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Interview with Kenneth Giles, February 10, 2005

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2005-02-10

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Narrator affiliation: EPA Farm

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nts_000173

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Giles, Kenneth. Interview, 2005 February 10. MS-00818. [Transcript]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d11n7xz8z

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Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Kenneth Giles February 10, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Suzanne Becker © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Kenneth Giles February 10, 2005 Conducted by Suzanne Becker Table of Contents Introduction: military service ( hospital corpsman [ 1958- 1962], Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, San Francisco, CA), training as veterinary x- ray technician ( Loveless Foundation, Albuquerque, NM), 1 Work as technician for USPHS farm at the NTS ( 1964- 1981) 2 Arrival at and perceptions of the NTS ( 1964) 5 Deer migration study at the NTS 6 Security requirements at the NTS 7 Contacts with the ranching community surrounding the NTS, and work as offsite radiation monitor 9 Work at Three Mile Island 11 Thoughts on personal radiation exposure and safety, and offsite monitoring work with fistulated animals and vegetation 12 Work with the offsite CEMP and relationship with ranchers 16 People who worked on the EPA farm at the NTS 20 Experience with protesters at the NTS 21 Details deer migration study 22 Wild horses on the NTS 23 Response to claims of injuries due to radiation exposure 24 Educational background, and benefits of doing on- the- job studies on the NTS 26 Conclusion: important people who did monitoring at the NTS and offsite 27 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Kenneth Giles February 10, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Suzanne Becker [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Suzanne Becker: So if you want to begin by telling us a little bit about your background, who you are, where you came from, your history of coming out to Vegas, and then ending up involved with the EPA [ Environmental Protection Agency] and the [ Nevada] test site. Ken Giles: I really got started in this when I was in the Navy. I was a hospital corpsman and I was stationed at the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco. And got out of the service and worked at Loveless Foundation in Albuquerque for a while. I met a guy there name of Ronald Ingle who was a veterinarian and had a Ph. D. in radiology. And he was in the Air Force. He trained me for a year as a veterinary X- ray technician. When he got out of the Air Force, he came out to Nevada and joined the U. S. Public Health Service, which had the farm on the Nevada Test Site. Right. Now what years were you in the Navy? Nineteen fifty- eight to nineteen sixty- two. Anyway, he needed some technicians, so he brought me and another guy out from Albuquerque to work up at the farm. They hired four dairymen and one beef herd manager, and then there was two or three technicians that we had up there because we were doing experiments and things on the beef cattle and on the dairy animals at the farm on the Nevada Test Site. What year did you arrive out here for that? I came out here in July of 1964. And the farm at that time was down at Well 3, which is about five miles north of the CP [ control point]. We were down there for two or three years, and then UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 they built a new facility up in Area 15, about a couple of miles north of Sedan crater. And so we were up there for a while. I was with them until that facility closed [ EPA Farm]. We did all kinds of experiments on dairy cows where they wanted to see what was happening with iodine 131 in the animals, because if a cloud would leave the test site and go over a dairy, then the milk cows would pick up iodine 131 and it would possibly get into children, into the thyroids and stuff. So we did a lot of experiments with exposing animals to iodine and counting their thyroids to see what was there, and then sampling milk and the feces and urine from the animals. Later on, we got into work where we were doing plutonium and americium and that kind of stuff, and doing metabolism studies on large animals. To my knowledge, that was about the only facility that was doing that type of work with large animals, especially with more than one large animal. A university in California was doing some, but they were only using one animal, where we were using four and five animals at a time. Right. There was an actual simulated farm- like situation set up and a herd of cattle— Yes, we had probably thirty to thirty- five registered Holstein milk cows that we milked twice a day, seven days a week. And we had a hundred- head beef herd that ran out in Area 18, and we rounded those up twice a year and took samples from them. Those cattle were descendents of animals that had lived on the test site since the atmospheric days. I think the first herd was in 1957. And so we kept that herd going. Reynolds Electric[ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, REECo] had it originally, and then the Public Health Service took it over from them. So we were monitoring them. We also had a wildlife sampling project on the test site where we were taking deer and small animals and that stuff— That lived out at the test site? