Sailors on old warship dumped thousands of tons of radioactive waste for years

[n2doc]

They asked the dying Pasco County man about his Navy service a half-century before. He kept talking about the steel barrels. They haunted him, sea monsters plaguing an old sailor.

"We turned off all the lights," George Albernaz testified at a 2005 Department of Veterans Affairs hearing, "and … pretend that we were broken down and … we would take these barrels and having only steel-toed shoes … no protection gear, and proceed to roll these barrels into the ocean, 300 barrels at a trip."

Not all of them sank. A few pushed back against the frothing ocean, bobbing in the waves like a drowning man. Then shots would ring out from a sailor with a rifle at the fantail. And the sea would claim the bullet-riddled drum.


Back inside the ship, Albernaz marked in his diary what the sailors dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. He knew he wasn't supposed to keep such a record, but it was important to Albernaz that people know he had spoken the truth, even when the truth sounded crazy.


more

http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/veterans/the-atomic-sailors/2157927

[TwilightGardener]

1. I figure shit like this used to happen all the time.

Amazing that more sea critters and wildlife haven't gone extinct from the way we poisoned pretty much everything.

[PearliePoo2]

2. Absolutely disgusting and sad in every possible way.

Mankind: We're so smart in some things and unbelievably stupid in others.
Shitting, fouling and poisoning our own nest...

[Demo_Chris]

3. This stuff happened all the time, with every kind of waste....

It's the main reason I cannot help but chuckle at the hysteria some of the doomsingers bring to their favorite disaster-porn stories.

[Voice for Peace]

7. you may be chuckling, but there are many of us whose lives were crippled by unregulated waste

as little children we swam in the wastewaters from Pfizer and
Electric Boat/General Dynamics, where they were building
the atomic submarines. Not long ago part of the area was
designated a superfund site.

I'm convinced that most of the cancers, and most of
the long-term inexplicable and mostly untreatable chronic
illnesses -- and many from my generation, in particular --
is directly related to such waste.

[Ezlivin]

4. While in Pearl Harbor

The guys from my boat would simply throw nearly anything overboard, right into the harbor. I used to wonder what the harbor's floor looked like from years of such actions.

I was amazed at the stuff I saw while in the service.

[Brother Buzz]

5. There's no secret about these dumps on the west coast

The Farallon Island radioactive waste dumps, west of San Francisco, are clearly marked on navigational charts. Between 1946 and 1970, approximately 47,800 barrels were tossed overboard. Perhaps the only secret is San Francisco's famous Dungeness crabs are harvested in the area where these barrels are quietly rusting away.

[Voice for Peace]

6. ggggaaaaaaaaaa

so sick of lying criminals

[NealK]

8. That's sickening.

[SCVDem]

9. Yet all we hear about

is how we are killing our future generations with debt.

That ain't shit compared to the dead planet we are leaving them.

[SoapBox]

10. I only hope...

That I'm dead before Earth is.

Ya, ya, I know...

[truedelphi]

11. I am guilty of eavesdroppng on people if I eat at restaurants alone.

When I first lived in Californian one of the first conversations I ever heard in such a situation , involved two old guys talking abut all the barrels of radioactive shit they ha taken and dumped from their ships out near the Farallones.

They were really having fun reminiscing, and talking about how toxic that whole area would be from the radiation. Their whole attitude had been, "Well if we hadn't done this,t he companies involved would have paid someone else to do it, so we might as well have made some dough from doing this."

[NaturalHigh]

12. The scary part is...

we don't even know how this horror story is going to end yet. Who knows what kind of damage all this crap is still doing and will continue to do?