Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town | Kelly McMasters | Talks at Google

Well, thank you everyone for coming today. Kelly McMasters is here. She's the author. This is her debut book, welcome to Shirley, A Memoir from an Atomic Town. And Kelly is a freelance writer. She's had her articles published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle Decor, and Time Out New York, among others. She's the co director of the KGB Nonfiction Reading series in New York. She also teaches writing at Media Bistro and Columbia University. So Kelly grew up in Shirley, Long island, which is what brings this so near and dear to her heart. And she has a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in Literary nonfiction from Columbia. So just a quick Earth day and googly fact about Kelly. Earlier this week at one of her events, she actually purchased a tree for every book that was purchased from her just to replace what was taken from the earth. And I just think that really resonates with why Kelly's here, not only to tell her story, but also that we are, in fact, in Earth Week. So just something really terrific, very characteristic of Kelly. So just once known as the town of Flowers, a little bit about the town of Shirley. Its people were lured there with false promises while they found each other and built very strong relationships that would last a lifetime. Cancer causing chemicals and nuclear waste from the Brookhaven National Laboratory were seeping into the water supply. Through well researched evidence, Kelly links cancer clusters around Shirley to the nuclear site and weaves a touching story of friendship and loss in her hometown. It has already received much critical acclaim, some of which you have seen already through the email that went out. So without much ado, here we go. Or without further ado, I bring with her much ado, Kelly McMaster.

Hello. Thank you so much, Michelle and Scott for having me here. I'm really excited. One of my closest friends works in Google over in Mountain View. And although he did say it was probably a little too early for him him to get up, I really thank you guys for coming here to hear about the book. So one of the most pleasurable and sometimes most painful aspects of writing a book and putting it out into the public is the response you get from your readers. And the responses I've gotten so far have mostly been from people in Shirley. And that is when I was writing it, who I was mostly writing to or imagining in my head. And most of those have been really positive and I wanted to share with you. Last night I got an email from my old babysitter and she was actually only a few years older than me and it was very much the, you know, the cool babysitter that I would sort of watch her. And she taught me how to put makeup on and all those things. And she emailed me and said, first, thanks for making me feel really old. Because she looked at my photo and I think realized, well, if I'm in my 30s, then that makes her, well, older than she thought she was. But she, in her note, she said she heard about the book and she said, I still live in Shirley in the same house. And she moved into that house in 1977 at the age of five. And she said, my husband and I bought this house from my parents when we got married in 1995. This town has always been a mystery to me. We have the bay and the ocean, yet have been considered a failing community for many years. And since the book came out, I've received so many emails like this, so many emails from people who either remember Shirley but have moved out, but have fond memories of it, or people who are still there and really trying to make a difference. And over and over and over, just, it seems to get bad press or get made fun of. And we're right next to the Hamptons and it's a very blue collar, working class town. And I think, you know, going being set right next to the Hamptons doesn't help. I think if it was a little town somewhere in the Midwest, then we wouldn't have such a bad self esteem problem. But I think that being next to the Hamptons, it kind of ups the ante. So I was thinking about all these emails and I realized that's really why I wrote the book, because I don't get it either. It's a beautiful town. Naturally it does have the, it has ocean access. You have to cross a bridge and cross a sand dune to get there. It's got a beautiful bay, it's got gorgeous rivers. And I grew up next to a wildlife refuge that I played in pretty much every day. And still it just gets a really bad rap. And writing teachers have always told me, and now I tell my students that we write to figure things out and we write to process. And I think my biggest question was after starting the book and speaking to the girls that I grew up with, who also felt that our childhood was really magical and we wouldn't trade it for the world, the big question was, well, why are we so ashamed? Why are we so ashamed of where we come from? And that's mostly why I wrote the book. And there were some surprising things that I learned and some not so surprising things that I learned. But I wanted to Just give you a little taste of. A little taste of