◆ SpookStack

| following the explosion, made fire con’ _hpossible. The * many small blazes ignited bythe explc .on joined to form bigger blazes, and these finally flowed together to be- come one huge “fire-storm” that enveloped most of the ! city and raged for hours,® Terrific winds travelled radially , inward toward the center of the conflagration, from all directions, An enc:mous column of smoke rose rapidly over the burning area. The loss of oxygen and the outpouring of acrid fumes in the region of the fire seems to have accounted " for the deaths of many who might othetwise have been able to reach‘safety, The forests and fields caught fire too.? The wind out of i the west of northwest swept these fires along, denuding vast areas of Illinois and southern Missouri. Throughout the entire country forest fires raged for weeks, The eastern Ozarks burned for two weeks, until heavy rains put out the blaze. Tronically enough, radiation caused little harm imme- ! diately -- first the heat and fire and flying debris got in their deadly blows, But the fallouf came soon enough, It is now calculated that an amount of fission products equivalent to a 9 megaton all-fission explosion was pro- duced by the two weapons used on St. Louis.!® Of this staggering amount, about seven megatons of energy equi- valent came down as loca) fallout; the other two megatons have been dispersed in the stratosphere and will come down as world-wide fallout,?! The Jocal fallout was distributed downwind over an elongated area about 80 miles wide at the widest pojni, and about 200 miles long -- approximately 9000 square miles altogether, stretching across southern Illinois. towards Evansville, Indiana. 12 Fallout Casualties Casualties from local fallout were heaviest around East _ St. Louis, In Belleville, persons in the open or in inadequate shelters received radiation doses of over 1000 rads during the second hour after the attack. During the first 24 hours after the attack the total radiation to such persons was about 5000 rads.'3 Since only 1000 rads of radiation, received in one dose will kil] al] the people exposed to it, those who received 5000 rads didn’ live through the second day. Al- though meny people stayed indoors in an attempt to avoid the fallout hazard, some were in buildings that reduced the radia- tion dose to one-tenth, 4 so that 500 rads were absorbed within a day, All who received as much as 1000 rads within a few hours were dead by the end of the week. !5 For those who reccived 500 rads in 2 short interval, mortality was about 90 per cent; mostly they were dead by the middle of November. '¢ In the whole 9000 square mile area of appreciable local fallout people who couldn’t or didn’t find shelter received doses up tv 500 rads the second day after the attack, 250 the third day, 150 the fourth day, and 100 on the fifth day.17 They didn't live much longer than that, ‘The region of local fallout is still radioactive. '8 The persistence of high radioactivity was one of the factors that Jed {o the decision, later in December, to evacuate most of the arca, Another factor was the probability that no crups could be raised on the heavily contaminated soi! for a Jony, time, and then there was also the fear that the (denuded land, with its water-holding, cover gone, would be subject to revere flooding in the spring, % Hi {urns out that the decivion was well (aken, We hear that over hundreds of se re es of Souther JHinois there is sti eon but the scarred, eroded wad nothing, bos spraui plainte Soonis conditions is no possibility of u d grown on it. The worst * of it is that the peak © s¢cumulation of the long-lived isotopes is stil] in the future, In about two years we expect that the strontium 90 concentration in the local fallout region will range from 10,000 to 300,000 milli- * curies per square mile, and cesium 137 from 20,000 to 600,000. 17 On a worldwide scale, the explosion of 4,000 mega tons of weapons released 2000 megatons of energy equivalent of fission products, This means that a total of 200 million curies of strontium 90 was produced.!9 (Remember that a “curie” is a thousand millicuries.) Four-fifths of this came down as loca) fallout, but the remaining 40 million curies will come down gradually from the stratosphere, In two to five years, when the strontium 90 concentration will be greatest, the average strontium 90 concentration in the north tem- perate zone will be about 1400 millicuries per square mile.20 Back in the late fifties we were concerned be- cause the soil around St. Louis had 46 millicuries per Square mile because of fallout from testing!?! And yet it is expected that 10 to 20 per cent of the area of the United States will have concentrations up to 500 times greater than the north temperate zone average of 1400 millicuries per square mile. '7 Right now it doesn’t seem possible that food crops could be grown in such areas for @ century at least.22 li. A DOCTOR'S REPORT I’m Bill Rosonthal, M.D., practitioner of one of the few professions that still flourish in this new era, Sickness and suffering are among the few things we have no shortage of these days, Not that a doctor’s life is ‘a very satisfactory one. It’s maddening to think of what we could have done, this past year, with doctors and nurses and technicians and hospital beds and antibiotics and drugs. Not to mention food, Well, we did what we could. I was at County Hospital when the moment came. County and St. Vincent’s were the only hospitals in the entire St. Louis area that remained in action, All other hospifals including our two great medical centers were in the zone of total destruction. St. Joseph’s in Kirkwood stood up, but was heavily damaged in the fire that raged through the area. I don’t remember when the first casualties began to arrive -- we were too busy moving patients dowstairs and trying to cover the broken windows. We were handicapped by Jack of light. There was an auxiliary power supply, of cousse, but we hesitated to draw on it because we suspected, right away, that Union Electric wasn’t likely to operate again in our time.$ The first victims to arrive were some youngsters fram Clayton High School, Caught out of doors, they had sus- tained terible burns. #3 ‘Three of them who had been standing near a wall had been hit by the “bouncing hack” of the pressure wave from the wall; they were already bleeding from the lungs. In a few minules more, people were pouring in -- more burns, injuries from flying ¢ and falling, masonry, even broken heads and Jimbs from the powerfu! wind that had picked people up and smashed them against walls and trees. Supplies Give Out We worked feverishly, but it was like trying, to bail out a lake with a teacup, Our supplies 4, ater of hours." Phe phones were dead, but from what we comld