Interview with William Byron Beam, January 20, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with William Beam January 20, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 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 William Beam January 20, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: Mr. Beam recalls growing up and later working in various mining communities in Arizona and California. 1 Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company [ REECo] hired Mr. Beam in 1967 to work at the Nevada Test Site as a mining safety inspector. 4 Mr. Beam was promoted to field superintendent for safety. Management restructuring and new government regulations forced changes at the test site. 9 REECo won several awards for on- the- job safety. Mr. Beam explains why REECo’s work at the Nevada Test Site was actually much safer than mining operations elsewhere. 11 Mr. Beam describes a typical working day as a mining safety engineer during an underground nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site. 12 Mr. Beam compares working conditions at the test site to those found at private mining operations. 14 Prior to his employment at REECo, Mr. Beam often witnessed the flashes of light from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the test site. 15 Mr. Beam describes some of the safety measures taken during the mining for an underground test. 16 The generally cooperative attitude of most test site miners helped to make their work safer than that at many private mining firms. 19 Mr. Beam describes working and living conditions at Area 12 and Mercury. 21 Mr. Beam discusses several accidents that occurred at the test site, including traffic accidents, construction injuries, hearing loss, and silicosis. 24 Mr. Beam narrates a series of photographs that depict mining operations at the Nevada Test Site, former co- workers, mine safety and rescue training and various accidents that occurred at the site. 26 Various photographs from the MX missile tests 37 Mr. Beam shares several artifacts and souvenirs from his tenure at the Nevada Test Site. 40 Since retiring from REECo, Mr. Beam has devoted considerable time to his hobby of writing and reading cowboy poetry. He discusses how his experiences as a day laborer in the West shaped his passion for the cowboy lifestyle. 44 As he grew up in a mining community, Mr. Beam idolized miners as a youth. 51 Conclusion: The Cold War lent a sense of urgency to the work done at the Nevada Test Site. This fostered dedication and a sense of satisfaction among test site workers, who saw their work as a contribution to the nation’s defense. 53 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with William Beam January 20, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: OK, so I thought we would start, if you could state your full name, date of birth, place of birth, and take a little time to give me a story about your life and maybe something about your childhood, even, and then how it led you to be working at the Nevada Test Site when it did. William Beam: OK, my name is William Byron Beam. I was born January 30, 1930 in Bisbee, Arizona. I went to school there. Bisbee was a mining town— copper mining— and was a typical company town of the 1930s. The company was about the only game in town, so when we were young, everybody aspired to go to work for the company. That was what happened. Being in a mining town, the aspiration of everybody was to go to work for the company in the mine. The only other occupation in that part of Arizona was cattle ranching. So when you got out of high school, if you didn’t go on to college, well, that was about the only options that you had was either in ranching or mining. One of the things that I remember growing up was when there was an accident in the mines, they blew the whistle at the powerhouse and that notified everybody that there had been an accident. Miners would talk about accidents in the mine. There was a number of boarding houses and all of us kids played around in those areas, and there was always miners out on the porch talking about mining. So that generated an interest for all of us in mining. When I first got out of high school and went to Ajo, Arizona— which was again a company mining town, an open pit operation— that’s when I first started in mining. I got a job on the jackhammer crew, which is a starting position on the surface. Then they opened up the pit in UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Bisbee. They went from underground to surface mining, and I went back to Bisbee and got a job driving one of the big Haulage trucks, stripping the overburden from the copper. Now were your parents involved in mining? My grandfather, who came from North Carolina to Missouri to Arizona back in the late 1800s, was a miner. And then my father was a miner, underground miner. OK. What were your father’s and grandfather’s names? My father’s name was William Burette Beam and my grandfather’s name was Fleming Beam. They were originally from North Carolina. They were both in mining, so it was just a natural thing, I