Once a nuclear weapons plant, the Fernald Preserve now bursts with life

CROSBY TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- The mind's eye insists on placing a sprawling, weathered industrial site where there is only rolling, wheat-colored Ohio prairie.

The K-65 silos were here, I think, staring at three smallish ponds with ice around their edges, and the barrels of radioactive waste were over there, by that deer ...

Actually, it's hard to get my bearings. I am at the Fernald Preserve, walking on gravel paths through wintry wetlands that, the last time I was here, were part of a closed and contaminated nuclear weapons plant. When I toured the place as a reporter in the early 1990s, I wasn't allowed to get out of the official van because it wasn't quite safe to walk around unprotected.

But in 2014, the former Feed Materials Production Center, which processed low-level uranium for use in nuclear bombs from 1951 to 1989, is a place where birders and photographers and casual hikers roam 7-plus miles of trails on the 1,050 acres 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati. Local schoolchildren visit the preserve on field trips, learning about Ohio wildlife.

"Amazing, right?" says Lisa Crawford, leader since 1985 of the effort to close and clean up the plant, which is just a mile and a half from her house. "This was the goal — how can we make this a community asset?"

Fernald is one of two former nuclear sites that have been decontaminated to the point where the public can visit. The other is Weldon Spring, a former U.S. Army facility about 30 miles west of St. Louis that once processed explosives and uranium-ore concentrates and since 2002 has been a recreational area for hikers, cyclists and wildlife lovers.

Both are part of the Department of Energy's Legacy Management Program, which is in charge of the long-term management of sites that have been cleaned up. Between 50 and 60 sites in 28 states and Puerto Rico are in the program. They range from a World War II-era military base in Alaska that was the site of the largest U.S. underground nuclear test in 1971 to the Acid/Pueblo Canyon site in New Mexico, still contaminated by leftovers from the Manhattan Project.

LM, as it's called, comes on the scene after the regulators and the community have decided what is to be done with the once-contaminated site. "We're responsible for maintaining the decisions made by the community — the long-term surveillance and maintenance," said Jane Powell, the DOE's representative at the Fernald Preserve from 2006, the year it opened, to 2013.

Fernald was part of a chain of more than a dozen sites that helped to build nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Just eight are operational now — they maintain the existing bombs and do not build new ones — and most of the others are far from being considered safe for the public.

At Fernald, the contamination and clean-up were complicated by the plant's proximity to the community. A small dairy farm sits just outside the property's boundaries. There's a private amusement park, available for weddings and family reunions, about 2 miles away. When the trucks began to carry waste away from the facility, they had to travel two-lane state routes where houses sit mere yards from the road. More troubling, the plant sat atop the Great Miami Aquifer, which provides drinking water for nearly 2 million people.

"You didn't have a lot of working room," Powell says. "People's houses are right there. You're trying to tear down buildings, dig up the waste pits. I think, honestly, a little more space would have been a good idea."

The residents were very conscious of the fact that they wanted the radioactive waste out of their backyards, but were about to send it into other's. The worst of it — the peanut-buttery sludge inside the K-65 silos, which included a hefty mix of radium and other high-level materials — went to a site in Texas. Some went to nuclear disposal sites in Nevada and Utah. But some remains at Fernald under a long, low mound on the extreme eastern edge of the facility, far from the trails and public areas. You're still not allowed to picnic at the site.

"We can't lose its history," Crawford says. "I didn't want somebody 50 years from now to go over there and say, 'This is pretty, let's build a subdivision.' There had to be a legacy there. That's the part we had to suck up and own."

The plant's history is remembered in a visitors' center open four days a week, with displays explaining Fernald's legacy as a weapons plant and the story of the cleanup. Former workers and others involved with the plant (including Crawford and her family) are commemorated with memorial bricks bearing their names. State historical markers, engraved rocks and signs along the trails give visitors a sense of what was once there.

What was there was dilapidated enough that the idea of Fernald as a public park seemed absurd. I will admit to looking up from my reporter's notebook and laughing at the idea when it was first proposed — the undrinkable water! The contaminated dirt! The radiation! Yeah, right. About $4.4 billion and nearly 20 years later, the plan turned out to be a success. Even Crawford says her reaction remains, "Holy crap! We did it!"

Powell, who worked at Fernald in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the plant was being shut down, still finds it hard to believe what the facility has become. "One evening I watched a great blue heron struggling to swallow a frog," she says. "An autistic child's uncle said it made his week when (they) participated in an owl banding. The major users are birders who could care less what was there. It's a unique place."

The "saving grace" for Crawford is that the children who grew up near Fernald — including her own now-grown son — seem to be healthy. Residents began agitating for cleanup after radiation was found in three wells. including Crawford's. Workers and residents eventually won multi-million dollar lawsuits that paid for health monitoring. "We wanted to make sure our kids would be OK," she says. "If we hadn't have fought when we did, God knows what they would have done. I believe they would have shut it down and walked away."

She visits the site several times a year, helping with tours and programs for students. "There was a time when there were no birds, none," she says. "We see a lot more wildlife than we used to. It's amazing that you can drive through and see wildlife. Just the fact that you can come back and drive through it at all is amazing. People come and go, 'It couldn't have been that bad.' Well, you weren't here in the 1980s."

Elizabeth Neus covered health and environmental issues at Fernald for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1988 to 1992.