Ask early Hanford workers what they remember about the 1940s, and you’re likely to hear a story about the wind and the dust it whipped up from a desert being scraped bare for new construction. Their stories are among several collected in recent months as part of the oral history project of the Hanford History Partnership, a community collaboration led by WSU Tri-Cities.
“There was a terminator wind, and there was probably 3 to 4 inches of sand blew into our front lawn,” remembered Harold Copeland, who started working at Hanford in 1947 and lived in worker housing in the government town of Richland. “The way they took care of it was the fire department came out with their tanker trucks and hoses and hosed it off our lawns.”