White had two flatbed trucks from Moron and Torrejon and soon added seven Spanish dump trucks to his fleet. Because most of the Air Force personnel were searching for bomb number four, White hired ten Spanish laborers. The Spanish were, however, leery of picking up chunks of radioactive debris. Ever since the accident, Spanish and American officials had been chasing them out of the tomato fields, warning them about
White soon supplemented his labor pool with forty-two fishermen from the nearby village of Villaricos. The Spanish navy had declared their fishing grounds off-limits, not out of fear of possible contamination but because their boats might interfere with the search for aircraft debris in the water.
The fishermen, according to White, proved “a pretty tough crew.” They were used to hard labor, long days, and handling rough fishing nets with their bare hands. White put them on the payroll, and they stayed for the entire operation.
White and his crew worked from dawn until dark. In just nine days, they cleared about 150 tons of scrap metal from the mountains and valleys around Palomares, heaping it on a junk pile just down the beach from Camp Wilson.
His men having cleared the bulk of the debris, White prepared to return to Madrid. That same day, General Wilson and the Spanish military liaison, Brigadier General Arturo Montel Touzet, arranged an assembly at the small movie house in the center of Palomares to calm the fears of the villagers.
Wilson and Montel spoke to a crowd of about 250 heads of local families. The Air Force banned members of the press from attending, physically barring at least one at the door. Speaking through a translator, Wilson thanked the villagers for their help and thanked God that nobody in Palomares had been injured. “On behalf of my Government, I would like to publicly express my most heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you,” said Wilson. “As Comrades-in-Arms in the defense against Communism, I know that the mutual admiration and high respect existing between the people of our two countries will continue in the future as in the past.” Wilson assured the villagers that the Air Force would clear the land of debris and pay the villagers for damages. He avoided mention of nuclear weapons, lost bombs, or radioactivity.
Wilson knew, however, that he had a major contamination problem on his hands. When Bud White reported that his team had cleared the major debris and his job was done, he was surprised — and a bit shocked — to learn that he was not going back to Madrid but would instead take over the “detection and decontamination division,” tracking down and cleaning up the scattered plutonium.
White knew next to nothing about radiation. He had grown up on a farm and held a degree in agriculture. But the next day, he took charge of the cleanup effort.
White did have some expert help. A team of scientists from the Spanish nuclear agency, Junta de Energia Nuclear (JEN), had been in Palomares since a day or two after the accident. Emilio Iranzo, one of the Spanish scientists, said that when he arrived and learned that two of the bombs had broken open, he worried that they would have to evacuate the village. But after some quick air measurements, the Spanish scientists decided that the air contamination was not bad enough to warrant an evacuation. Then they tested the crops and soil and found that much of the land had received a fine dusting of alpha particles. They ordered the villagers to stop harvesting tomatoes, and the Guardia Civil enforced the rule. The villagers watched in dismay as their tomatoes ripened, rotted, and fell off the vine.
Now White’s job was to calculate how far contaminated dust had spread from the two broken bombs and to map the contamination. Starting at each bomb’s impact point, White drew a series of lines leading away from the crater, each line angling about fifteen degrees from the next. White’s team, using a handheld alpha-measuring device called a PAC-1S, walked along each line, measuring the alpha contamination until it reached zero. They used this information to draw “zero lines”—giant squiggly circles around the contaminated areas.
Work proceeded slowly. Because alpha radiation travels such a short distance in air, PAC-1S operators — most of whom were trained on the spot — had to hold the face of the counter close to the ground to get a reading. But the PAC-1S had been designed for laboratory use; the measurement face was thin and fragile as paper and tore easily on the jagged rocks.
