Force to create a cleanup plan called “Moist Mop.” The plan called for radiation teams to enter the area first, accompanied by EOD teams. The radiation teams would check for contamination while the EOD men tended to fragments of high explosive. Everyone except emergency personnel should stay 1,500 feet away from the accident; everyone entering the area should wear full face masks for protection.
But Moist Mop assumed that the accident would take place somewhere under U.S. government control, such as an Air Force base. It didn’t account for sheep, goats, tomato fields, and curious Spanish villagers. Nothing in the plan mentioned that one bomb would be found by an Air Force lawyer, another by a Spanish shopkeeper.
Thus, the early days of the Palomares cleanup were decidedly ad hoc. Any men plowing, scraping, or removing vegetation were supposed to wear gloves, surgical caps, and masks. Anyone working in a dusty area was supposed to wear a half-face respirator. Men were ordered to tape their shirtsleeves and gloves together with masking tape to keep dust out; the same with their pant cuffs and boots. At the end of every day, each man and his gear were to be checked for contamination and washed down. Some adhered to these guidelines, and enforcement certainly got more strict as the operation progressed. But many airmen recall spotty safeguards and monitoring in the beginning.
Robert Finkel, who spent many long days chopping tomato plants, says his men wore fatigues and T-shirts. Their only protective gear was hats for the sun. At the end of each day, they would decontaminate themselves by walking, fully clothed, into the Mediterranean. “Ultimately we got showers, and things improved dramatically,” recalled Finkel. “But initially it was pretty tough.” Soon after Red Moody arrived in Palomares, he suggested that the Navy begin testing for contamination. The Navy regularly sampled the water and also swiped dew off ships’ decks to test for airborne alpha. To the best of Moody’s memory, the Navy never found any contamination, but the divers weren’t entirely out of harm’s way. One day, Gaylord White, one of the divers who had come to Palomares from Rota, traded a diver’s knife for a warm Air Force jacket. White, happy with the swap, took his new jacket back to the EOD tent. When he arrived, one of the other divers told him to leave the jacket outside while he ran to get an alpha monitor. Sure enough, the jacket was contaminated. White, undeterred, came up with a plan. He ran a line up one sleeve and out the other, then staked the jacket on the beach below the high-tide line. After a few days of ocean washing, White let the jacket dry in the sun.
Some contamination stories had more dramatic endings. Henry Engelhardt, the commander of an Army EOD detachment in Mannheim, Germany, answered a call for assistance and sent a small EOD team to Palomares shortly after the accident. When Engelhardt’s unit commander arrived on the scene, an Air Force colonel told the men not to wear protective clothing “because it might scare the locals.” The Army commander refused the order and appealed to a higher command. According to Engelhardt, the Air Force colonel was finally relieved over the dispute, and the Army men were allowed to wear protective gear. However, Engelhardt, worried about the primitive safety conditions in Palomares, had a decontamination team waiting when the team returned to Germany. As suspected, the men were hot — their clothing and gear tested four times as high as permissible levels.
Three men also had high counts on their fingernails, probably from putting their hands in their pockets. The decon team ordered the men to undress on the spot, bagged their clothes and gear, and sent the men to the showers. Luckily, says Engelhardt, they didn’t have to decontaminate the plane.
Despite such mishaps, “Don’t scare the locals” became the overriding theme regarding radiation in Palomares. When Bud White’s team first mapped out the contaminated areas, for example, they marked the boundaries with red flags. This color choice “proved to be unacceptable due to psychological factors,” according to the SAC final report. The Air Force ordered the red flags changed to green. Furthermore, the guardias civiles and U.S. air police who controlled access into the contaminated areas were forbidden to post signs prohibiting entry or noting the radiation hazard.
In any emergency situation, authorities want to prevent undue panic, a logical and even admirable goal. But in Palomares, it is unclear whether the Air Force crossed a line, choosing public relations over public health. When they decided not to post warning signs, they undoubtedly prevented unnecessary worry, but they also avoided embarrassing photographs being published in the international papers. It is difficult to determine which goal was more important.
