Friday, Feb. 21, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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Families of miners who worked in some of the most radioactive uranium mining towns on earth are suffering. My childhood was in a small mining village outside Jeffrey City, Wyo., named after its mine, Phelps Dodge.
Fathers who worked the mines did finally receive compensation for their exposure to radiation, but the families did not. That location has since been shut down and access blocked because it is still too hot for public access.
This was in the late ’50s to early ’70s. Jeffrey City and Phelps Dodge mined pitchblende, which is highly radioactive. Fathers brought it home on their clothes, the yellow dust was everywhere, and us kids played in water runoff from the mine, building dams in the summer and ice skating on it in the winter. We used chunks of pitchblende as chalk to write and draw pictures on rocks. Radiation was all around us. We ate it, played in it and breathed it.
Since then, many of the wives and mothers have died of cancer and other diseases.
The children are now suffering from cancer and diseases associated with radiation exposure. I’m sure most of the residents will be dead by the time the government renders any compensation.
It’s sad that the government that is supposed to protect us would intentionally expose its citizens to such extreme dangers just to profit from uranium during the Cold War.
We have been working hard to get some relief but, thus far, it’s falling on deaf ears.
