80 years after first nuclear bomb test, New Mexico downwinders remember hearing the blast

TULAROSA — Mary Riseley walked through glowing rows of luminarias looking for her mother’s name at a vigil for New Mexico downwinders Wednesday, 80 years to the day after the first nuclear bomb test.

As dark hues of blue and black overtook the sky in Tularosa Veterans Park, Riseley gave up her hunt. She didn’t have enough light to read the names written on each of the more than 1,000 brown paper bags. Instead, she settled into a lawn chair and listened to the names intoned solemnly over the beat of a drum and the hum of singing bowls. Occasionally, the meditative repetition was interrupted when a reader added my mother, my father or my husband ahead of a name.

On July 16, 1945, Riseley’s mother, Mary Mossman, was in Roswell, within an area of potential fallout from the first nuclear bomb detonation in human history. In 1976, her mother died of multiple myeloma, a radiation-sensitive blood cancer.

“It was about three years of misery,” Riseley said.

For decades, New Mexicans have called on the federal government to recognize a potential link between the first atomic bomb test and family trees weighed down by cancer diagnoses. Eighty years after those fateful atoms split, the government finally has.

Earlier this month, a program to compensate people who developed cancer after above-ground nuclear weapon tests was renewed and expanded to include New Mexico for the first time. The state also unveiled a highway sign on Wednesday recognizing the history of New Mexico downwinders.

A series of scientific papers from the National Cancer Institute published in 2020 concluded that some people living in New Mexico during the Trinity Test probably got cancer from radioactive fallout, The Associated Press reported. They concluded excess cancer cases would have been limited to those alive at the time of the blast. Researchers suggested exposure levels would have been substantially higher than natural background radiation in five counties: Guadalupe, Lincoln, San Miguel, Socorro and Torrance.

‘All we saw was smoke’

On July 16, 1945, 9-year-old Mela Armijo got up early to have coffee with her dad. Sugar was rationed because of the war, but her dad let Armijo sprinkle some in her coffee. The Trinity site, the location of the infamous detonation, was 14 miles from their ranch house, Armijo said.

“We just heard a loud, loud explosion, but when we turned around, all we saw was smoke, or dust, or whatever it was,” Armijo said. “But our cows all turned white on top. The government never let us know what they had done.”

The family got drinking water from a cistern, which Armijo believes was contaminated by fallout.

At 89, much of her family has died of cancer. Eight years after the bomb test, her father, Frank Gallegos, died of stomach cancer. Her mom and siblings later died of pancreatic cancer.

Stomach cancer is associated with high-dose exposure to radiation and pancreatic cancer has a possible association with radiation exposure, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both diseases are eligible for compensation under a Department of Justice program created by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act for people who lived downwind of nuclear tests.

New Mexico was added to the list of downwind areas near the beginning of July.

Armijo believes the deaths are connected to the Trinity Test.

“We knew it had to be that, but we couldn’t do anything about it. They wouldn’t listen to us,” Armijo said. “We were a very poor family.”

‘Never heard a bigger boom’

On July 16, 1945, Lucy Garwood was awoken by the loudest noise she’s ever heard. The adobe house shook. Dishes rattled in the cupboard.

“To this day, I’ve never heard a bigger boom,” Garwood said. “My mother jumped out of bed. And of course, I don’t remember if all the children woke up, but a couple of us did. My mother said, ‘Well, what in the world was that?’”

In the July heat, 13-year-old Garwood, her mom, sisters and brother slept with just the screen door latched on their Tularosa home. Her father was overseas serving in the Army.

After the boom, Garwood’s mother walked to the nearby highway. She thought a car may have crashed into a house or exploded. But she didn’t see anything, so she told the children to go back to bed.

In Tularosa that day, the whole town was talking about feeling an earthquake, Garwood said. They had no television or telephone, but the radio said there had been a military training exercise with an explosion, so Garwood didn’t worry anymore about what caused the boom.

No one had heard of an atomic bomb or knew to worry about radiation. The kids kept eating food from the gardens and playing in the irrigation ditch. Garwood believes radioactive fallout contaminated the town’s water.

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II came to an end, and Garwood’s father was sent to Okinawa to bury bodies.

As she grew older, she began to wonder why so many people were getting cancer. At 93, she believes the cancer cases are connected to the Trinity Test.

