Posts Tagged ‘billboards’
How I learned to love the bomb – part 3
There are all kinds of things strange in Oak Ridge. In fact I would argue that something usual would be odd there. We even managed to make the normal, well, strange.
The old timers in our town don’t tell about the time before the land around the city was all subdivisions. No, these guys tell about the time before we understood about mercury poisoning.
The labs still remain in Oak Ridge, and they still do top secret government work, just as they have since they were built. In one of these labs, the old timers say they used to have pools of mercury. About 3 feet deep! And ‘in the days before we understood about inhaling it and getting it on our skin, we would just pull on our waders and go in.’ It seems they were just a bunch of good old boys, in back woods Tennessee, getting in their gear and their waders and going in to catch . . . strange diseases?
Every summer the local lake would get the public swim area shut down due to toxic levels of mercury. Us kids didn’t think anything of it. Isn’t mercury poisoning why any public swim area would be shut down?
