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Trail:
Bequerels on the Brain
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| Bequerels
on the Brain - Page 2 |
| Hocus Cocus
With guidance from the Chamorro
people, I rapidly found my investigations focusing upon the history
of Cocus island – an eerie, elongated islet rising out of the
coral reef and located a couple of miles off shore from the mainland
villages of Umatac and Merizo (See map). |
Some more of my 'Chamorro
friends'! |
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Cocus Island from the
mainland
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I
sailed out to the once upon a time tropical ‘paradise’ island, and
quickly realised that the health of the coral reef, at the former naval
owned western sector of the island, was way below standard.
It was kind of cankered and decrepit, like a derelict moonscape devoid of
any life. The only evidence of activity was the solitary skeleton of a
juvenile crab that appeared to have been frozen ‘mid scuttle’ across
the top of a coral block - as if some powerful poison had compelled the
poor crustacean to terminate its life force prematurely.
The ecosystem of this
part of the island was no better. It supported little more than a rag bag ecology
of sickly looking vegetation. The previous evening I had attended an enlightening meeting with ex
serviceman and atomic veteran, Robert Celestial and colleagues. |
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Although I
was initially suspected of being a ‘CIA plant’, I convinced them to
the contrary and spent the rest of the evening listening intently to
Robert’s catalogue of nuclear exposure incidents during the clean up of
the US atomic bomb test sites out at Bikini atoll (4). He had subsequently
survived a series of grotesque cancers, which motivated him to devote the
rest of his ‘half life’ to campaigning. He handed me the sworn
statement of another ex serviceman, Vancil Sanderson (5), that offered a
plausible explanation for the ‘leukaemic’ state of the life on Cocus
isle.
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A decrepit coral
reef on Cocus Island |
Vancil had been stationed at the former mini naval station on Cocus
island, and his statement told the tale of a continuous stream of small
naval ships entering Cocus lagoon - the waters that lay between the Cocus
isle coral reef and the diseased coastal villages on mainland Guam.
Disturbingly, these boats had all been involved in monitoring the atomic
bomb tests on the atolls between 1946 and 1963. After each detonation,
they were sailed back to Cocus for decontamination of their radioactive
fall out.
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Acidic detergents and sand blasting was used in the
decontaminating procedure, and the resulting radioactive debris was
discharged directly off the decks and into the open sea (6). The life of
the coral reef was subsequently exterminated (5) due to the infiltration
of the marine food-chain with a radioactive cocktail of strontium 90,
barium 137, caesium 137, etc. A high peak of radioactivity was detected in
the surface waters around Guam during a radio-ecological study carried out
by the University of Washington in 1959 (7).
The naval boats had left a toxic legacy of radioactive decay in their
wake; a fall out effect that could last for up to 60 years plus. More
disturbingly, the radioactive alkali earth metals that were involved, eg;
strontium and barium, are readily incorporated into the calcium of the
coral beds, since the atomic arrangement of these metals is near identical
to that of calcium (8).
My inspection of Cocus – albeit forty years later - seemed to confirm
the statements made in Sanderson’s report about the annihilation of the
coral beds. I found that the ratio of sand to coral on the local seabed
was still only about 9:1 – clearly abnormal, since reports written
before the US navy arrival in the late 1940s referred to a blanketing of
coral across the Cocus seabed (5).
A rusting bulldozer
blade |
I even witnessed a rusting bulldozer blade, slumped up at the top of
the old naval section of Cocus beach – presumably one of the last
remnants of the military tackle used to push the contaminated waste into
the hollow that had been hewn out from the backbone of the coral island. Despite
the tropical heat of that afternoon, I felt a chilly shiver
down my spine as I watched the arrival of yet another boatload of ‘uninformed’
Japanese tourist girls onto the newly developed ‘Cocus Island Resort’. |
I wondered whether they would still be so eager to sprawl themselves out
along the sand or water ski around the lagoon if the toxic secrets of this
island’s murky history had been publicly unveiled?
But the very real danger posed by the decontamination of the boats in
Cocus lagoon was concentrated into the period when the highest levels of
radioactive contamination existed fifty years ago – the window period of
toxic exposure that precisely fits the model prediction of the ‘experts’
who have been studying the origins of this epidemic (1-3).
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Part of the
'hollow hewn out from the backbone of the coral island' |
So the Chamorros had continued to draw
their mainstay foods from the last remaining morsels of marine life that
had survived the toxic contamination. More disturbingly, they continued to
pulverise the chunks of local coral into a fine powder for mixing up with
the betel nut and papula leaf – a traditional concoction that is
habitually chewed for its sedative effects. The Chamorros’ unwitting use
of the radioactive coral with the betel could represent the most
concentrated source of strontium 90 contamination that has ever been
endured by the human race?
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Coral lime, Betel nut and Papula
leaf
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Chewing the betel nut -
habitually enjoyed!
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It seems that the entire epidemic could have been avoided if the local
population had been informed of the true purpose behind the US military
presence on Cocus. Whilst the villagers had watched the USS Bowditch naval
vessel carrying out a 3000 sonar sounding surveillance of the Cocus
seabed, as well as the fleet of vessels that sailed in for decontamination
over subsequent years, they knew nothing about the true nature of the
operations at the Cocus station.
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