guess, to go into mining, and that was about all that we really knew how to do. Once I got back and got to the open pit in Bisbee, I worked in the open pit for a number of years driving the big Haulage trucks. Then the opportunity came to take an ironworker’s apprenticeship, and I took the apprenticeship and completed it and became a journeyman ironworker. Then I got married, and we decided we would go to California, which a lot of the people did, go to the coast. So we came to California and I went to Darwin, California, on the other side of Death Valley, by Lone Pine, and went to work for Anaconda Copper at an underground mine out there. What year was that? Let’s see, we got married in ’ 53 and so that was probably late ’ 53 or 1954. Good. That gives me the era. I worked underground there in Darwin, California as a miner and then as an underground welder mechanic. Then the operation— due to price fluctuation, they closed the mine down. And I went up the valley to Bishop, California and went to work for Union Carbide Corporation [ UCC]— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 which at that time was called U. S. Vanadium— and went to work underground as a welder. Then UCC Corporate offered a training program for safety, and I took the opportunity and entered their corporate safety training program and went through that at Union Carbine Bishop Operations, I became first a safety engineer, then mine and tunnel safety engineer. They were driving a large access tunnel in addition to the normal mining operation. And I worked there until 1965. How long and how in- depth was the training? [ 00: 05: 00] Most of it was on site in the underground operation, but I did go to the uranium mines in Colorado, their properties there, for that type of mining. There were two of us, myself and a man named Jim Smith. He was in the milling operations and I was the mining, and they sent us to Uravan and Slick Rock and Rifle [ Colorado] and the different uranium properties for training. Now I have a question about mining because I’m really just learning about this through talking to all the test site people who worked underground. You’re talking about tunnels here that are mined into hillsides or pits? These are vertical shafts. These are vertical shafts. Yes. There are tunnels, drifts, after you get underground, but these are vertical shaft mines. I left Union Carbide in 1965 and went to work for Caterpillar at the Esperanza Mine in the open pit in Tucson [ Arizona]. I worked there for a while, and then a friend of mine that I worked with in Bishop, California became a manager for a company called Atlas Copco who provides heavy equipment for mining and tunneling operations, drills and compressors and things like that. He asked me if I would go to work for them, so I moved back to California, and then I worked for Atlas Copco with the mining equipment, such as bits and steel and jumbos and UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 drills. At that time they were doing a lot of the water tunnels in California and the market was lucrative. I worked southern California from Baja California as far north as Sacramento. Then they put the Nevada part on my territory and I worked Bishop, California with their equipment. Then they added the Nevada Test Site. I’d been out of safety now for two or three years. I was making calls on the test site, and one day I had lunch in Mercury with Bill [ William] Flangas and Glenn Clayton, who were in the tunneling at the test site. And the talk got around to safety. We were talking about something and safety came up and I said, Well, I was a safety engineer for eleven years for Union Carbide Corporation. And Bill Flangas said, Hey, there’s a guy I want you to talk to. So when this fellow came into the cafeteria, he introduced me. His name was J. D. Hill. He was the new Director of Safety for Reynolds [ Electrical and Engineering Company, REECo]. And he sat down at the table and Bill said, This guy here was a shaft safety guy. He said, We just lost two people up on the mesa. Two miners by the name of Parker and Johnson were killed in one of the drill hole shafts. And he said, I understand you’re looking for a safety guy. And Mr. Hill said, Yes. He asked me, Would you be interested? And I said, Sure, I’d be interested in the job. So I filled out an application, and about a week later I got a call to come up to Las Vegas. The REECo offices were down on Wall Street. On which? Wall Street. That’s where REECo’s offices were. I went and talked to the personnel man and filled out all the forms, you know, and did all that good stuff. I continued working for Atlas Copco with the drilling and mining equipment. I got a call, his name was Mr. Cummings, I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 believe, that they were interested in hiring me and would I take the job. And I said, Sure. We were excited about moving from Yucaipa, California to Las Vegas. So I took the job and came to the test site and started in— let’s see, Parker and Johnson were killed in June or July and I came in August of 