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 Yes. And sampling them for radionuclides, and we would take histopathology samples to make [ 00: 05: 00] sure there was no damage, or to see if there was any damage caused by the testing. What types of things did you find? Well, we never really found anything that we could say was harmful to the animals up there. I took four deer a year on the test site and, like I say, we counted the tissues, we checked them for radionuclides, and we did the path[ ology] analysis on them. You would find some cancer- I in the Hereford cows once in a while, but if you have Hereford cows that [ are] out in the bright sunlight back in Nebraska, you’ll get— The same thing. Yes, about the same percentage of cancer- I as we did on the test site. And the only thing we ever found in our dairy cows was the isotopes that we actually injected them with or fed them. We did some simulated studies where we had about fifteen acres of alfalfa that we grew. And we simulated a rainout situation, where if a device had gone off and the fallout fell on alfalfa fields in a rainout situation, we sprayed the iodine and some other isotopes, I forget what they were, on this alfalfa and actually cut it like the dairymen and the farmers would, and fed it to dairy cows to see what come out in the milk and the other end. We did that on several different occasions. And you monitored, I would imagine, this over a period of time? Yes, you would follow it until you couldn’t find it anymore. And then during the later part of the Plowshare program, we actually put cows out on the mesa in Area 19 and 20, in stanchions. When the device would go off, we had them positioned downwind so that the cloud would actually go over the animals. Then we would take them in and check to see what type of isotopes came out in the milk and the urine and the feces. Any differences in those herds? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Well, they were never exposed to enough radioactivity to make the animals sick or anything. We could detect the radioactivity in them, and in some instances, because it was in the wintertime, we had blankets on the cattle to keep them warm because it was freezing cold up there. And we were able to see where the blankets were, they had enough fallout on them where the black hair was to make some of that turn gray. You could see on some of them the pattern where the blanket was. But those cows stayed in the milking string for years and— And never— Yes, nothing bad ever happened to them. The biological monitors were a very good method of detecting radionuclides. At one time when the Russians and the Chinese were still testing, we found iodine 131 in the thyroid of a deer on the test site and we couldn’t explain it, where it had came from. Nothing had happened on the test site to explain that. So Dr. [ Donald D.] Smith, who was my boss at that time, contacted DOE [ Department of Energy] and they said well, yeah, the Chinese had a shot that wasn’t announced and it had leaked. But we were able to pick it up on our deer. And then about a week later, there was a little article back in the obituary section in the paper, where they had had a test. And then we were also able to pick up some stuff from Chernobyl that came over here. That’s a pretty significant traveling distance. Yes. But you know the biological samplers, if it’s there, they’ll pick it up and you can find it. Right. Interesting. But we were never able to show any harmful effects on the deer or the small animals or anything that we sampled on the test site. And I— OK. So when the Chinese or the Russians did a test, the equipment was able to pick it up here. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 [ 00: 10: 00] Yes. EPA at that time had what they called standby air samplers in all the western states. When Chernobyl happened, we activated the standby network system. You could see it move in through Washington and Oregon and in down this way, and we were able to pick it up in the snow and the rainwater on Mount Charleston. Just minute amounts; just enough to say that something was there and to identify where it came from. So it was a pretty good distance. Not enough to hurt anything but enough to say that it was there. Now similar things, I would imagine, would have happened here, too, when we did— Yes. If we had a test that vented, why, you could pick it up. One of the first things I was involved with in ’ 64 or ’ 65, they had a shot on the test site that vented and it went up over Alamo and Hiko. Well, there was dairies there. We went up and covered the hay out as far as Lund, which is almost to Ely, and then sampled the milk from those dairies. And what they did at that time was diverted the milk from being a Grade A product to where