8-13-2025 Pasco, WA

In the, “You Learn Something New Every Day,” department:

 

I sorta knew what a, “coulee,” is.  It’s a dry river bed or ravine.    But I never knew what a, “reach,” is.  A reach is a straight stretch of river with a bend on each end.  We are in the Tri-Cities area.  The cities are Richland, Pasco and Kennewick and everywhere here, they use the word, “reach.”  Now, back to, “coulee.”  The Ice Age had carved a new path for the Columbia River and left the original river bed dry and barren.  The Grand Coulee Dam backed up the water in the Columbia and it was pumped into the coulee to create Banks Lake, which irrigated and turned eastern Washington into vast fertile farm and ranch land.  But the Grand Coulee Dam was destined to provide another service during WWII. 

 

On our first day in Pasco, we paid a visit to the Reach Museum, one wing of which is devoted entirely to the Hanford branch of the Manhattan Project.  Col. Franklin Matthias was a member of the project’s brain trust.  When a site was needed for a particular process in producing atomic energy, the requirements were several:  1)  sizeable land to build the facility, 2)  10 miles from the nearest highway, 3) 20 miles from the nearest town of 1,000 people or more, 4)  a water supply with a flow of 25,000 gallons per minute to cool the reactors and 5)  an electrical supply of 100,000 kilowatts minimum.  Matthias found the perfect place north of Richland, WA.  Enter the Grand Coulee Dam (see items 4 and 5, above).  The 670 sq. mi. Hanford Engineering Works or, “Site W,” was constructed in 1943 with astonishing speed by thousands of patriots dedicated to the war effort.  It was essentially a reservation, complete with housing, 8 mess halls each the size of a football field, churches, taverns, schools, a swimming hole, movie theaters, dance halls, stores (Sears Roebuck for one), bath houses, gardens, banks, a post office, doctor and dentist offices and a hospital.  Due to the critical and secret nature of the project, the mission of Larson Air Force Base (mentioned in my Moses Lake t-log) was to protect the Hanford Engineering Works.

Sign from the Hanford Site

Hanford Construction Plant

 

At its height, the Hanford Site employed more than 40,000 people;  secretaries, chefs, engineers, doctors, nurses, skilled and unskilled laborers, scientists.  Each person had an assignment and was sworn to secrecy.  If any person so much as whispered his thoughts about what was going on (No one really knew the whole picture at the time.), he was not just fired but exiled and sent away.  They only knew that they had jobs and were grateful after the Great Depression.  What was actually going on?  Nuclear reactors at the site were splitting tons of uranium 238 to create plutonium, the energy source for Fat Man, the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.  When the Hanford Site employees learned that Japan had surrendered and that their labor to create Fat Man’s plutonium had essentially ended WWII, they were stunned, proud and jubilant.  The war was over, thanks in large part to them!

This is a framed copy of 
the Richland Villager
newspaper printed on the
day Japan announced its
surrender, exactly 80
years ago today.

This is a framed copy
of the Richland Villager
newspaper dated
8-6-1945, the day
Little Boy was dropped
on Hiroshima.  
Employees finally learn
the whole story.

Statistics of the
food required to feed
Hanford employees.
30,000 donuts per
day?!  Holy buckets!

 

In case you are wondering, Fat Man was a plutonium bomb and Little Boy was a uranium bomb.  The scientists at Los Alamos decided to build one of each to guarantee that at least one of them would work.  (Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.)  Japan announced its surrender to the Allies on August 14, 1945.

 

Hanford was not done though.  The Cold War followed WWII and the Hanford Engineering Works was back in business.  It wasn’t until 1989 when the Cold War ended and ICBMs were invented that the Hanford facility was decommissioned.  Hanford no longer exists.  It was not just decommissioned and abandoned, it was razed and totally plowed over.  Nothing to see here, folks, absolutely nothing.  Tens of thousands of people, now unemployed, went back home to places all over the USA.  So, that’s all I know about that.

 

I am proud to announce that we found yet another place to paddleboard.  A quiet lagoon on the Columbia River!  That makes three new lakes for us on this trip, so far!  It has been unseasonably hot here, 102-104F, so an hour or so in the breeze on the water was a relief.

 

Yesterday, we drove a 150-mile loop out into the country.  We paid a visit to the Wanapum Dam on the Columbia, had a nice lunch at the Gard Public House and then stopped to pick up 40 pounds of very-high-protein flour from the Cascade Milling Company in Royal City.  To let you in on my secret, this flour makes the best Italian-style bread on Planet Earth.  Mission accomplished, Krauser.  (Yes, you can get this flour online, but the shipping cost for 40 pounds of flour made my eyes water.)  Next stop:  Burns, OR on the antepenultimate (Great word!) leg of our trip back to the homestead at 1640.

Walleye dinner to celebrate 36
years of marital bliss (mostly).

At camp.

Relaxing on the mighty Columbia River

OK... being silly at camp.  Fun times.

Well what to our wondering eyes
should appear?!  The ship we sailed
on a few years ago from Astoria to
Lewiston... parked
in Pasco for the evening!