1967. OK. Let me back up a little bit. A couple of questions were raised. When you’re working for Atlas Copco and you’re coming out to the test site to do a particular task— Service equipment or sales of bits and steel and jackleg drills. OK. At that point in time, how much do you have to know or do you know about what’s happening at the test site? Are you aware of the work? [ 00: 10: 00] Yes, I was aware of the work. A lot of the miners that worked Bishop quit Bishop and came over to the test site. Then they would quit the test site and come back to Bishop, depending on what the contract price was, how much they could make, they would work two or three months at Bishop and then they’d go over to the test site, and then come from the test site and go back to Bishop. But most of them that came to the test site stayed pretty firm. So I knew about the test site, and then going to the tunnels and the shafts on the test site as a representative of Atlas Copco, I became familiar with the operation that they were doing at that time. Did you have to get clearance at that point? Yes. I just had a red badge as a vendor. So I was aware of the test activities. I’d been in all of the tunnels at the test site and some of the shafts and was familiar with it the years that I worked for Atlas Copco, so I knew the way the operation was and what they were doing. So I hired out as a safety inspector. They were really beefing up the Safety Department at that time. A lot of new safety people came in. A whole bunch of us were safety inspectors. The Chief Safety Engineer was Jim Lancaster, who I reported to. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 And he was REECo. This is all REECo now? Yes. And the Safety Director was Mr. Hill. I don’t remember his first name. He wasn’t there very long. They assigned me to work with the safety engineer for the tunnels and shafts, which at this time they had included the drill hole shafts on Pahute Mesa. I was a safety inspector and he assigned me to the shafts— he didn’t like the shaft mining. He liked the tunnel mining, so he gave me the shafts that were operating and the drill holes, which until I came to the test site I never saw a drill hole shaft. So I quickly learned there was a lot of difference in working in the drill hole shaft and a conventional shaft. Explain that to me. What is a conventional—? Well, in a conventional shaft, they would sink them vertically. Out at the test site they used a Cryderman mucker – they would drill and blast and muck out and square- set timbers with the drill holes, they would drill a hole with one of the big oil field- type drills. They would drill a hole, whatever diameter was requested by the laboratory, and they would drill the hole and case it, and so you had a straight casing from the surface to the depth. Then they would set up their head frame and their normal standard mining equipment for shaft mining— a hoist and compressors and so forth— and then they would send miners down to the location that they wanted to cut the cavity. They would cut the casing and drill and blast and make the cavity for the test. So it was a little bit different— in fact, it was a lot different than conventional shaft mining. So I worked on the drill holes and the shafts for quite a period of time. We all worked out of Mercury at that time. There was about, I’m going to guess, twenty- five to thirty safety engineers, safety inspectors. And all of us reported to Mercury and took our daily assignments there for the plan of operation we were going to be working with, inspecting, so forth. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Also I was a certified mine rescue instructor, and they gave me the training requirement to train the miners in mine rescue, and also train them in first aid. So that was just another added thing on what I did. So I trained the mine rescue teams and first aid for the mining people. This included terms for tunnel reentry after a shot. Then at that time they hired a safety engineer, for the purpose of cleaning up the unexploded ordnance on the test site. His name was Milt [ Milton] Shriver, a retired Marine Corps major, explosive type. They assigned me to him to work with [ 00: 15: 00] him when he needed help getting rid of old ordnance and explosives. That was just another added duty, and I worked with Milt, till he left, with the explosive ordnance disposal, and then they assigned that to me. That was part of my job function was to do the unexploded ordnance and disposal of conventional explosives. Oh, so let me ask you about that. There’s tests of, what, conventional—? Explosives. Explosives, going on at the test site. Yes, this was all non- nuclear explosive: dynamite, ammonium nitrate, DETA [ Diethylenetriamine] sheet, whatever explosive that was excess or ordnance that was discovered on the site itself. That was the responsibility of Safety. You said dynamite, you said something else, and I didn’t understand the third word. You said— let’s see what that was. DETA sheet? That’s it. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 That’s just like a plastic explosive. It’s used in various things on the test site, I assume. But if there was scrap left over from a test, they would call me and I’d pick it up. Sandia or the other laboratories would call and I’d pick it up and dispose of it. So your offices were in Mercury. At that time. At that time. You were living in Las Vegas with your family then? Yes. And did you have children at this point? I had one daughter. OK. And so you commuted every day, is that right? That’s right. I rode the bus back and forth to the test site. What part of town did you live in then? Lived over in the northwest. It was way out on the edge of town, off of Saylor Way. Washington and Jones is the major cross street, or Vegas Drive and Jones, which was in the edge of town there. There was nothing beyond that, beyond Jones, at that time. In fact, my wife taught our daughter to drive on Rainbow, which was a dirt road. That’s great. So we can get back to what you were saying. OK. Eventually the company decided that they wanted the safety people closer to the actual work areas, so they moved everybody from Mercury that was involved with the field operations, DoD [ Department of Defense], with all of the laboratories and heavy construction, heavy equipment, forward to Area 6. Built a building there and we had our offices in Area 6. So all of us involved in those disciplines reported to Area 6 instead of Mercury. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Prior to that, there was a change in the REECo safety management. Mr. Hill left and Collin Dunnam became Director of Safety. And at that time, shortly after that, when they decided to keep some of the safety people in Mercury and some of them forward, they made the position of Field Superintendent, Safety, and that was my responsibility. I became Field Superintendent for the Safety Operations, and at that time I had about eight safety professionals working for me, and their disciplines were mining and tunneling, drilling, heavy equipment, construction, laboratories. So we had our own little group in Area 6, and then of course housing and feeding and motor pool. Those safety people were still in Mercury. So they separated the two groups of people, still reporting to Mr. Dunnam in Mercury, which was good for us because we were on the job quicker at the start of shift, and you could drive from Area 6 to 12 in a very few minutes and it was just a lot handier to be on the job. Reporting out of Mercury a lot of times, you wouldn’t get out into the field until ten or eleven o’clock. By reporting directly to Area 6, you were on the job that much sooner, so it was much better to work out of Area 6 than Mercury. And we were that way for a number of years. And then there were some changes in the Safety Department. OSHA [ Occupational Safety and Health Administration] requirements came [ 00: 20: 00] in and we hired OSHA specialists, code compliance people. And then they decided they would put safety people with the departments, like a safety engineer for LASL [ Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory] and one for LLNL [ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and Sandia, and embed the safety professional with the operation. And I went with Field Operations [ Division], DoD [ FOD/ DoD], with Flangas. I reported to Flangas instead of to a safety director. And it was that way until I retired in 1993. Still worked out of Area 6 but reported to the division manager in Mercury. I also had safety professionals working for me at Tonopah [ Test Range], reporting to me. So we were spread out a little bit different. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 About what time did that shift take place where you go to the different departments? Approximately? Boy, I can’t remember. It was in the eighties I believe. OK. So that’s quite a bit of time that you worked under that system. Yes, quite a bit of time that I worked. I’m going to guess maybe in the late eighties, in the middle eighties. I don’t remember. Really it wasn’t much of a change because the working relationship that we had with the department managers really didn’t change. It was just basically a different reporting system. It worked out real well. Working with FOD/ DoD in the tunnels and the shafts was really a good operation. FOD is—? Field Operations Division. All right. OK, FOD/ DoD. Got it. Yes, Department of Defense, in the testing. And that was a good move. My relationship with the department manager became much closer and our common problems were easier to discuss than going through the whole system. You had a hands- on feel of the operation, rather than putting in a report and then waiting for feedback. You were included in all of his staff meetings and all of his briefings, so you knew what projects were coming on line and what you should gear up for. You knew you were going to have to have a guy in the down hole operation or— the discussions with the department managers were much better once we were embedded in the department. It was a lot easier to get things accomplished because the guy that could accomplish it was in the room next door, instead of having to go all the way back to Mercury or all the way to [ Area] 12 to have a discussion on safety. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Then I continued with the mine rescue training and the first aid, the inspections, basic safety operations, and continued on. Had some really, really good man hours worked without lost time injury. There wasn’t a year that I can remember working out there in the years that I worked that we didn’t have one of the better safety records comparable to other types of operations. We had to kind of break ours up, mining and drilling and, you know, construction. You couldn’t compare us just to the construction industry. So we had some good safety records. And REECo received a lot of awards for safety operations throughout the test site. Also had a safety engineer at the MX [ Missile Experimental] project. When there were special projects that would come up, we would assign somebody to them. And in Tonopah, we always kept one guy up there full- time in Safety who reported to Area 6. So that worked out. But we had a good operation. We had some good people. We had quite a staff and when you combined them all together, Mercury and the forward areas, it was a big staff of safety. And they were all very, very professional. Good people. Now this kind of safety— I���m asking a question here— you’re dealing with mining kinds of safety issues as opposed to RADSAFE [ radiological safety] kind of safety issues in your field? [ 00: 25: 00] Yes. We had no involvement with RADSAFE or Industrial Hygiene, none of those. We interfaced with them on tunnel reentries or when they were having drill backs, for example, after an event, RADSAFE personnel on board, we had a safety engineer on board also. So there was a close interface between RADSAFE and Industrial Safety, and Industrial Hygiene. All kinds of work— did our own thing, only worked together. OK. That’s a great overview you gave me. Thank you. Just so laypeople and other kinds of people can understand this better, maybe you could take me through the kinds of daily things UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 that would be involved in this whole world of safety as far as what you would do— what would a day maybe look like when a tunnel operation was going on? Basically, if you were going to take a look at the tunnel, you would generally go up to the tunnel when the shift went in— say, day shift and they went underground at eight o’clock— you would be there to ride in on the train with the workers. And that day, if you were coming up there for a specific reason, you wanted to look at— say, Industrial Hygiene was going to take air measurements, or the RADSAFE people were going to do their thing that particular day, they would generally be there at the same time and then you, you know, discuss and go in with them or, I’ll meet you in there, or whatever. But if it was just strictly for mine safety, go up to the tunnel, get on the train, and go in and get off, go to the doghouse as the walking boss and the shifter would line out the guys and listen to what heading they were going to or what location, the lineup, and they’d look at the logbook from graveyard shift and line out the crews for the day. Then say they were drilling with a jumbo in a certain drift, you’d walk back and on the way back you���d look at the track, you’d look at the back and the rock bolts, whatever was going on in the tunnel and just make a quick visual inspection, housekeeping, this type of thing, you know, is the trash out? Are the walkways clear? They had underground shops you can go in, and say there was a welding shop, the screens in there, is the welder welding on something flat, you know, have a screen up. Just basic safety things that 99 percent of the people did anyway. They were as conscious of safety as we were. Go into the heading and they were drilling, you know, everybody had protective equipment on: hard hat, glasses, earplugs, whatever. You’d just make a mental note. Very seldom did you write anything down right, you know, in front of the person. If you saw something that you thought needed correcting or wasn’t quite safe, you just make a note of it and then report it to the shift boss or the walking boss. You know, if there was a slab that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 looked loose, you can just stop the operation and, Hey, shut the drill off, you know, and get that slab down, or whatever the situation was. The cooperation from the miners was normally very good. They were gung- ho mining. They weren’t working on a contract basis but they liked to make footage. It was an individual thing, you know, a shift thing. They worked hard and they worked fast. Our responsibility was to see that they did it safely. And fortunately we had good people. I can say over the years that I worked underground that there were very, very few people that gave us any resistance to safety. The managers, the walking bosses, the department manager were behind whatever we did 100 percent. We had no problems