it would get immediately into the food source. They diverted that into cheese making because that would take a lot of time and iodine 131 has a seven- and- a- half- day half- life. Well, by the time it would ever be on the market, everything would have decayed out of it. And— And if there was any danger of— No. But those were things that we were involved in at that time. Interesting. And so I guess I have two questions. One, I was just wondering when you got out here in 1964, what your perceptions of the test site were, and had you been familiar with the test site prior, or what was going on? Well, quite frankly, I had no knowledge of the test site before. Like I said, I had worked at the Naval Radiological Defense Lab in San Francisco and they had their own projects going on. But UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 I’m like a lot of people were; I didn’t know testing was still going on. We did some surveys at one time, some milk cow surveys, where we went around all over Nevada and part of California and part of Utah and Idaho, looking for family milk cows and dairies and this kind of stuff. And once you got out of the immediate area around the test site, it was, Testing? You guys are still doing that stuff? We thought that ended back in the fifties. So a lot of people, with the underground stuff, if they weren’t reading a newspaper every day they weren’t even aware it was still going on. And I was kind of that way when I came here in ’ 64. I didn’t know what they were doing. So were you pretty amazed to see this very huge chunk of land devoted to it? Yes, it was quite an experience for me to learn about what was happening and then to be actually involved in it. In those days you could go out and when they had the Plowshare shots, you could be within a mile or two of them as long as you were upwind from them. You could just go in and stand around and watch them. So we’d put out our experiments and then we’d go stand around and watch them. It was really neat. One of the other things that I did that was probably one of the most fulfilling and rewarding jobs that I had while I worked on the test site was we had— like I say, we were sampling the wildlife on the test site, the deer. Well, we didn’t know whether the deer were actually getting off the test site or not, whether they could be eaten by people off the test site. My boss at that time was a wildlife biologist. He’d been with the State of Nevada as a fish and game agent and then came to work for EPA. So we got a project going where we captured deer live on the test site and put radio transmitters and collars on them. And for seven years, I [ 00: 15: 00] captured deer on the test site and put radios on them, tracked them, took their pictures and followed them all around. And that was one of the more rewarding things. I’ve got a couple of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 little papers that are down in the [ Atomic Testing] museum where we published. But that was a lot of fun. It was a lot of hard work but it was a sense of accomplishment, too. That sounds really neat. And I bet you traveled all over the test site to do that. Oh, I knew the test site. People would come in with pictures and I could tell them right where the picture was taken. And the guys in Operations and stuff, they were good. A lot of times areas would be locked up, and I’d have to go and get keys or get Security to let you in and— So you needed, I would imagine, clearance for this. Oh yeah. And a couple of us with the EPA and Wackenhut Security and the Sheriff’s Department were about the only ones who were allowed to carry guns on the test site. I carried a gun. For thirty- five years I carried guns on the test site all the time. And cameras. Had cameras and field glasses. Right. I would imagine none of that’s allowed on the test site. No, it’s not unless you have— you had to have a permit and had to have a reason for doing it. What kind of a clearance do you have to go through for that, or what’s the process? Just a Q- clearance. Q- clearance? OK. Yes, just a regular Q- clearance, and then you have to apply for a camera permit or a gun [ permit]. You have to have a reason. They just don’t give them to you for the fun of it, or everybody’d have one. But it was interesting to do that, and you’d meet new guards that weren’t aware of it and they’d get all excited until you could explain what you were doing and calm them down. That deer migration study was, like I say, one of the most interesting jobs I had had up there. I got to do things— I had flight orders, and at that time they used the Huey helicopters that were based at Indian Springs, and I could go down and just make a phone call; I could go down UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 and get on them and fly around the test site with the security sweep, because in the wintertime I couldn’t get to the areas where my deer were going to. So they would let me slide one of the doors open and sit there like this, you know, outside with my radio antenna and headphones on and look for my deer. Wow, that is interesting! That must’ve really been neat. It was neat. Now how much time did you spend up