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Windscale Fire 1957: Coverup Conspiracy?

sophia8

Master Poster
sophia8
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Oct 28, 2003
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There's this woman I know through some friends. Never met her, but have exchanged some pleasant emails with her.
I knew she had grown up in Cumbria and was around the same age as me (fifty-coughcough), so when I recently saw a TV programne about the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuke plant in Cumbria, I mentioned it and asked if she had any childhood memories of it. She emailed back saying that the fallout had made her and her whole family very ill; I replied expressing surprise, as no serious effects from fallout had been reported at the time, and she replied thusly:
Many many things were covered up and ignored, unfortunately, around the Windscale disaster, like a multitude of other government mistakes. (I have since worked with military secrets, so found out a lot of information that was never ever to be divulged to the public.) Crops never grew, but all the land around became desolate, smelling of this wretched burning sulphur and in the village of Marshon the nearest dwellings to Windscale, nobody survived. Abandoned homes remained covered in the grey-white ashes that nobody could go near; shrivelled trees and plants were covered in this acrid dust. Everything was dead; there was no greenery, no life. When my father had to drive us through the area, he used to tell us to hold our breath while he drove as fast as our old Standard 12 car could go.... I saw many people dying of leukaemias and other 'unknown' illnesses, during my childhood. Thankfully, moving abroad to a cleaner land saved my life!
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(My bolding.)
Now, I appreciate that a hell of a lot was hidden from the public for years afterwards (as the TV programme showed, but - everything covered with ash, abandoned houses, dead plantlife, a whole village where everyone died, Chernobyl-style desolation....? None of that could have been covered up. But it's obviously what she wants to believe.
I guess I've posted this here as an example of the CT mindset - any kind of documentary or eyewitness proof that goes against what you believe has been manufactured as part of the cover-up.
For instance, the inconvenient fact that the firefighters and plant workers who fought the fire for over 48 hours all survived and suffered no immediate health problems? THEY covered up the sicknesses and deaths!
The fact that there is no village named Marshon (or anything like it) near Windscale? THEY wiped it off all the maps!
Instead of the local countryside being turned into a wasteland, cows on dairy farms adjacent to the plant were still grazing freely in their fields after the accident, with farmers photographed having to pour away their milk because of contamination? THEY faked the photographs and news reports!

Sigh.....


ETA: There was a Marchon chemicals works in the nearby town of Whitehaven, and which a local football team is named after. So it appears her memory is confused.....
 
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Sometimes I despair. What the hell is wrong with people?

It's not bad enough that people believe the stupidest of things, but that they then apparently go through the rest of their lives perfectly normally as if the very basis of their belief is just...... unimportant.

A whole village wiped out and this event covered up. Doesn't someone feel the need to devote their life to uncovering such an act?

Instead, and as with the 9-11 fantasy, they appear to just go "Meh.... time for work" and off they trot as if this terrible information means nothing more than last nights football result.

Which, of course, leads me to suspect that they don't really believe this crap themselves, it just gives them a bit of a thrill to contemplate it and to impress others with their knowledge. It's probably similar to watching a scary film or a ghost ride. We buy into it at the time because we get the buz from being scared, but when it's over we don't continue being scared or believe that what we saw or experienced was real. We just carry on with our lives.

Just like 'truthers'.
 
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Just 1 Village? did it stop at the Milestone on route to Ravenglass or the pub maybe (The Glowing Sheep).

That isn't just a mark of Woo, that is a full blown sheep dip of woo, and somebody has got litres mixed up with fl Ozs mixed up on the dilution instructions. HTF do they convince themselves of this?
 
The cover up was of why it happened, and of just how close it had come to a full blown disaster.
 
Total rubbish. None of her "observations" (burning sulphur smell, grey-white ash, shrivelled trees) fit with the reality of a radiological release. None. The significant source term at Windscale, as at Chernobyl, was Iodine 131, and the Windscale releease was magnitudes less than Chernobyl. No where near enough to produce any observable effects in any living thing.

There are plenty of good scientific papers on the radiological aspects of the Windscale accident, but of course any CT woo would dismiss them out of hand.
 
[Tinfoil]
"they put it out with water", "Looked into the core and saw it was white hot". - Bunkum

Astronauts need Exactly 6 feet of lead just to traverse Van Halens belt, and yet they just called the Trumpton Brigade, Captain flack said Elevate and then Cuthbert and Pugh put it out with a hose. it was a Nookleer atom plant dude, you obviously know nothing about unclear physics[/Tinfoil]
 
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Furi said:
[Tinfoil]
"they put it out with water", "Looked into the core and saw it was white hot". - Bunkum

Astronauts need Exactly 6 feet of lead just to traverse Van Halens belt, and yet they just called the Trumpton Brigade, Captain flack said Elevate and then Cuthbert and Pugh put it out with a hose. it was a Nookleer atom plant dude, you obviously know nothing about unclear physics[/Tinfoil]
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[Tinfoil]Yeah, and that old geezer they had on the TV show, the one who claimed to have actually looked into the burning core? An obvious PLANT! If he had really looked into a burning radioactive core, his eyeballs would've been cooked right into his head by the radioactive iodine flare![/tinfoil]
 
In her defence, she was only a child at the time. I could imagine a child who was driven through the Marchon chemical works could conflate the two.
 