with getting things done as far as safety was concerned. Am I correct in hearing you say that they would— was their competition between the shifts about how many—? [ 00: 30: 00] Yes, just, you know, We got more hole than you did last night, or, We broke more ground. Just friendly competition. Sure. Good competition. Everybody was trying to outdo the other. They were all experienced miners and they came from all over the country. I met people out there that I’d worked [ with] in Arizona, in Bishop, California. Of course I knew a lot of them from being with Atlas Cotco from the little mines in Death Valley to the Nevada Test Site. That’s one of the things that’s so interesting for me to learn, is about the— I don’t know if you would call it a community, but in the sense a community of miners in the West here, and seeing people at different places and then people coming to Nevada to do a really different kind of mining than any other place. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 It was the same type of mining, the mining as mining, but it was a different atmosphere, and it wasn’t like you had to get so many tons out a day to make a profit. And there was no incentive to— it was a standard wage. There was no incentive, what they call bonus mining, like it was in the copper mines where they had a program set up. The miners called it “ gypo.” Your day’s pay was, I’m just using numbers, was twenty dollars, but if you drilled and blasted so many feet in the day, when they measured up at the end of the week for the pay, if you exceeded what standard they had set, you got a bonus for that much more. So there was no contract mining at the test site. It was all straight day’s pay and there was no reason, really, to take shortcuts as far as safety was concerned to try to make more money. But a lot of the guys that came to the test site from the underground mining had that mindset of gypo, of making as much footage or tonnage or whatever you wanted to as they could, and that was just one of the things of the trade, I guess. And the tunnel miners were the same way. It was tunnel miners from the California water projects and back East. In fact, I think one of the superintendents was from New York, in the tunnels that they drove back there. But there was some education that had to be done, but that was done by the departments themselves. The department managers and the project managers were firm on safety. And over the years, it took years to pound it in some of their heads, but they got the message. And they had a good operation. They were good people. And I think the years from— I missed the surface testing. That was before my time. But I did live in Death Valley at Darwin, on the other side of the Panamints, and we used to get up in the morning to watch the flash from the detonation light up the side of the hill. Somebody would say, There’s going to be a test tomorrow at the test site, five o’clock, and everybody in the mining camp, kids and women, get up at five o’clock and stand outside. We UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 lived in trailer houses, get out, stand out there, and wait, and then see the bright flash, and then pretty soon across Death Valley you can see the mushroom up in the sun. So we’re familiar with what was going on at the test site. In fact, one time we worked swing shift and we decided we’d come to Las Vegas, and after work we got in cars and drove from Darwin down to the Panamint Valley and across Death Valley. We got out there somewhere, I guess it was between Lathrop Wells and Mercury, they had a roadblock, and we stopped and got out and sat on the fender of the car and then waited for it to go somewhere out on the test site. It was really bright and you could feel the rumble. But that’s as close as I ever came to the surface testing. But the years from 1967 to ’ 93, I think, were the best years of the test site. They were good years and everybody worked hard and everybody that I knew of enjoyed their job. A lot of guys have a lot longer time than I had at the test site, so it couldn’t have been too bad a place to work. Right. Speaking of testing, with the safety, the tests themselves, I mean, the safety issues, I’ve [ 00: 35: 00] seen some photographs at the ends of the tunnels, the caverns or— Yes. Cavities. Cavities? Thank you. Dug out for placement of the device. Were there any particular special safety issues that happened once you got to that place where— was that a different kind of mining? No, the mining was the same. They were just breaking rock and making a room, you know. The mining was the same. I’m sure there were other safety aspects that the laboratory had to— we had no knowledge, you know, in electricity and things like that. OK. But from the mining aspect— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 The mining and construction was the same. And speaking of the laboratories, did you have to deal with the safety of the scientists or engineers when they went in? They had their own safety people, and we interfaced with LLNL safety and LASL, and Department of Defen