Hanford Fire Under Control Firefighting Force Reduced And Some On The Way Home

All but the last bits of fire, smoldering in several brushy draws, were out by the time fresh fire crews reported for duty on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation Friday morning.

“It’s contained; it’s stopped; it’s going to look pretty sad by the end of today’s shift,” said Dale Warriner of the Washington Department of Natural Resources, one of the agencies fighting the blaze. “Yesterday was a good day. The winds that were predicted didn’t happen.”

Friday was forecast to be equally friendly to firefighting, and Hanford planned to start sending some of the 850 firefighters home. The aerial firefighting force was clipped to six helicopters and no airplanes from Thursday’s nine airplanes and seven helicopters.

Meanwhile, other firefighters were on their hands and knees, looking for hot spots in a 300-foot-wide perimeter in the unburned portion of the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve. That work was being done in lieu of digging a fire line in the fragile reserve, prized because it was not tainted by radioactive pollution or other significant human intrusion during Hanford’s years as a plutonium weapons factory.

Some of the sagebrush will survive, Warriner predicted, which will help the scorched acres recover.

Hanford workers are searching for a few pieces of soil monitoring equipment that contain radioactive Americium 241 and beryllium. The radioactive material is part of the mechanism these permanent monitors use measure soil moisture.

Fire officials predicted they easily survived the fire without losing any of the radioactive material.

The rest of the damage tally: a guard shack, trailer and small storage building on the Arid Lands Reserve, and 20 homes and 53 outbuildings in Benton City. Fire also blackened plants and sage on about 200,000 acres across the reservation and in Benton County.

The fire also moved across three old sites where liquid radioactive waste was dumped between the 1950s and 1970s. At its worst, the fire crossed a fence into the zone where 177 nuclear waste tanks, with 54 million gallons of radioactive waste, are buried.

Federal and state officials continued to insist no radioactive materials were released into the atmosphere as a result of the fire. But they conceded some small release was possible when pressed on how such a blanket statement could be absolutely true - given that some plants pull nuclear waste pollution from the soil.

Still, the radioactive plants are at the center of the reservation and the radioactive particles are heavy. So if any radioactive particles were kicked into the air, they settled back to the ground before getting off of Hanford, said Debra McBaugh of the Washington Health Department.

The Health Department sent out three air-monitoring crews Thursday, and has so far found radiation levels exactly where they would be expected without a fire.

“Our hypothesis is zero release and we go out and do extensive monitoring to prove our hypothesis,” McBaugh said.

Other scientists agreed that it is likely no radioactive waste was released.

“I don’t have any reason to doubt that,” said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. He said early monitoring would have turned up any “tremendous concentrations.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson made a whistle stop in the lobby of the Richland federal building Friday morning. With 16 television cameras rolling, radio shows taping and reporters scribbling, Richardson delivered his condolences to the families who lost their homes and the relatives of the woman killed in the automobile accident that started the fire Tuesday. He praised firefighters and Tri-Cities residents for a heroic effort.

“This was a stubborn fire to contain,” Richardson said.

He pushed local officials to ask for financial assistance from Congress to cover the damages. U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Tri-Cities, was by Richardson’s side, in what seemed a “made for the campaign season” moment.

Most of Hanford’s 8,500-strong workforce stayed home again Friday. They likely will return to work next week.

Hanford was created by the Manhattan Project during World War II to make plutonium for nuclear weapons - a purpose it pursued for decades, generating the nation’s biggest volume of radioactive wastes. Its primary mission now is cleanup.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.