the neighborhood that I grew up in and what it meant for the first four or five years of my life. My father was a golf pro, and we would move pretty much two to three times a year by season, moving from a golf club to a ski mountain in the winter where he would make snow or teach ski school. And then we'd move again. And, you know, for a kid, I was an only child, I thought it was great. And every time we would move to a new place, often we would live in either the clubhouses, where the kitchens were these giant commercial kitchens, and the peanut butter jars were this big. And I thought we owned all of it. So I thought we were doing fine. What I didn't realize was we were really struggling. And when I interviewed my father, because I did do a lot of interviews with my parents for the book, I, for the first time, really understood. He was teaching upstate at a private club, and he took on this side job of selling sodas to the members. And I think for him, it was a really hard memory to relive. To know that you're trying to support a family and doing what you love and playing golf and teaching golf, and you're great at what you do, and yet you still have to run after a member and say, 25 cents, you want a soda? And that 25 cents suddenly really matters. So places like Shirley, which are. It's probably the most affordable place in Suffolk county right now, places like Shirley gave places, gave people like me and my family a start. And I think it is really unfortunate to make fun of these places that maybe aren't so posh and lovely as the Hamptons, but give families hope and a safe place. So I just wanted to introduce you to a few of our neighbors. With just a few. I'm just going to read a few pages here. But across most of Shirley, in 1981, which is the year that we moved there, houses lined the haphazardly angled streets, packed together like points on a picket fence. Homes on my street were spaced about a car's width apart, maybe two. The majority of them held families with two or three children and possibly a grandparent as well. From our last place in the Catskills, I couldn't even see another house. Here. Everyone seemed to know everything about everyone else. A steady stream of women from the neighborhood shuffled up our driveway to knock on our door in the first few weeks after we moved in. Each one brought food covered in tinfoil and stories about our landlady, Mrs. Cutch. We were renting the house. Most of the women had been living on the block for years and many had grown up in town. They did not wear aprons or trade suggestions for getting stains out of lace curtains. Many of them wore blue eye shadow, had gold chains with little charms of gold horns hanging from their necks, and chain smoked. They brought meat filled lasagna and rice balls and told my mother where not to buy her cold cuts. They would pat my hair and ask me questions. Where did you come from? Upstate. Where are your brothers and sisters? I don't have any. How old are you? I'll be five in a few months. Many of the women had daughters trailing shyly behind them as they came up our driveway, including the four girls close to my age. Within a few houses of my own, I slowly worked my way into the fabric of the neighborhood and became closest to Tina, the oldest at 7, who lived directly across the street. She was bossy and loud and funny, the leader of our group with a head full of dark glossy curls. She liked to dance and sing. Her older sister, Jenny had just gotten a part in a Nestle Crunch commercial, and Tina planned to become an actress like her sister Jackie. Their mother always had homemade ice pops in the freezer, frozen fruit juice with toothpicks and ice trays, really. And Jerry, Tina's father, was the unofficial neighborhood dad. Jerry worked as a maintenance man at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a federal facility just up the highway. And unlike most of the fathers who were in service jobs like my dad or in construction, he was home at a reasonable hour almost every night. Melissa, the girl who used to live in my new house and now live next to Tina on the other side of the street, was blonde and sensitive. She was the dreamer of our quintet, and her wide brown eyes would sometimes fix in one place until they clouded over and we could tell she was far away. This might happen during a quiet afternoon, sitting on her front lawn while we were rubbing the velvety petals of her magnolia tree on each other's cheeks, where she could break away into her private world in the middle of a heated kickball game at the end of the block. Melissa's older brother, Jonathan, terrorized us every chance he got, pelting us with berries or pinching our arms. Their mother was loud and loving, quick with jokes. Their father, Richie, a steam fitter who would go away on jobs for weeks at a time, built intricate model trains complete with real steam in the basement, although not the kind that we were allowed to touch or play with. Richie and his friends also worked on cars. Big hulking shells of rusty trucks would sit on cement blocks in Melissa's driveway and we would carefully pick our way around, the legs stretched out