were standing off one hundred feet or so. When they wrapped him back up in the blanket, we rushed over there, picked him up, and put him in and probably spent fifteen seconds at it.”

  Someone threw a lead blanket over the body, and the ambulance, with a security escort, left the SL-1 compound at high speed. It was 9:11 P.M. Once the ambulance had backed into the chemical plant's makeshift morgue, four men dragged the blanket-bound body out and rushed it to a large metal sink. Legg was slipped into an ice-and-alcohol mix alongside his crewmate Byrnes.

  Now that the second body had been removed from the reactor room, health physicists, engineers, and scientists began mulling over ways to retrieve the last body from its precarious perch directly over the twisted, exposed innards of the reactor. The body hung from a steel beam, enveloped in what the experts estimated was a deadly fog of radiation exceeding one thousand roentgens per hour. Climbing onto the beam and inching out to free the body would be far too dangerous. The body itself was peppered with highly radioactive particles of enriched uranium. And there was a further co
mplication: scientists feared that if the body or the rod holding it to the ceiling fell onto the reactor, another nuclear excursion could be unleashed.

  Voelz recalls the dilemma facing recovery crews: “Until that third body was taken out, their principal concern was trying to figure out the status of the reactor. They were concerned they might do something that would cause another excursion or criticality and have a second accident. For example, whether the reactor had water in it or not was an important consideration as to whether they could have another accident. So they were trying to determine whether there was water in the reactor container itself. One of their concerns was if you had the third man—who was directly over the reactor—and you dropped him down on the reactor, would that set anything off?”

  In a grotesque atomic tableau, the body of the third crewman hung from the reactor's ceiling for six days while army volunteers from a special radiological unit station in Utah figured out a way to remove it safely. They devised their plan using a full-scale mock-up of the reactor, which they constructed at a fire station training tower. On the evening of January 8, a large crane approached the exterior of the reactor and came to a halt just below a large freight door that opened onto the second-story operating floor. The crane's operator, shielded by a lead plate and guided by a spotter perched high on a pole three hundred feet away, slowly eased the big machine's long boom through the door. Attached to the boom was a five-foot by twenty-foot net. At 5 P.M., ten soldiers dashed into the reactor room to position the net under the limp remains of the serviceman hanging from the ceiling.