The First Link

Concrete silos seven stories high rose from the surrounding forest and farmland like ominous watchtowers. Smoke billowed out of stacks into the air as trains barreled in and out of the small rural community all day. Surrounding a fenced perimeter were guards armed with guns, hiding the secret within. Hiding the secret that inside were thousands of tons of uranium ore being processed, a radioactive metal which helped fuel a global nuclear arms race for nearly 40 years.

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Lisa Crawford was recently married with a young child when she moved to Ross, which sits 30 minutes south of Oxford, in late 1984, searching for a quiet life for her family. At first glance, Crawford found that simple existence she was looking for: a rented house in a quiet Midwestern town. But one look across the road quickly shattered that reality.

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The sprawling thousand-acre facility was impossible to miss, looming over the town and its residents, many of whom it employed, but even more of whom had no idea of the radioactive 

product within its intimidating exterior. Yet, a much greater danger was spawning from the plant, one that was out of sight and unknown to the workers and Crawford alike, until her landlord came knocking.

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In 1981, three years before Crawford moved to Ross, the plant, known then as the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, first detected uranium in offsite drinking water wells. There were no federal limits for uranium concentrations in water, and the Department of Energy (DOE), which built the plant and contracted operations out to National Lead of Ohio, decided against taking action on the contamination. However, Crawford’s landlord still admitted her well had tested positive for the radioactive element.

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Crawford and her family didn’t know what to make of the news and, wary of the dismissiveness of the DOE, decided to contact other agencies.

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“You know, we're just average folks,” Crawford said. “We don't know anything.”

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Soon after, in 1985, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dispatched surface water expert Graham Mitchell to test her well. At this point, rumors of environmental contamination had begun to circulate, and uranium was found at two sites in the surrounding area. Concern was growing. Ross residents were forming advocacy groups, and the media was picking up stories about uranium pollution.

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Despite having no jurisdiction over the federal site as a state employee, Mitchell immediately knew something was wrong when he also detected unusual levels of uranium. What he found was the same as the DOE, but he had a very different and much clearer message to Crawford.

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“Find another source of drinking water.”

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— 

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Mitchell sits on a bench in the Fernald Nature Preserve visitor center as early morning sunlight streams in from floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating a bright and open lobby surrounded by photos and infographics on the other sides. An average-size man with gray hair, glasses and a mustache that beckons back to the ’80s, he breaks into a wild smile as I walk through the doors.

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“Sam! It’s great to finally meet you in person,” he says while extending his arm for a handshake.

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The visitors center was completed in 2008, more than 20 years after Mitchell first found uranium in Crawford’s well. It sits right where purified uranium was processed for decades and is the culmination of a $4.4 billion environmental restoration effort. The entire Fernald Preserve, as it is now known, is what's left of the 1,050-acre Cold War chemical plant that operated for nearly four decades.

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Looking through the window behind Mitchell, across the wetland where concrete factories once rose from the earth, I struggle to imagine the industrial behemoth that once covered these grounds.

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For him, though, it’s quite easy. In 1985, in response to the contamination and pressure from the local residents and Ohio EPA, the DOE allowed Mitchell and other outsiders on the site. By then, the purpose of the plant was known, but the extent to which its radioactive product had infiltrated the community was not.

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“It was scary at times; there were lots of unknowns,” Mitchell said, recalling the first time he stepped foot inside the site.

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He leads me to a dimly lit hallway next to the information desk. Along the left wall, a string of grainy black and white photographs creates a timeline, starting before the 1950s. I start reading about the farming families who once owned this land as Mitchell describes the process of buying their property, and the beginning of this area’s incredible but tumultuous past 75 years starts to take shape.

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In the early 1950s, the United States government was looking for sites to build a uranium processing plant, which was the first step in a nationwide process to build nuclear weapons. The Fernald site was chosen because it was flat, close to a railroad and accessible for skilled workers in the surrounding area, including Cincinnati. Construction began in 1951 and was finished within the year.

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Uranium ore mined in the U.S., Canada and Belgian Congo were shipped to Fernald. The metal ore was separated and purified on site, the “first-link” in the nuclear weapon building process, before being shipped to other facilities in Washington, Colorado and South Carolina. 

At these locations, the uranium was bombarded with neutrons, causing a chemical reaction that transformed it into plutonium, an even more radioactive element for the core of nuclear weapons. 

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Finally, it was sent to other facilities where the warheads were assembled. The process of purification at Fernald created uranium waste and radioactive radon gas, which were stored in barrels and silos on site.