This much is certain: the broken bombs certainly emitted enough alpha radiation to cause harm. And at the start of the operation, safety measures were haphazard at best. Some men, such as Gaylord White and the Army EOD team, left Palomares with high radiation readings and were monitored for months afterward. The Air Force maintains that the radiation exposures were not significant, but military health records from Palomares remain classified or heavily redacted.
After Spanish and American officials decided how much soil and vegetation to remove, another question arose: where to put it. The vegetation problem was quickly solved. Spanish officials said the Americans could burn the less contaminated vegetation in the dry bed of the Almanzora River, as long as the smoke blew out to sea.
Burning the vegetation was an operation in itself. On an average day, Bud White’s team hauled 140 truckloads of vegetation to a temporary pit or the burn site, located near the former resting place of the B-52 tail section. In late February, the Air Force built a new road to the burn site so they wouldn’t have to drive their radioactive haul through an inhabited area. In the end, the team hauled 3,728 truck-loads of vegetation to the riverbed, and burned it all.
This left the question of what to do with the more contaminated dirt and vegetation. At first, it was generally assumed that the Americans would bury it in Spain. But to hold all the contaminated soil, they would have to dig a pit about the size of the Empire State Building lying on its side. To complicate matters, the Spanish government wanted the pit in a mountainous, uninhabited area about three miles west of Palomares.
As ideas bounced between Washington and Madrid, with Ambassador Duke, the State Department, and the Department of Defense weighing in, opinion quickly turned against a burial pit in Spain.
Jack Howard, the assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy who oversaw Palomares for the Pentagon, worried about a permanent monument to the accident. A burial site could become a stark reminder of nuclear danger for decades to come, perhaps even a gathering point for annual anti-American protests. Nobody wanted that.
Spanish and American officials had already worked through this problem with regard to the aircraft debris. Neither the United States nor Spain wanted to leave the wreckage (some of which was slightly contaminated) lying around Spain, possibly leading to “lingering recriminations against the United States.” Spain, with an eye toward the tourist and fishing trades, also didn’t want the debris dumped in the Mediterranean. Both sides eventually agreed to dump the wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean. The Navy built a fifty-foot pier off the beach at Palomares and used a twelve-ton crane to load two barges full of debris. The USS
Officials discussed whether to dump the dirt in the ocean as well or move it to the United States.
Eventually, the Americans agreed to haul it to the Savannah River Facility, a nuclear processing center in Aiken, South Carolina.
To prepare the dirt and vegetation for shipment, the Americans decided to excavate a temporary burial pit at the site where bomb number two had been found. This area was already contaminated, relatively barren, and some distance from the village. The Americans dug a trench measuring approximately one thousand cubic yards and started to haul in contaminated dirt and mulched vegetation.
Once the U.S. government started stripping contaminated crops and topsoil from the land, the farmers had to be paid. By late February, the Air Force had a full-blown claims office, with lawyers interviewing about twenty people a day to assess damages to crops, homes, livestock, and livelihoods.
The claims work was as complicated as the radiation cleanup, if not more so. Lawyers had to sort out which odd-shaped plot of land belonged to whom, how big it was exactly, what had been growing there, and how much that crop had been worth. This might have been easy in Oklahoma, but in Palomares, farmers often marked property lines with buried rocks or nothing at all. Formal records didn’t help: when lawyers consulted the owners’ registry at Cuevas de Almanzora, they found that the entries were as much as six years behind. Furthermore, boundaries had been shifted and parcels had changed hands without being recorded. It didn’t help that many people in Palomares had similar — or identical — names. Four claimants, for instance, were named Francisco Sabiote Flores; twelve were named Navarro Flores.
Joe Ramirez sympathized with the villagers. He did his best to be fair with their claims and give them their