Woolsey Fire & Santa Susana Field Lab: Hot Particles Blowing in the Wind?

Paramount Ranch during the Woolsey Fire

Climate changes confront us everywhere, whether it is the horrific late fall forest fires in California or the aftermath filled with mudslides and flooding because the burned and scared ground cannot absorb any rainfall. While Californians face increased decimation of their ravaged landscape as well as significant homelessness, each week we learn of ongoing climate issues somewhere in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

 In June, Fairewinds Energy Education moved to South Carolina, and with the major rain and snow storm hitting the southeast today and tomorrow, weather modeling forecasts downtown flooding in Charleston for Sunday morning at the same time that North Carolina and parts of Virginia will receive record snowfalls for this time of year. Parts of North Carolina are still devastated by the head-on hurricane that hit in mid-September.

 Imagine what it would be like for the people that are facing these “natural disasters” to also be facing toxic chemical exposures like those that occurred just last year in 2017 with Hurricane Harvey in Texas, or worst of all exposure to radioactivity from atomic power plants, nuclear weapons waste dumps, or the waste left behind from the development of nuclear weapons and atomic labs or test sites in city after city throughout the U.S.

 Did you know that America’s first atomic meltdown was not at Three Mile Island (TMI) in Pennsylvania?

The Santa Susana Lab

Instead, the first known atomic meltdown in the United States actually occurred in 1959 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory northwest of Los Angeles and almost due north of Malibu. Covered up for decades by the U.S. government, the Santa Susana meltdown spewed radioactive isotopes far and wide, and no one was informed. 

 Now we have learned that the Woolsey Fire, may have been sparked by a Pacific Gas & Electric (PSE&G) transformer failure, and may have disturbed, burned, and distributed radioactive isotopes leftover from the Santa Susana meltdown and carried by billowing smoke and the rain and flooding that has followed.

 People from all over the U.S. and most especially California have written and called us asking Fairewinds Energy Education to help determine whether Californians are at risk from migrating Santa Susana radioactivity from the 97,000 acres destroyed by the Woolsey Fire. We don’t know that answer, but we are helping Californians find it.