Despite the equipment problems, White and his team managed to run zero lines around the two bomb craters and the town itself. Their results were daunting. The contaminated area inside the circles included about 640 acres of hillside, village, and farmland. Of the 640 acres, 319 were cultivated farmland. In Oklahoma, 319 acres might add up to a couple of flat, level fields of soybeans — a tractor could plow it under in two or three days. But in Palomares, farmers had chopped the land into a patchwork of 854 separate plots, almost all of them smaller than four acres, some smaller than an acre. To separate their tiny, uneven fields, villagers had built stone walls and tangled cactus fences. Through this maze ran irrigation ditches, carrying water to the ripening tomatoes. In some fields, the crops stood thick; the tomato plants, especially, climbed high and sagged under their heavy fruit. The U.S. and Spanish governments wanted this maze of land cleared — and somehow cleaned of radioactivity — by April 1, so farmers could plant their next rotation of crops. “In twenty-four years of Air Force experience,” said Bud White, “I have never, never had a challenge like this one.”
While Bud White worked on a cleanup plan, something had to be done about the tomatoes. In Palomares, farmers used thin, flexible, six-to-eight-foot poles to support their tomato plants, forming dense thickets in the fields. The majority of poles and plants showed no contamination. But plutonium dust had settled in the soil around the plants, so the Air Force decided to clear the fields to the ground. “The only way you could treat that land,” said White, “was to get rid of those cane poles, because you couldn’t get the plow in there.”
The job of chief tomato plant chopper fell to Bob Finkel. His superiors gave him a handful of men and a bucketful of machetes. Every day, he faced a new patch of tomatoes. From dawn until dusk, he and his men hacked tomato plants until the fields lay clear. Someone nicknamed the group “Finkel’s Farmers,” but he thought they looked more like a chain gang. By the end of a day in the blazing sun, Finkel and his crew were filthy with sweat and dirt and sticky with rotten tomatoes.
Finkel’s Farmers piled the cane poles and green plants at the far end of each field for mulching and disposal. The ripe tomatoes, on the other hand, were gathered into gleaming red heaps. One news reporter wrote that most of the crop was dumped at sea, in an operation quickly dubbed “the Boston Tomato Party.” But residents of Camp Wilson knew that many ended up in the mess hall.
As a gesture of goodwill, and to help support the desperate tomato farmers, the Air Force had decided to buy the contaminated tomatoes, wash off any alpha contamination, and feed them to the airmen. At the peak of the harvest, it bought 250 pounds of tomatoes a day. “Anywhere you turned around, there was a bucket of tomatoes,” said Walter Vornbrock. “We could eat tomatoes all day and all night, for that matter. If you loved them, you were in Heaven.” A bit farther down the beach from Camp Wilson, somewhat aloof from the Air Force men, sat the Navy divers’ tent, sometimes marked by a cardboard sign over the door reading “EOD Command Post.” The divers took pride in being a bit rougher, a bit wilder, than their Air Force brethren. “The Air Force is okay,” said Gaylord White, a diver who came to Palomares from Rota. “I mean, they live in nice, clean, dry places; they eat good food. But we’re not used to that crap.” Noting strong winds on the beach, the divers set up their tent, holding the corners down with concrete clumps — the ubiquitous diving tools used to secure buoys and search lines — then watched smugly as other tents blew down. Inside the tent, the divers built a wooden workbench for mapping out search patterns. Underneath the desk, they dug a deep hole and buried an empty oil drum with the top cut off. They filled the drum with beer, fitted a plywood lid on top, and covered it with sand.
Anyone inspecting the scene would see a diver scribbling at his workbench and never suspect that his feet rested on a buried drum of beer. “Leave it to divers,” said White. “They’ll find a way.” On the afternoon of February 2, Ambassador Duke flew to San Javier with his special assistant, Tim Towell, and General Donovan. The group spent the night in San Javier, then flew by helicopter to Camp Wilson to meet General Wilson and Admiral Guest. It was the ambassador’s first visit to Palomares, but not his first report from the scene. Right after the accident, Duke had sent Towell and another embassy staffer, Joe Smith, to the village to survey the scene. After chatting with some locals in a bar, they had tracked down General Wilson, who was not thrilled to see them. Wilson viewed the accident as a simple military operation and saw little need for diplomats, diplomacy, or making nice with Spanish officials. “Just go in, put a clamp on the area, clean it out, and then get out of there,” said Smith, describing Wilson’s view. “I think they saw me being there, especially the fact that I spent a lot of time in the village… that that was not particularly a good thing,” he added.