underneath them. Melissa was always the Studebaker when we played Spud, a combination of freeze tag and dodgeball in the streets. The third in our troop was Andrea. She was the athlete of the group, fierce and strong as her long black hair. She lived on the other side of Joe the Realtor, and her house was always dark and quiet like church. Frank Sinatra songs played softly on a loop, and her cupboards and refrigerator smelled like vitamins. Her mother kept a vegetable garden in the backyard, and her father, Andrew also worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. But while Jerry went to work in his pickup truck with a flatbed full of tools, wearing carpenter pants or jeans and a baseball cap and big boots, Andrew went to work in short sleeve collared shirts and slacks with matching belts and shoes. The briefcase he carried was pointy and severe like his car. He fixed computers, he was meticulous about his lawn, and I quickly learned never to touch even a toad. It was perfect green yard. Joe's house was between my house and Andrea's, and there was usually someone bustling in or out of Joe's with a bang on the screen door. That house was always loud and sentences that were started in English were usually finished in Italian. Insults were doled out the same way, and I learned Italian curse words before I learned their English counterparts. You strengths. Joe's two sons, Louis and Anthony, were younger than me, still in diapers. His niece, Margaret, was one year older, and even though her family lived on the other side of town, she came to play with our group all summer. Like me, Margaret's brown hair angled into a short page boy cut. We would spin and spin on the street, pretending we were performing perfect Hamilcamels. Margaret was the scrawny girl spying on us on moving day, and our similar builds and haircuts locked us into an immediate bond. My skin, dotted with more and more freckles as summer wore on, would never take on Margaret's warm brown tan, but we were sometimes mistaken for sisters. Margaret's outfits were always clean and ironed, even her play clothes. Three houses within two blocks were full of Joe's extended family, and on Sundays I took to blending into the under the foot traffic, listening to the voices reaching louder and louder registers as people spoke over one another. Maria, Joe's wife, always made my pasta without sauce since I didn't like tomatoes, and I would happily suck up the long strands of spaghetti one by one, as loudly as possible. No one was listening to me slurping. Anyway. That summer in Shirley was the first time I was a part of a group in a neighborhood. I loved the freedom of opening the door to someone else's house and being able to wander in and out, looking in their refrigerator or cupboards. Because I was an only child, some of the other mothers pitied me, using this as a reason to baby me more than the other kids. But after we moved to Shirley, I never again wished for brothers and sisters. Anytime I wanted to be part of a larger family, I just walked out the front door and picked a direction. So the reason I wanted to just introduce you to some of the people here. When I was first putting this book together, you know, there were some decisions to be made, and some of the editors were suggesting to go strictly journalistic and just report. You know, report everything and don't include your personal experience and just have it be very historical and journalistic based. And then there was another contingent who said, just do memoir. There's a section in here when we become teenagers, obviously, that innocent magic sort of wears a little thin and we get into some trouble and do the usual teenage things that Michelle and I were talking earlier that usually involved Camaros because it was Long Island. But I think at that point, I wound up losing some friends, not only to illness, but to drug overdoses and things like that. And the darker side of Shirley started to creep in. And as I went away to college, I was returning again and again for funerals. And it was sort of. The funerals were sort of like small reunions. And. And it was only at college that I realized, hey, no one else is going home to bury their friends or their friends mothers or their friends fathers. That's kind of strange. And I think the memoir part, while very important and accessible, I think it had to include all of the science and the journalism. So I decided, with my agent's blessing, to do a hybrid. And so this book is. While it's a memoir, there is a lot of history and science involved, and I hope that the memoir makes it more accessible. But the reason I chose that is for the people you just heard about, because they are very important. And with the laboratory that basically sits just north of the town. The two grew up together, and in the 50s, their stories are very intertwined. The town's founder first came to the area to visit Camp Upton, which was in World War I. It received all of the guys being shipped off to war, and that was an induction area. And it was the first time Walter T. Shirley saw trees. And he has this great quote that says, the first time I saw a tree, I