there? It sounds like you, particularly with tracking the deer, you would probably be up there quite a bit. I spent like three days and two nights a week, pretty much for seven years up there. And then I wasn’t one of the regular milkers or one of the dairymen at the farm, but I would fill in for them. When we first started, I wasn’t married, and so when they needed holidays or days off, why, I would fill in. Because that was a seven- day- a- week operation. Yes, I bet. All day. Early. You had to be there to milk at six in the morning, six to five, seven days a week; 365 days a year, those cows had to be milked. So after you got married, is that when you cut back on spending time up there or—? No, I still spent about the same amount of time up there. It’s just that I didn’t fill in quite so much on the holidays and stuff for the other guys as I did. But you still had to help out and take your turn. Somebody would get sick or injured, you know, we had a couple of guys get injured, so you had to fill in. You mentioned earlier that currently you’re still in touch with some of the ranchers. Was that also something that you did out there, talk to the folks in the surrounding community? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Yes. We had veterinarians on our staff. At one time we had, I think, five veterinarians on staff at EPA, one wildlife biologist, two zoologists and a half- a- dozen radiobiologists and chemists. But one of the things that DOE wanted us to do was to provide some veterinary service to the ranchers. If they had claims, some of the ranchers say, Well, [ 00: 20: 00] our cows are being exposed. Well, you’d go out and you’d look at the cows. And we would buy cows from the ranchers. Twice a year we sampled six animals from our own herd on the test site. We also went around with the University of Nevada to two different locations and sampled herds off the test site. And then after we quit doing that, we would just go out, and the ranchers that ran all around the test site, adjacent to the test site, I would go out and I would buy six cows and bring them onto the test site. We would kill them and take samples from them. And we did that for several years. So the ranchers knew us, and they knew what we were doing. We’d always give them a report that showed that there was nothing in their animals. They were safe to eat and they were healthy. But then testing was also going on at this time. I had to fill in as a radiation monitor also. When there would be a test, EPA would field a whole bunch of people who would go out and you would do D- minus- 2 information ( Day- minus- 2), where you would find out where everybody was going to be out to about 150 miles away from the CP, and the hunters and sheepherders and ranchers. We had an area that you worked in so that you knew the people in there. And we would go out two days before the shot and talk to these people and let them know what was happening if we could, if it was an announced shot. Sometimes you couldn’t tell them anything but they knew what you were out there for. So just by virtue of you being there, they knew that something was happening. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Yes. And then there were regular offsite monitors that did air sampling and water sampling, that were in contact with the people. Well, when the farm closed and they shut down the deer studies and all that biological stuff on the test site went away, why then I transferred in to offsite and I became one of those offsite monitors that worked in the offsite area. At one time, there were two of us. Don James was the other one. And I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the offsite area or not. A little bit. Do you know where Rachel is? No, I don’t. OK. Well, say this is the test site. North of the test site, there is a mountain range called the Grant Range that kind of goes north and south. Well, at one time I was responsible for everything on the east side of the Grant Range in Nevada clear to the Idaho border, which included Utah, clear back around to Las Vegas. Jamesie [ Donald James] was responsible for everything over here, part of California, all of Nevada, and back into Las Vegas. So you guys had some big territory. Yes. Oh yeah. If you didn’t put a thousand or twelve hundred miles a week on your truck, it was a slow week. And I had four monitors that worked for me. We did everything out there. We maintained all the equipment, we changed all the TLDs [ thermoluminescent dosimeters], we collected all the milk and water samples, which was done monthly, we maintained all the equipment, we did all the public relations work. If it had to be done, we did it. I don’t know whether you know her or not but Vickie Nieman that works over in DOE? No, I don’t. