22 October - On the morning of Shot Able we were marched around to the other side of the hill from our bivouc area to watch Able go off, but it had a misfire. It didn't establish much confidence with us for how these were going to go. We could see the tower which held the bomb and the guys climbing up the tower to see what had gone wrong. It was three days later before they actually fired it. In the meantime we just "carried on" with the work at hand in the test area. In the darkness of early morning, Able was the first one I saw and it was the damnest thing I'd ever seen. The nuclear light was there and it disentregated the tower, but it was the smallest one of them all. It had a mushroom cloud with it. The cloud drifted off to the East, although most of the others I would see would drift off to the Northeast. After Shot Able, we (Company A) went down to the Ground Zero area about an hour or two later to fulfill our mission which was to restore the area to its natural state which included retreiving materials used in the test, as best we could making the desert look like before. As I recall there were very few emplacement areas for this shot. The dust was still in the atmosphere. We were sucking it in and breathing it out. We worked with out the benefit of respirators during the whole exercise and I never remember seeing a radiation monitor. [AEC Press Release: Able Misfire] |