Redneck Tale # 26 - Happy New Year, Friendswood

As described in a previous article,  the Hastings Radiochemical Works located in Friendswood, Texas, was not the most beloved of the town’s resident businesses. Its presence there was probably beneficial to some of the town’s eateries (investigators and reporters have to eat…), but Hastings many untoward activities caused unusual problems.

Late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve , December 31, 1970, the production manager’s home telephone jangled. The phone call was from Hasting’s delivery driver. The master radiation danger alarm at the plant was sounding loudly. The driver yelled above its noise, "Sir, I think I may be contaminated!" After instructing the driver to go straight to the decontamination shower stall, remove his clothing, shower, and don one of the cotton gowns and a pair of cloth slippers, the manager jumped into his station wagon and hurried from his Houston home to the Hastings facility some 30 miles away.

The alarm bell noise was deafening. The manager pulled its plug to silence it. Next he assayed the driver for radioactivity. Finding any contamination to be now gone, he sent the driver home. Then he summoned the company’s radiation health physicist. As soon as the physicist got there, the two men picked up radiation detectors and went into the warehouse to see what it was that had contaminated their driver.

To say that the air had turned blue in the warehouse would be an exaggeration, but the meter needles on the radiation detectors "pegged out." The place was dangerously hot. Pointing their detectors here and there, it was soon apparent that the radiation source was the 600 pound container of 99-molybdenum the driver had just brought in from the Houston airport. It had arrived there on a Delta Airlines passenger airplane. Hastings used a great quantity of "moly" every week to make medical products for use in diagnostic imaging.

This was radioactive contamination beyond what could be handled on a strictly local basis. The Texas state radiation control people were called in, and a Houston company, Bio-Nuclear, that was known to have also received a similar shipment was notified that they, too, might have the same contamination problem when they opened their place for business on Monday morning.

Cleanup of both facilities was arranged using specially trained crews. It was bothersome and disrupted both businesses, but even after cleanup, problems kept piling up.

The passenger aircraft had been heavily contaminated by spilled radioactive molybdenum. The plane had landed and taken off from a number of airports before it was grounded. Then it was ferried, empty, to Atlanta, Georgia. Its many passengers and all of their luggage, plus a lot of other commercial cargo had to be checked and, if necessary, either cleaned up or isolated until the radioactivity died out.

Imagine being a passenger seated directly above the red-hot cargo hold. The only thing between you and the cargo hold’s radioactivity is your seat cushion and a relatively thin sheet of aluminum floor – and aluminum is not a good radiation barrier anyway. There you sit for an hour, two hours, or more. All that time your body is being zapped by gamma rays from the "moly" that had spilled all over the cargo hold and everything in it.

What caused all of this mess? Well, it is somewhat unusual, but Hastings Radiochemical Works was not responsible for the mess (for a change). As it was discovered, the cause was human error at the "moly’s" source, Union Carbide in New York. Bio-Nuclear’s plastic bottle that had been filled with pre-dissolved 99-molybdenum had not been sealed tightly, plus the gasket on the steel container holding that badly sealed bottle had been improperly applied. This allowed highly radioactive liquid to leak out and run throughout the cargo hold. Even those two very grave errors would probably not have resulted in this unfortunate event had not the huge wooden cask that held the bottle and its steel container been allowed to tip over on its side in the airplane's cargo hold.

For some people, New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1970, was a time of celebration. For Friendswood, Texas, it was just another typical Hastings Radiochemical Works sort of day.

Copyright 2010 Gus Kilthau