“We were country people. We were poor people. We were scratching the earth forever here in Tularosa,” Garwood said. “The government went to Japan to study Nagasaki and where they bombed over there. Here, we were bombed first, and nobody cared.”

In nearby Three Rivers, Garwood’s grandparents had a farm with horses, chickens and lambs. She remembers an uptick in animal deaths on the farm after the bomb test.

“The cloud went right over Three Rivers. … By 1948, my grandmother was dead with breast cancer,” Garwood said.

Garwood’s grandmother suffered with the disease for two years and was given morphine to manage the pain.

“At the end, you could see her ribs, because it just ate a hole in her chest. And she was only 58 when she died,” Garwood said.

Breast cancer is associated with high-dose exposures of radiation and is a disease eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

One of Garwood’s sisters also had breast cancer, as did two of her daughters. Another daughter grew so weak she had trouble walking and died with a low white blood cell count, which Garwood believes was likely leukemia.

Her mother died from bone cancer, and six of her nine siblings were diagnosed with various cancers, including lung, thyroid, uterine, breast and skin cancer. Lung cancer is associated with high-dose exposures of radiation and radiation exposure is a risk factor for thyroid cancer. Both are eligible diseases under the Department of Justice program.

Garwood’s daughter Doris Walters had such an aggressive tumor, she had surgery to remove it two weeks after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Although she was born after the Trinity Test, Walters could be eligible for $100,000 in compensation under the expanded Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The program includes New Mexico as a downwind state through 1962 because of above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada.

Walters feels fortunate to have good insurance. Her copay for radiation treatment was $5,000. She also paid for travel expenses to Phoenix and Albuquerque for treatment.

“It adds up, and people here can’t afford it,” Walters said. “They die. They literally die.”

‘The government never told them’

On July 16, 1945, 14-year-old Jess Gililland and his brother Pete were asleep on the front porch of their parents’ ranch house, according to Gililland’s daughter Edna Kay Hinkle. The ranch on state-leased land was 27 miles from the test, and relatives had nearby homes, according to Hinkle.

“They saw the mushroom 27 miles away,” Hinkle said. “The government didn’t even bother to tell them to get out of the area beforehand.”

Sometime after 1949, her dad and uncle went to the Trinity site with their wives. The gates were open, Hinkle said, and the couples picked up green glass, melted sand left behind by the bomb test. They kept it on the kitchen floor by the door.

“The neighbors came by and saw that pile of glass and told them, ‘You need to get rid of that. That’s radioactive.’ The government had never told them what it was,” Hinkle said.

Several years later, the family was forced to leave the property so it could be used by the military as part of White Sands Missile Range.

Hinkle, 71, still lives near Tularosa with a flourishing garden and a view of Salinas Peak, the mountainside where the family ranch was once located.

There have been 35 cancer cases on her father’s side of the family, including the aggressive breast cancer Hinkle survived. There were only three cancer diagnoses on her mother’s side of the family, most of whom grew up in California.

On Wednesday, Hinkle got good news. The Tularosa Elementary School records that prove she lived in New Mexico in the 1950s and early 1960s still exist, proof Hinkle needed to apply for the compensation program.

‘What is my mother’s life worth?’

On July 16, 1945, Demecio Peralta was in his corral in Capitan, according to his cousin Mary Martinez White. When the bomb went off, he was covered in ash.

“So he goes running into the house, which had windows busted out, covered in ash,” Martinez White said. “Little did he know that it was radioactive. He finds his family huddled in a corner, thinking the world just came to an end.”

His horse turned white and died. Peralta got cancer on the back of his hands, on his face, in his eyes, his mouth and his stomach, and died about 11 years after the Trinity Test. Only one member of the nine-person family survived cancer, Martinez White said.

In Martinez White’s immediate family, five of 10 siblings developed cancer. Her dad died with leukemia and her mom died from multiple myeloma. The family lived in Carrizozo when the bomb was tested, but moved to Tularosa by the time Martinez White was born.

The compensation that members of her family may be eligible for does not seem adequate to her.

“What is my mother’s life worth?” Martinez White said. “I think that if the federal government were a company, our lives would be more valuable. I don’t think it’s adequate, but it acknowledges that harm was done, and there is something to be said about that, because we can use that to help other generations understand that we can’t forget what happened here.”