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Between the factory buildings, communal worker spaces, silos, storage containers and more, the site was a conglomerate of industry. On panels and displays lining the visitor center, the DOE describes how measures were taken to ensure workers’ safety on the site, including using protective gear and scanning for radiation when workers moved between different buildings. It was hard work, but it paid well, better than most jobs in the area.

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“It was the poster child site for weapons programs, it was supposed to be safe. But are we hurting ourselves at the same time?” Mitchell questioned as we wound our way through the educational displays.

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Around the world, Cold War tensions were heating up, and in 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, employment at Fernald peaked at 3,000. From chemists and engineers to cooks and janitors, the plant was a major employer in Ross. Workers were still unable to tell their family and friends the true nature of their work in fear of Cold War spies, but for nearly three decades, the plant ran well.

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Until 1979, when the DOE discovered that radon gas had been leaking from two of the silos for years.

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In 1985, Fernald was managed on-site by the National Lead of Ohio, with the DOE only providing oversight. With limited federal involvement and no involvement on the state level, Crawford said there was a frustrating lack of transparency.

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“No OSHA, no EPA, U.S. or Ohio, no nothing; they told no one nothing,” Crawford said, the exasperation still in her voice 40 years later. “There was no oversight at all.”

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At this point, word had spread of environmental contamination, and discontent in the community was growing. Residents formed Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH), an activist group that started asking questions, putting pressure on the DOE and demanding answers.

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Eventually, they got a meeting with leaders of the plant at a local elementary school. The meeting carried out like a town hall meeting, as residents signed up to speak and were given a limited time slot. 

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Crawford made sure she was one of them. She waited and waited as the meeting dragged on, growing more irritated as they continued to dodge questions and claim the community had nothing to worry about. Crawford said she didn’t buy it for one second.

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When it was her turn, she marched up to the stand with water from her property. In front of the packed room, she wanted to see them own up to their words.

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“I sat my jug of water and my five red solo cups in front of these idiots,” Crawford recalled. “… ‘Your letter tells me that this water is safe to drink. I want to see every one of you drink it.’”

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The cups were left untouched.

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That set off a domino effect, thrusting Crawford into the media spotlight as the leader of FRESH and a vocal advocate for the injustice her community was facing. At this point, the Ohio and U.S. EPA were testing water both on and off-site, and residents were using bottled water rather than their wells. Pressure was mounting to shut down the plant, with Crawford and FRESH spearheading it.

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Crawford and her husband sued the DOE and National Lead of Ohio in 1985. Members of FRESH scoured piles of documents from the site, discovering that they knew about contamination years before informing Ross residents. They became the first outside group to tour Fernald and came equipped with cameras and radiation-measurement tools, sharing what they found with local media.

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Crawford bluntly admitted that what drove her, and many in the community, was anger. Anger that they had to fight for answers. Anger that it was taking so long to create change. Anger that people at Fernald knew what was going on, but didn’t tell anyone. 

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At one point, Fernald’s lawyers blatantly told Crawford’s lawyers that they didn’t believe the community could do anything about it.

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“‘We knowingly and willingly contaminated the site and the water, and there's really nothing you can do about it,’” Crawford recalls the lawyers admitting. “Oh wow, that really pissed the community off.”

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Eventually, Crawford testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, demanding that the federal government step in and halt the uranium production that was poisoning her community.

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Thrust into the spotlight as the sole voice of Ross, she said testifying was intimidating. But after seeing her own representative stand up against other representatives on her behalf, Crawford found the strength she needed.

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“We left a lot of shoe leather in D.C. too,” Crawford said. “We held our elected officials’ feet to the fire. We’re like, ‘By golly, you represent us, and you're going to do your job.’”

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In 1988, then Ohio Governor Richard Celeste sent a letter to President Ronald Reagan asking him to shut down production. Reagan acknowledged that something needed to be done in a visit to Ohio soon after, and in 1989, it was declared a superfund site, and environmental clean up began. But it wasn’t until 1991 that the Fernald plant officially halted all uranium production. The years of pressure from FRESH and environmental agencies had finally paid off.

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“We became a force of reckoning to be dealt with,” Crawford said of FRESH during that time.

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Almost exactly 40 years after the plant opened, and a decade after water contamination was detected, the uranium processing was over. But the work to restore the land had just begun.