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 At that time, she was one of the monitors that worked with me. But anyway, she’s over at DOE now. She went on and got her degree and went on to bigger and better things. But we did everything out there. And then Three Mile Island happened. And Jamesie [ Don James] was in the first clench of monitors that went to Three Mile Island, and then I relieved him six weeks later and I was there for six weeks. What was that like? [ 00: 25: 00] It was kind of neat, in a way, because we were the guys in the white hats, you know. The state, everybody was telling all these different stories, and people were so happy to see us because, like I say, we were the guys in the white hats. I had farm ladies come out almost in tears when we’d have equipment running at their property, come out and they would offer to do your laundry for you, all this kind of stuff, just because they were so happy to have somebody there that they could believe was telling them the truth about what was happening. Right. So much chaos going on at that time. Yes. Everybody was basically telling the truth but the state had their version of it, DOE had a version and the utilities had a version. They were all basically telling the same story but in a little different way, and these people didn’t know who to believe. Well, then EPA came in and, like I say, we were the guys in the white hats, and so it was kind of neat. It was a very interesting experience. It was a lot of hard work but it was fun, too, because it was different than what we’d been doing. And one of the reasons that we went there was because we were just about the only agency in the government that had the equipment and the manpower to do that. How long were you there? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 I was there for six weeks the first time, and then I went back a couple of months later for another month. But EPA and some of the labs back east, just EPA all told, was there for ten years or better. Sampling. And so when you were out there, that’s primarily what you were doing. You guys were sampling and out in the communities? Yes, we were there during the venting. When they vented the reactor building, they vented the tritium out of it. We had tritium samplers and we were going and taking samples. They had a map made up with grids and distance, sector lines and stuff on it, and they would call you on the radio and say, Move to 6B, or something. And you’d pack up all your stuff and move over here, set up your sample, because that’s the way the wind was blowing. They wanted to send me in the plume all the time so we could get these samples. So we were always moving around. But we were off the reactor. The reactor was kind of on an island and they had their own radiological people that did stuff on their own facility. So we did all the monitoring and stuff off the facility. OK. So more offsite. Yes. Now since you’ve been involved in this for so long and worked so closely with it, I’m just wondering what your thoughts about exposure are, and have you ever been worried about that for yourself? No, because we always wore either film badges or TLDs, and we always had survey instruments with us when we were doing stuff. So you were always able to monitor what was going on at the moment? Yes. And I never felt like I was ever in any danger or anyplace where I was going to get hurt. We did a lot of stuff on the test site with animals. They had some places on the test site where they UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 had old failsafe shots in the old days, where they would simulate an airplane crash that had a nuclear weapon on board and scatter plutonium and americium and a variety of isotopes out on the ground. And we had these fistulated steers, animals that had a window in their side where you could unscrew the lid and you could reach into the stomach and take samples out of them. We had four of those and we would take those out and let them graze in these contaminated areas and then take samples out of them Now how did that work? They just had little windows in them and you could see what was—? Well, it was a round plastic thing. I gave some of them to the museum down here. There may be some down there for you to look at when you walk through the museum. What you would do is on ruminant animals like cows, on the left side right by the hipbone, the rumen, which is the [ 00: 30: 00] large first stomach, and the skin are right together. So what you would do is cut a patch out of the skin, sew it and the stomach together, and let that heal up. And then you would cut a patch out of the stomach so that you could look right into the stomach. And that would heal up. Then you put something in it. We had plastic plugs made that fit in there and you could just unscrew the lid, like unscrewing a big jar, and reach in and take the samples of the grass. You or I could go out here in the desert and pick vegetation, but it wouldn’t be the same stuff that cows would eat. And at different times of the year, they all eat different types of grass and shrubs and stuff. We had a guy that could identify the percentage and the species of the grass they were eating. So we would take these things out. You had to clean everything out of them first because they’d been eating hay in the corral. Virtually, you just rinse the stomach out— And they let you do this? Sure. I mean you weren’t hurting them any. And then you’d take them out and you’d let them graze for a couple of days, then bring them in and unscrew the lid and take a sample out. