The Bum Plant

By Tom Poland
July 12, 2013

I grew up in Georgia near a country store. In 1961 I worked there as a boy stocking shelves and pumping gas. I heard all manner of stories in that plank-floored store where a red vat filled with icy Cokes got much of my change. With rapt attention I listened to the men’s talk about work, women, and a strange factory. I was twelve when a fellow in a straw hat at Mr. Clifford’s store said, Yeah, he got on at the bum plant. He got a job at the bum plant.

He, I wondered, must be a hobo, a bum, and for some reason, I could see bums sliding Hav-A-Tampa bands around cigars, puffing them, and sticking more than a few in their pockets. And then, as the Cold War escalated the prettiest girl in class talked about her dad’s new fallout shelter.

Oh, bomb plant.

Though it seemed an infinite distance afar Savannah River Plant was only about 60 miles from my home. Closer as the wind blows. There, an army of workers, scientists, military experts, and weaponry wizards were fabricating the raw material that could annihilate Russia. We could wipe out a beautiful city like St. Petersburg and its onion-domed Church Of The Savior In Spilled Blood in minutes. We were in their crosshairs too.

People from home, a neighbor among them, made the 120-plus mile roundtrip to the bomb plant five days a week, month after month, year after year. Peacekeepers of sorts. Meanwhile I grew up, learned to write, and started a career. Writing would lead me to the infamous Bomb Plant, a place larger than New York City. Sprawling more than 310 square miles it devoured communities, farmland, and towns in a broth beautifully prepared by Chef Eminent Domain.

New Ellenton owes its existence to the fact that Ellenton, South Carolina, was moved lock, stock, and barrel to make room for the bomb plant. Distraught people held up signs: We Don’t Want To Lose Our Home. Don’t Make Us Move. A sign on the highway pretty much said it all … It’s 
hard to understand why our town must be destroyed to
 make a bomb that will destroy someone else’s town that 
they love as much as we love ours. But we feel that they 
picked not just the best spot in the US, but in the world.

I walked Ellenton’s ruins one summer day, a suggestion of storms on the horizon. Pines and broom straw grew where homes once sat. Streets and sidewalks could be seen and foundations too. All overrun with weeds. Kids had played there once. Cars once sat in those driveways, and in the small bedrooms couples once … but all that life was gone. All that remained were concrete, gravel, and steps to nowhere.

Many summers later in a spell of déjà vu, I recalled Ellenton as I looked across the remnants of Petersburg, Georgia, drowned by Clarks Hill Lake. Both towns, vanquished by man in different ways, still had their streets, sidewalks, and foundations, but both wore the name ghost town.

I went to Savannah River Site another time to write a feature on the site’s ecology lab. The site, being the largest restricted land area in the eastern United States, makes a natural laboratory. In one of the great coups the Savannah River Ecology Lab opened under the auspices of the University of Georgia, not Clemson, not the University of South Carolina. Georgia professor Eugene Odom founded the ecology lab in 1961. The lab’s purpose, though never highly publicized, was to study the effects of radiation on plants, animals, and simple-celled organisms.

So there I was in the belly of the atomic beast, the bum plant of youth. The lab’s director and I drove to a large creek, a small river really, that foamed with steam. That water first came from the Savannah River. Now hissing like a legion of snakes, the water had just cooled the reactors’ cores keeping you and me safe from a Chernobyl-like catastrophe. (I’ve heard learned people say Clark Hill Lake was built was to assure the Bomb Plant a reliable water supply.)

Standing on a steep bank carpeted in pine needles I stared at an alien world—river rocks covered with orange algae. On both sides of this river-creek ghostly trees stood, killed by steam, a scene straight out of Terminator. It was winter and plumes of steam rose from the river-creek. I’ve not seen anything like it since.

I wanted to draw my fingers through the river and gauge its heat. As I squatted to do just that, the pine straw rolled beneath my feet and I slid toward the water on my backside feet first. A hand, firm and strong, grabbed me by the collar just before my feet plunged into the steaming water.

The hand of salvation belonged to Whit Gibbons, the director of the Ecology Lab.

Man am I glad you caught me.

Me too, said Whit. If you had fallen in I’d have been filling out paperwork for three weeks.

Gibbons, I recall, looked like a Marine drill instructor. He was a senior professor of Ecology at UGA and the author of some fine books on Southern nature, particularly snakes. His book, Their Blood Runs Cold: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians is a classic. 

I had other adventures at the Bum Plant. One day I was taken inside a building that looked like the soundstage for an episode of Twilight Zone. Walking past a glassed-in recessed area jam-packed with dials, gauges, meters, and blinking lights I began to count my paces. I got to 260 I recall, longer than a football field. It looked like the control center for a Doomsday machine. Then I entered a cavernous room where a monstrous container held hot fuel. Upon leaving, I was made to stand in a contraption and insert my arms into metal sleeves akin to the ductwork in your home’s AC system. I was being scanned for exposure to radiation.

On another occasion, I was driven by an immensely long series of massive terraces guarded by razor wire and plastered with warning signs—the burial site for radioactive material with a lifespan of 100,000 years. Among the concerns was that man and his language might change so much over 100,000 years that people would forget what was buried there or how dangerous it was. How that could happen baffles me.

I have other memories of the Bomb Plant. I recall the day I walked through a familiar area only to find it unrecognizable. What happened here, I asked my escort.

You’re not a news reporter are you, he asked.

No, I said, a writer.

He explained that a neighboring building had negative air pressure. That means that any dust, i.e. radioactive dust, occurring in that building could not escape. They had wired up a new air system, only one of the fans had its polarity reversed. When they fired it up, dust blew onto the street, sidewalk, and grass. All of it had to be dug up, placed in stainless steel barrels, and buried.

I had an older neighbor once named Ann. She commuted to the Bomb Plant for a long time. Ann and many others made the weapons that in a perverse way upheld the peace in a game of drawn guns where he who shoots first is assured of annihilation. So why shoot?

Ann died of an illness that, looking back, surely had its roots in radiation. The Bomb Plant. What a long reach it had; probably still does it reach out and grab folks.

Over 23 years have passed since I was visited the bum plant but I was there as the old journalist used to say. My time there proved memorable. Ceaseless wonder and fear in one fell swoop.

The bum plant reigns as a place of myths. Through the years I heard of super-large deer, mercury-infested fish, monster alligators, and strange beasts with glowing eyes. I heard too that if you drove through on the way to Edisto Island you’d better not tarry. Wackenhut Security, those Wacky Nuts, would detain you.

I heard, too, that 18-wheelers disguised as ordinary trucks transported mysterious materials to and from the plant right down I-20. That, to me, belonged in the realm of an overworked imagination. Nonetheless it was an alleged truth, and as my Dad would often remark, something was true if they say it is.

Would I go back? Yes. But not to see the site’s science fiction-like facilities. No, I’d like to walk through Ellenton one more time. In one of our country’s great exoduses, some 6,000 people and 6,000 graves were uprooted and moved. To go there and stand by yourself is truly to be alone, and there are few places left where you can do that in these parts.

Yes, I’d like to go back to Ellenton, stand there, and play the music from the play, I Don’t Live There Anymore, The Ellenton Story, that premiered in, of all places, Dorset, England in 1992 … some 42 years after the evacuation that left nothing but streets, curbs, driveways, and sidewalks.

What a scary place it was, the bum plant. The Cold War gave it to us, a topic of great interest once upon a time at Mr. Clifford’s country store. What a naïve boy twelve-year-old Tommy was. Having been to Savannah River Site as a man, I rather envision it as I first did: hobos making cigars but boy was I wrong. Wrong by a country mile.

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

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