That would make more sense. What she describes sounds like either pollution or a fire.
 
What I find strange is the inherent contradictions in her own statement and how that doesn't make her think "hmm... something doesn't quite add up..."

She says that :
Crops never grew, but all the land around became desolate, smelling of this wretched burning sulphur and in the village of Marshon the nearest dwellings to Windscale, nobody survived. Abandoned homes remained covered in the grey-white ashes that nobody could go near; shrivelled trees and plants were covered in this acrid dust. Everything was dead; there was no greenery, no life. ​

OK that's all well and good, lets say that did indeed happen i.e. that a whole village and the surrounding area was sterilised and made deadly to life.

So what then happens? Again her own words:
When my father had to drive us through the area, he used to tell us to hold our breath while he drove as fast as our old Standard 12 car could go...​

Hang on on moment - this deadly area where everyone and everything died and your father then used to drive you through it and just told you to hold your breath - that immediately should strike her as not quite adding up.

Now that a nearby chemical plant has been mentioned what seems more likely from her recollection is that when they used to drive by or past the chemical works there was the smell of "burning sulphur" and her father used to tell them "hold your breath". It would seem like her childhood memories have become intermingled and because she is not applying critical thinking to her own recollections she has missed the contradiction.
 
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Polution from a chemical plant circa 1957 could easily be the cause of all that.

I remember as a kid, driving through the south side of Chicago. All you could smell for miles was the hydrogens sulfide from the steel mills. Everything had that dead shriveled look to it, as well as the blighted neighborhoods of abandoned houses.
 
So, wait, Chernobyl happens all the way off in Chernobyl and the effects are so serious that some places in Wales still aren't allowed to sell meat raised there, but a similar accident happens right here in Britain and nobody notices? It's a marvel some people manage to tie their own shoes.
 
Darat said:
What I find strange is the inherent contradictions in her own statement and how that doesn't make her think "hmm... something doesn't quite add up..."

She says that :
Crops never grew, but all the land around became desolate, smelling of this wretched burning sulphur and in the village of Marshon the nearest dwellings to Windscale, nobody survived. Abandoned homes remained covered in the grey-white ashes that nobody could go near; shrivelled trees and plants were covered in this acrid dust. Everything was dead; there was no greenery, no life. ​

OK that's all well and good, lets say that did indeed happen i.e. that a whole village and the surrounding area was sterilised and made deadly to life.

So what then happens? Again her own words:
When my father had to drive us through the area, he used to tell us to hold our breath while he drove as fast as our old Standard 12 car could go...​

Hang on on moment - this deadly area where everyone and everything died and your father then used to drive you through it and just told you to hold your breath - that immediately should strike her as not quite adding up.

Now that a nearby chemical plant has been mentioned what seems more likely from her recollection is that when they used to drive by or past the chemical works there was the smell of "burning sulphur" and her father used to tell them "hold your breath". It would seem like her childhood memories have become intermingled and because she is not applying critical thinking to her own recollections she has missed the contradiction.
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That's what I think. I don't know her exact age, ut if she was only three or four, her memories are obviously mixed up.
In a previous email, she describes how she was always sick at that time, with rashes and stuff - that might have been due (or she may have been told that it was) to chemical pollution.
She also claims to have watched "many of her friends" die from leukemia. for a long time, radiation from Windscale/Sellafield was blamed for a rise in leukemia in that area, but later studies showed that not only that there wasn'fta hugely significant rise in the figures, but that the few extra cases of leukemia may have been due to the influx of new viruses bought in by the plant workers and their families. But she remembers "Radiation leaks caused lots of leukemia!" and incorporated that into her memories.
The devastation she describes sounds like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption; maybe she saw pictures from that volcano that wiped out half an island in the Caribbean (have to check that) and incorporated that as well.
 
If she was only three or four in 1957, and remembers being always sick at that time, with rashes and stuff, hey news flash. I also was three or four in 1957, and remember the exact same thing. My mother called it - uh, what were the words again? - oh yes, chicken pox, german measles, measles, mumps and whooping cough. Not necessarily in that order, mind.

Rolfe.
 
You might just be able to hide the evucation of a village with some careful cover stories bribery and hopeing it gets lost in the general postwar movement of people. Hideing the existance of a village is completely imposible. Britian is just too well documented. Aquireing a pre WW2 map of the area would be fairly trivial for example:

http://www.old-maps.co.uk/IndexMapPage2.aspx
 
sophia8 said:
<snip>She emailed back saying ...
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Wow. Just wow.

Darat said:
Now that a nearby chemical plant has been mentioned what seems more likely from her recollection is that when they used to drive by or past the chemical works there was the smell of "burning sulphur" and her father used to tell them "hold your breath". It would seem like her childhood memories have become intermingled and because she is not applying critical thinking to her own recollections she has missed the contradiction.
Click to expand...

That certainly seems like a reasonable explanation.
 
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