In this oral history interview, Trisha Pritikin describes her experience growing up near Hanford and her later experiences with health issues. She also shares the story of a class-action lawsuit that she participated in, brought against the US government by fellow downwinders.
Hanford Site: Trisha Pritikin
“It seemed like a perfectly normal town to me….[But] I started to have health issues when I was eighteen, and we didn't know what was wrong. This was about eight years after the end of exposures from Hanford. What I mean by that is, over the time I lived there in Richland—actually, beginning in the late 1940s—Hanford began to release from chemical separations facilities on the site the byproducts of [plutonium](link to Glossary) production, into the air and water, without letting anyone know they were doing that. And so people downwind, people in Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, which were the three cities next to Hanford, and people through a vast downwind area, were exposed to airborne radioactive particles.”
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