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Show While The Uranium flush Changes Utah Towns, ftase Uge lilso Alters Washington Cities Oreatly Seldom in American history., have three neighboring villages seen such violent change as Han-ford, Han-ford, White Bluffs and Richland in southeastern Washington during dur-ing the infancy of the Atomic Age. One of the tiny communities billowed bil-lowed almost overnight into a brawling boom town and quickly .faded away and was lost to the desert wind and sand. The second village was swallowed swal-lowed up, its value as a potential orchard center overshadowed by the need for an atomic energy plant site. The third outlived the roaring boom period and since has grown into an unincorporated city of 27,000 persons, its future secure as a business and residential area for atomic plant personnel. Deep inside the barricaded boundaries of the Hanford atomic energy project today lies the remnants rem-nants of the town which once was given great promise of becoming becom-ing a leading producer of orchard crops. The town was White Bluffs. Once a small orchard community commun-ity on the banks of the majestic Columbia, it since has been absorbed ab-sorbed by the sprawling, bustling Hanford project-Now it is a crossroad cross-road in the center of a 600-square- m i 1 e government reservation, where General Electric Company operates the Hanford plutonium plant for the Atomic Energy Commission. Com-mission. The town which gave its name to the Hanford project also was a quiet community of 300 persons per-sons before its selection as a site for the huge atomic energy plant turned it into one of the biggest boom towns the West has ever known. More than 50,000 persons, comprising com-prising workers and their families, moved into the area early in 1943 to help construct giant plant facilities. fa-cilities. They were people from all over the country, recruited from wartime labor markets to build the original Hanford works. When their job was completed, most of them moved on. Those who stayed behind to operate the atomic energy plant moved to little Richland Village, some 25 miles away from the nearest plant area. Today, the town or Hanrora is a ghost town, its blacktopped streets and windswept wooden fram skeletons offering only slight evidence of its brawling past. Richland, a village of 250 persons per-sons which stood 30 miles downriver down-river from Hanford and White Bluffs, survived its sister communities com-munities and the fickle prosperity of the era. It expanded and absorbed ab-sorbed its new people until today it is one of the largest cities in Eastern Washington. Because of the almost complete absence of facilities for caring for its increased population in the early days of the Hanford project, the responsibility of providing the necessities of a big town was placed with the plant contractor, in those days, E. I. duPont de Nemours, prime contractor to the Army Engineers. The essential activities of a municipality mu-nicipality police and fire protection, protec-tion, supplying the necessary utilities util-ities and recreational facilities are now provided by the Community Com-munity Services Section of GE. This group covers all normal departments de-partments of most cities in the nation; na-tion; everything from public works and safety, to parks and liberty boards. In addition, it manages most of the town real estate rentals ren-tals and operates the plant administrative admin-istrative area. The"' commuhitiesi"1o'f Hanford and White Bluffs now are chapters chap-ters in American history, but Richland Rich-land a child of the Atomic Age is making history as this nation's na-tion's first atomic city. |