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The Buffalo News / January 13, 2002
Tonawanda News Forum June 29, 2009
Legacy of The Manhattan Project
65 years ago, US army general Leslie Groves came to Tonawanda, the year was 1940.
The spring of that year I was fishing at the foot of Sheridan Dr. with my Dad.
It was Blue Pike Run time. I was 8 years old and old enough to experience wars realities and fears.
All one needed for fishing gear was a bamboo pole a feather and a hook.
An hours fishing would fill a large basket and would feed many families / (Sadly here in 2009 those days are over.)
Air raid wardens came every night with flashlights in hand so as to ensure peoples lights were turned off.
Fishing in the Niagara River was my families way of helping to provide for our needs while living under war time conditions.
We all wanted to contribute to the war effort, we wanted the war over, we prayed for peace. We endorsed and accepted food rationing as our patriotic duty.
Times were bad, but gas was 20 cents a gallon, Families didn't think or plan too much ahead and as a kid, I prayed for a better future and surviving the terrors of war.
Unknown to our community, in complete secrecy, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves was frantically pushing Linde / Union Carbide to increase it's efforts of refining uranium for the atomic bomb Manhatten Project.
Huge amounts of uranium ore were under darkness shipped into Tonawanda's Linde Air facility.
Among a multitude of sins committed, they secretly, in mutual agreement, injected 37,000,000 million gallons of uranium hexafluoride waste sludge into pourous sponge like rock shallow wells and when the wells could take no more they pumped the remaining gallonage into 2 mile creek.
( See The below reference NYS assembly / Fed. Connection)
