An article from La Voz. Excuse my computer translation
https://www.lavozdealmeria.com/noticia/233/especial-80-aniversario-de-la-voz/183514/el-dia-que-la-provincia-pudo-desaparecer?fbclid=IwAR3PcHhb2PmkH5D5cXcMlman32an-2w63xJhl4-fMKnrqnBwMSAYeDot0nIThe day the province could disappear
It all happened at 10.22 in the morning on Monday, January 17, 1966
Americans and natives collaborated in the cleaning work.
Americans and natives collaborated in the cleaning work.
You, reader, if you are less than 50 years old, could not have come to the world, not been born, your parents would have died contaminated, like all the parents of this province and contiguous regions, up to a radius of more than 300 kilometers, according to a declassified report of the American Energy Agency (DOE).
If they had detonated the four H bombs of 6 megatons that fell from the sky of Palomares, 75 times more powerful than the atomic ones of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just half a century ago, Almeria would have been swept away from the map like in the apocalyptic movie Armageddon of Bruce Willis.
Poor Almeria, the penultimate province of Spain for rent at that time, would have become a nuclear cemetery, a lunar territory swept by radioactivity , sealed by plutonium and with hundreds of thousands of allopathic people, with bones and blood poisoned by The inevitable radioactive cloud.
The miracle of San Anton
All that would have happened at 10.22 in the morning of Monday, January 17, 1966 , in which in Cuevas, the Brotherhood of San Antón celebrated the sermon and invited it with beans and bacon, in Palomares, Don Pedro, the teacher, taught Arithmetic to his students, in Garrucha , the fishermen hid the longlines and in Carboneras , Eddie Fowlie , the friend of the filmmaker David Lean, perched on a mountain, as in a premonition, to capture the only image that is conserved of the ball of fire in the air, at the very moment of the crash of the airplanes.
A few seconds earlier, the American giant super-ship captained by Wendorff, had approached the tanker plane to refuel kerosene more than 9,000 meters above the dry riverbed - like a skull versed Sotomayor - of the Almanzora River.
To the side, another pair of tanker plane and B-52 were about to finish the work of collecting fuel and were the ones who reported the fatal accident of the damaged devices. The operation had to be quick and simple, but something failed, the devices collided on the Gulf of Vera, the sky caught fire as in a biblical apocalypse and nothing in that humble Spanish village, Almeria, cave, was the same again.
Biblical apocalypse
Seven crew members were burned, three were saved by parachute into the sea and another by being rescued on land.
They did not detonate the atomic spurs because they were not activated, although armed, but two of them cracked in the fall, the dynamite charge exploded and up to ten kilos of the fateful plutonium were released , which over time has begun to degrade in radioactive americium
Another bomb succumbed intact by parachute on the riverbed and a fourth was rescued 80 days later - like the return to the world of Fog - after a Herculean naval deployment, in a maritime chasm several miles from the coast.
The nuclear catastrophe did not occur, Almería remained Almeria, because there was no chain explosion in the belt of protection of the core of the two cracked bombs, a remote but not impossible possibility, according to Randall
Maydew, advisor to the Sandia Corporation, the largest institution American in nuclear weapons research, who visited the area in those crucial days of the accident.
It was miraculous that no inhabitant, no housing in the village, was affected by that rain of fire, bombs, fuselages, kerosene, engines and landing gear that resembled the end of the world. An airplane wing rushed over Antonio Sabiote's orchard , the girl Antonia Flores, who later became mayor, hid terrified in her house next to which one of the projectiles collapsed.
The Tasca of Mula and the Tavern of Montoya were not damaged, but a cow that was resting, from the soponcio of the explosion, stopped giving milk and died.
The blue sky was covered with smoke and pieces of steel began to rain on Palomares illuminated by the incandescent jet of fuel. Explosions and more explosions, and people running and howling in fear as if it were a cataclysm on a morning that was promised as peaceful as a snail's working day.
The first to arrive The flames spread through some terraces of beans and several thunders culminated the fireworks. Terror seized the neighborhood and they felt the need to flee to La Algarrobina. They noticed an explosion near the cemetery and another 60 meters from the school desks. The accident, which changed the life of this simple cave village, could be seen from Sorbas to Carboneras and Guadix.
Captain Buchanan had not yet taken land , with his seat glued to the buttocks, when several neighbors arrived to help him and wrap him in a blanket terrified of cold. In the truck of the son of the mayor he was transferred to the hospital of Vera where he was cured by the doctor Don Jacinto González.
They also appeared, from the first, through that land of tomato plants that were planted with quincalla, the priest Navarrete talking about the miracle of SanAntón , Captain Calín, the diplomat Rafael Lorente, the bearded architect Roberto Puig , who was manipulating one of the bombs , and the judicial secretary, Esteban Carrillo who ordered the removal of the bodies.
In those moments, the fishermen of Aguilas Paco Simó, Bartolo Roldán and Alfonset, managed to rescue three more crew members from the waters.
The sun was still in place, the chickens were still tricking in the corral of Sabiote and the 1,500 inhabitants of Palomares, a hamlet without drinking water, with a single public telephone and a cinema called Capri , was trying to move on. From the mass of plane wrecks, the neighbors and the Civil Guard managed to rescue the bodies that were wrapped in blankets and transferred to the chapel.
Young and old played among a mountain of doughs, between ailerons and landing gear, observing the crater that had opened the nuclear device. They manipulated the H bombs without fear or caution.
The couple of planes that refueled next to the wrecked sent the alarm signal to the Pentagon and spread throughout Yankee Spain : Broken Arrow in southeastern Spain. The US military commanders took the road to Palomares , through the San Javier airport. They entered at night on the road of Vera. They saw the town without light: shrapnel had cut the wires and the owner of the bar was confiscated an oil lamp.
The Marines installed the first camp by the river. In the morning, an intense engine noise woke the neighbors. Caravans of military trucks, helicopters and light planes arrived across the sky, as if it were the Normandy Landings.
The people watched astonished that deployment of forces, unprecedented in times of peace . Journalists and curious arrived , but it had already begun to cordon off the affected area and the keywords were top secret and no comment.
They began to whitewash the facades of the houses and burn the clothes and it was forbidden to consume the remains of the crop, they could not even use the feed for the animals. The Americans seemed willing to pay anything to suspend agricultural and fishing tasks. Until Sunday, Governor Gutierrez Egea did not appear to whom the neighbors demanded compensation for barley, for lost tomatoes, for lettuce and pastures.
Thus began the valley of tears in the neighborhood for an event that no fault they had. The fishermen of Villaricos, 15 days after not being able to launch the boats, made a mutiny and began to burn the Wilson camp if they did not receive urgent money to eat. Soon there was food distribution of the Americans in the Plaza of the neighborhood when people began to feel pure hunger.
Wilson's men took 1,7000 tons of radioactive land via Cartagena to bury it in South Carolina. "The problem is already solved," they exclaimed, ignorant of the stigma they were leaving, which is now 50 years old.
