Trinity Site downwinders keep up the fight

[TexasTowelie]

An obelisk made of black lava marks Trinity Site ground zero, where the first atomic bomb was detonated at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. The site will be open to the public Saturday. (Richard Pipes/Albuquerque Journal)

Before she died, Annie Chavez told her children the story of how 70 years ago it snowed in July, how the walls of the family home in Capitan crumbled and the floors rocked and the sun rose with a crack into the dark, predawn skies from the West, not the East. And how scared she was.

It was, she thought, the end of the world.

“Mom stumbled to her feet and started yelling at us to get our rosaries. She yelled for us to pray that our sins be forgiven and that we go to God,” Chavez told them. “Then my mom said, ‘See, it’s Jesus, in the cloud,’ and when I looked out the door there was the brightest cloud I’d ever seen.”

They didn’t go to God that day, much to the eternal despair of Chavez’s mother, and it was not until years later they learned that what they had seen and felt that early morning of July 16, 1945, was the detonation of the first atomic bomb on a desolate stretch of the Jornada del Muerto desert at a spot called Trinity Site, about 50 miles west of Capitan.

Read more: http://www.abqjournal.com/651318/news/trinity-site-downwinders-keep-up-the-fight.html