THEN CAME THE SUMMER SNOW
by Trisha T. Pritikin
(Moonshine Cove Press, 2025)

 

Q: What does “summer snow” refer to?

Great question. “Summer snow” refers to radioactive ruthenium flakes that fell during summer months in the early 1950s, blanketing the town of Richland, Washington as well as farmlands across the Columbia River. The ruthenium was released from exhaust stacks at the massive, secretive Hanford atomic weapons production site near Richland in southeastern Washington state.

“Summer snow” also refers to airborne radioactive flakes and other particles from atomic tests that began in 1951 at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). The tests generated huge clouds of fallout that drifted onto communities downwind of the test site.

Q: Can you tell us about THEN CAME THE SUMMER SNOW?

THEN CAME THE SUMMER SNOW evokes the comedy, pathos and tragedy of 1950s America, a decade rich in delusion, prejudice, and patriotism. Richland, Washington housed Hanford’s engineers, scientists, chemists, other white-collar professionals, and their families. Richland was a government-owned atomic town where neighbors and friends were FBI informants and the families of those who talked were often ‘disappeared’ in the night.

The reader is introduced to the Higgenbothum family on an ordinary afternoon in 1958. Herbie Higgenbothum, ten-years-old, tinkers with the Geiger counter his father recently acquired for weekend uranium prospecting. When Herbie powers up the device, it emits a barrage of clicks, revealing that the milk in Herbie’s nearby glass is radioactive.

Edith’s husband Herb immediately understands the implications of Herbie’s discovery. As a security-cleared Hanford engineer, he is well aware that the site secretly releases radioactive byproducts of plutonium production, including radioactive iodine, through its exhaust stacks. He has always relied on the assurances of the Atomic Energy Commission and Hanford management that levels of radiation in communities around Hanford are too low to be of concern. He is therefore baffled by this discovery that local milk contains significant radiation. Herb nonetheless assures Edith that the milk is safe, and tells her that the Geiger counter is clearly defective.

Meanwhile, Herb secretly uses Edith’s typewriter to type a letter to his superiors in which he seeks assurances that radiation in local milk will not harm his son. When she is cleaning the house, Edith discovers a carbon copy of the letter that has fallen behind the desk. From the letter, she now understands that her husband lied to her—the Geiger counter did not malfunction when it detected the presence of radiation in Herbie’s milk. She no longer trusts Herb, and as her anger at him grows, it causes a marital rift.

When potentially cancerous nodules are found on Herbie’s thyroid, Edith is faced with the very real possibility her son has thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine in local milk. Edith evolves before the reader’s eyes, shedding the proper 1950s veneer of a dutiful housewife, growing in confidence and authority to become a thorn in the side of those who value atomic secrecy over the health of downwind communities.

Based on the real-life town of Richland, Washington, the novel takes the reader along on a true atomic age hero’s journey filled with shape shifters, tricksters, and mothers whose only motivation is to save their children, no matter what the stakes.

Q: Could the US government have protected downwind populations from the radiation it released from Hanford’s stacks?

Yes, the public could have been protected through inexpensive, highly effective public health measures, yet government officials refused to implement these measures.

It was known years before radioactive iodine was released from Hanford’s exhaust stacks that radioactive iodine (in this case, primarily I-131) can be absorbed by the thyroid, particularly in infants and children, leading to severe damage or total destruction of the developing thyroid, and possibly, to thyroid cancer. I-131 travelled from Hanford’s exhaust stacks onto pasture grass downwind of the site. Cows and goats grazed on the contaminated grass, and the I-131 made its way into the animals’ milk supply. This was referred to as the “milk pathway,” and was one of the primary ways infants and children ingested high levels of I-131. I-131 was also released from atomic tests at the Nevada Test site, and in fallout from other Manhattan Project and Cold war atomic weapons production and testing sites, damaging the thyroids of infants, children and adults downwind of those sites.

It was understood at the time that potassium iodide (KI) tablets could be given to the population to block uptake of I-131. Another recommendation made by public health officials but not implemented by the Atomic Energy Commission, was that only iodized table salt be made available locally, as iodized salt would help block uptake of I-131. Neither public health measure was undertaken because officials feared the public would become “unduly alarmed” should people learn their environment was full of airborne radiation.

Q: Why did you choose to write about this topic?

I was born and raised in Richland during the 1950s. Following the wartime Manhattan Project, Hanford ramped up plutonium production to meet the Cold War demands of the nuclear arms race between the US and former Soviet Union.

Hanford manufactured the plutonium for the world’s first test of an atomic bomb, the Trinity Test, detonated July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, NM, and for Fat Man, the atomic bomb that decimated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Beginning in late 1944, and for more than forty years thereafter, Hanford operators secretly released millions of curies of radiation, the radioactive byproducts of plutonium production, to the air and into the waters of the Columbia River, exposing civilians downwind and downriver. Infants and children were especially susceptible to the damaging effects of radiation exposure. Hanford’s airborne radiation spread into British Columbia and across eastern Washington, northern Oregon, Idaho and into Western Montana.

I now suffer from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, hypoparathyroidism, congenital joint deformities, and other disabling health issues more likely than not caused by exposure to Hanford’s radiation in utero and during childhood. My only sibling died shortly after birth, part of a spike of neonatal deaths downwind of Hanford. My father, a Hanford engineer, died of aggressive metastatic thyroid cancer, and my mother passed away from aggressive, metastatic malignant melanoma. I am the only surviving member of my immediate family.

In THEN CAME THE SUMMER SNOW, I used the unique opportunity that fiction provides to create a world in which a housewife in Richland, inadvertently discovering that the milk in her child’s glass is radioactive, courageously challenges her atomic engineer husband as well as the Atomic Energy Commission, questioning whether Richland is a safe place to raise a family. I so wish I’d had an Edith Higgenbothum in my life.

I have worked for over thirty-five years to secure at least a modicum of justice for those who, like my family, struggle with, or have already succumbed to, cancer and other health damage caused by exposure to ionizing radiation downwind of Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons production and testing sites, nuclear waste storage sites, and modern day nuclear power reactor accidents.

I am also the author of the award-winning The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, (University Press of Kansas, 2020) which includes the oral histories (including my own) of Hanford downwinders who filed personal injury claims against Hanford contractors for radiation exposure in mass toxic tort personal injury litigation, In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation.

Our stories serve as irrefutable evidence of the devastating human toll of production, testing and use of nuclear weapons.