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—

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A mallard duck couple swims lazily across a man-made wetland surrounded by tallgrass prairie. I watch them go by before raising my eyes to the large earthen mound rising out of the grass several hundred yards away. Underneath that mound is 85% of the harmful waste, more than a hundred thousand tons, that decades of uranium processing produced, radioactive and not. Even further below the mound, and my own feet for that matter, is the Great Miami Aquifer, where thousands of pounds of uranium still remain.

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I turn around and head back to the visitor center. I go to the front desk and ask for Brian Zimmerman, the site manager overseeing current operations at the preserve, whom I am meeting for an interview. I am led to a small conference room full of books, newspaper clippings and a plethora of posters and handouts detailing the transformation from superfund site to nature preserve.

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In 1991, Fernald’s mission was officially changed to environmental clean up.

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When production was halted, a group made up of residents and employees at the DOE, Ohio EPA, U.S. EPA and more was formed to determine the fate of the Fernald site. It was clear from the beginning that it was going to be extremely costly and time-consuming to reduce the uranium contamination to “background levels,” or the level at which an element is naturally found in the environment.

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In light of the problems from contamination in their own backyard, the residents of Ross decided to send only the worst waste away, and in 1992, the first 1,600 barrels of the waste were sent by rail to Nevada, out of an eventual total 15,000. The remaining waste was stored on-site to avoid harming other places. This was one of many decisions that the community directly made, as their input was key in determining the future of Fernald.

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Mitchell describes how residents wanted it to be a community space, and without the possibility of having people move back on the land permanently, the idea for a nature preserve was born.

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“The idea was to give something back to the community,” Mitchell said.

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And that they did. After nearly two decades of clean up and restoration, a myriad of six different habitats and seven miles of public-use trails cover the former production site, along with one of the largest man-made wetlands in Ohio. The preserve has become extremely popular with birders, as the variety of habitats attracts an abundance of species, including some that are rare to southwest Ohio.

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Yet, behind the restored landscape, there are still harsh reminders of the past. A raised mound that is closed off to the public houses deadly levels of radioactive waste, sealed up and buried underground. There is still a uranium plume in the Great Miami Aquifer, which supplies much of Southwest Ohio. The DOE has contained the plume, however, and chemically treats the contaminated water before it is discharged back into the Great Miami River.

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Overseeing all of this is the DOE and Ohio EPA, a key component in the increased transparency that was so important to Ross residents. Even today, monitoring occurs daily, and untreated groundwater contamination levels are not expected to reach drinking quality standards until 2045. Fernald still echoes the scars of its past, and maintaining two vastly different worlds is a challenge, but it has been successful so far.

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“We have our ongoing operations, and having the public in areas where we have operations is a potential source of conflict,” said Zimmerman, who is the only federal employee at the site. “... We haven’t had too many issues with members of the public going off trail and affecting our operations, but it is a balance we have to strike.”

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While Zimmerman sees the visibility of Fernald’s past as necessary to ensure it remains a safe and healthy site, he admits those who lived through its worst days view it differently. When Fernald showed what can happen when industrial sites have poor environmental regulation, people from Ross and the EPA fought tooth and nail to keep it in the public eye, ensuring that something would be done. Now, they fight to preserve its history, in the hope that nothing like it will happen again.

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“How do you make sure no one forgets this site?” Mitchell questioned, who continued working at the Ohio EPA throughout the restoration process.

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The repercussions from the plant still weigh on Ross, though. Crawford said that medical studies in the town revealed higher rates of breast, lung and kidney cancer, along with childhood developmental disorders. Zimmerman said that some Ross residents who lived with the towering silos and billowing smoke stacks still hold onto those memories, still wary of the people and the land that transformed their small town.

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Yet, there were victories. Crawford won $78 million for her community, and a workers’ union won $14 million. The contamination is contained now, the visitors center promotes itself as a community asset and Ross stands as a testament to environmental advocacy.

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Graham Mitchell took the first steps in admitting something was wrong. Leaders in the town and government stepped up to defend Ross residents. And Lisa Crawford fought so passionately for her community that it thrust her into a world of advocacy she would have never expected.

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It brought her to D.C., to meeting President Bill Clinton, to countless national interviews and carrying the Olympic torch through Cincinnati. Yet, after all of it – all the lights, the anger, the work – she found herself back where it all began. Living the quiet life she had dreamed of in a small, resilient town: her kids grown, but her eyes ever watchful.

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“When you don't pay attention anymore is when you get in trouble,” Crawford said. “It's my job. It's my lifelong job.”

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