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 How many windows per cow? Just one. Into the stomach? Yes, into the first stomach. Wow, that’s really interesting! And we used to take these things around to fairs and stuff, too, to show what we were doing, you know. And one of the guys that I worked with had been a 4- H leader, so he’d take Big Sam— we called him Big Sam— whichever one was on display was called Big Sam because that’s what all the literature said, was Big Sam. We’d bathe this steer, and the things got to be like twelve hundred pounds. I mean they were humongous. Eventually they got so big, you couldn’t work them because you couldn’t get your arm in far enough to reach the bottom of the stomach. But he’d bathe them and he’d bleach their head and he’d back- comb their tail and fuzz it all out. They’d be just like a show animal. And one lady asked me, she said, Well, that’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen, she says, that’s just mean. And I says, You’re wearing pierced earrings, I see. She says, Yeah. I said, It’s the same idea. You make a hole in the ear and it heals up. And this plug is just something that he wears. You can take it out and it’ll grow shut. And I said, It’s the same idea as pierced earrings. It’s just instead of a little bitty hole, it’s a great big hole, but, I says, we have to keep something in it or it’ll grow shut. How big were the holes? You might’ve said that but I don’t— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 Well, they come in different sizes, depending on how big the animal was. But, oh, it’s probably six or eight inches around. And then there were small ones that were about that big [ indicating size] that you could do on goats. And they’re called rumen cannulas, and I gave a couple of them to the museum down here so— They’re called what? Rumen cannulas. So you did the same thing with the goats, let them graze? Well, we kept the goats in a corral, and they were fed stuff that we wanted to give them. It didn’t work out real well with the goats because the skin and the stomach wasn’t strong enough to carry this plastic plug. It wound up being on the bottom, you know, and so it didn’t work out real well. But it worked out fine with cows. And most of your universities that have agricultural programs have these animals and they used them for nutritional studies and things. Years ago, I seen a picture of one in National Geographic. So they aren’t uncommon. The first four we got, we got from the University of Nevada up in Reno. And then when they closed the farm, we gave the ones we had back to the university. But they were too big to work by then. I mean you had to have animals small enough that you could clean them out. You know it’s kind of a messy, smelly job— wet grass and stuff— you had to reach in by hand [ 00: 35: 00] or use a little dipper and actually clean everything out. You would get down to the bottom and there’d be sand and rocks and stuff in there that they’d eaten. You had to clean all that out before you could put them out to let them sample. Did you find anything with those, what they were grazing on? Well, what we wanted to see was what type of vegetation was picking up the plutonium in these contaminated areas. And so we would go out and we would get the vegetation that the cows had UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 picked. Then they would identify it, and then somebody would actually go out and gather a whole bunch of this vegetation, and then count it and analyze it. Now do certain types of vegetation hold more, I guess, radiation or—? Yes. In the wintertime there’s kind of a leafy plant. It’s called winterfat, and I don’t know what the real name for it is, but it has little bitty hairs on it, almost microscopic. Well, that stuff will pick up the resuspended dust and particles, and that’s what we found more in than anything. It was because of the little hairs [ that] stuff would get caught in that. Makes sense. Yes, I guess I’d never thought about that, that maybe some vegetation would either be more prone to absorbing it or hold it in like that. Yes. And one time we used to take vegetation samples, or garden samples from people that had gardens that lived in Alamo and Rachel and close in to the test site. We found some stuff in some broccoli one time that some people in Rachel were growing. It has all kinds of neat places for things to get trapped in, and it was just from resuspension from the old atmosphere days, with dust blowing. So you mention now that one of the things you do is still work with ranchers in the surrounding areas. What do you do with them now, or what is your connection? After Three Mile Island, for public relations they came out with these community monitoring stations. And the EPA put them in all around the test site, over into California, into Death Valley, and up through Utah as far away as Salt Lake City. And they had air samplers and radiation detection equipment. Then as a community monitoring thing, we had somebody in the community that changed the samples and was a point of contact. If anybody had any questions, their phone number was there and they could contact them. In order to get