River Monster

Artist credit: Dan Duford, www.poisonedplayground.com

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Robert Wells surfaced after he swam the Columbia River near the Hanford site.  “Huh… I feel fine.”

He faced the media covering his 1960 pollution protest.

They screamed.

The River Monster was born.

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This is my response to Trifecta’s weekend prompt, which was to “give us the 33 words that follow this illustration.  What happens next?”

I normally don’t do ‘creepy’ but I’m making it my challenge this year to get into the Halloween spirit.  For those not familiar with the Columbia River or the Hanford site, here’s a bit of what I found on Wikipedia (click here if you want to read more:)

Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project in the town of Hanford in south-central Washington, the site was home to the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world.  Beginning in the 1960s, scientists with the U.S. Public Health Service published reports about radioactivity released from Hanford, and there were protests from the health departments of Oregon and Washington.  In the 1980s, Hanford Health Information Network reports concluded that residents who lived downwind from Hanford or who used the Columbia River downstream were exposed to elevated doses of radiation that placed them at increased risk for various cancers and other diseases.