thought it was a fire hydrant frozen green. And although that's a little. He was a vaudevillian, so I'm sure that was a little hyperbole. But he just fell in love with the ocean and the natural beauty of the area. And that's why he came back and started developing the town. But what most of the people who moved to Shirley when I moved there didn't know was that the National Laboratory at that time had gone through three nuclear reactors, and each one leaked. And the National Laboratory sits on top of one of the largest sole source drinking water aquifers in the country. And it serves 3 million people. That's where 3 million people on Long island get their drinking water, including the town of Shirley. And most of the Shirley is basically a giant sandbar. So it's very permeable. And there's a spine that runs along the north side of the island. And everything, if you pour a glass of water, everything runs south and east. And Shirley is exactly south and east of the lab. So we were first in line. What's interesting is if you look at. There are quite a few national laboratories across the country, and there does seem to be surely near every single one of them, a blue collar dumping ground. And I think the fact that it is blue collar and you know, our voting power and our pocketbooks aren't as large as some other places, that I don't see that as an accident. And I think. I think that while the labor still says that they don't have any relationship with Shirley, I think what's frustrating is that Shirley didn't have a choice but to have a relationship with the lab. And you'll see that a lot of the dads actually did work at the laboratory, but most of them were in support positions. And most of the scientists lived north or west of the lab, which I also don't find to be a coincidence. But I think what. I didn't really realize that until I started working on the book. And what I think is important here is that the lessons time and time and again were your disposable. And the lab actually has won multiple Nobel Prizes and they've done some really incredible research, but they also did pollute terribly. And I think that the people in Shirley did sort of internalize that disposable message. And so they started to take on that sort of working class shame. And that is where I For me, that's where that connect happened. That is where I drew the lines. Those two things intersecting is where I started to feel really badly when I. When I would always say, oh, I'm from the East End once I went to college, or, oh, I'm from, you know, eastern Long island or near the Hamptons. And now I'm happy to say that I proudly say that I'm from Shirley, Long Island. And I hope ultimately that people who read this book who come from Shirley will be able to do the same thing. Although I did take a ride through the town recently with Newsday, and I was reminded of a time period when we were looking for a house in the mid-80s, and interest rates were sky high, and there were a lot of foreclosed homes. And as I was driving around Shirley, I was trying to show the journalists how beautiful it was and take them to this dock and take them to the beach. And we were driving by so many homes, and they all. Many had these bright yellow stickers on the front, either on their windows or their doors, and, you know, weeds up to here. And they've really been hit hard. Out of all of New York State, they are, I think, number four to be hit hardest by this mortgage issue. And I think while this is an environmental book, it's also a class book. And I think often America is very nervous to talk about class. And I certainly was when I first started writing this book. I kept saying, well, that's besides the point. It's not about class, but it is about class. And I think we struggled in the 80s to. To raise. To get above our raisin, as my Southern friend says. And we tried to change the name of our town. And there's a chapter in here devoted to that. And again, when. Only when I started, when I went back into the story as a writer and with a little bit of objectivity, did I realize how strange that was. We had this very long history. You know, we were named shirley since the 50s, and there are these two factions. One faction wanted to call the town Floyd Harbor. William Floyd was our. He's sort of our patron saint, and he signed the New York Declaration of Independence, and he had a farm in the town. So everybody always points to him as our. As the reason Shirley is very important. But Floyd harbor started to get people's eyebrows raised because there's no harbor. And so in a very Shirley way, they started making bumper stickers. The people, sort of the guys who were like, hey, I live in Shirley, and I love it. I'm not going to be ashamed. I don't want to change the name of our town. So they made these great bumper stickers that said, where's DA Harbor? And that is da. So sort of embracing what everybody had been trying to change. And ultimately, there was a boycott that, you know, they had this official vote, and they did try and change the name. And by the vote, tallies they won. But because of the boycott, there's only one organization in the country that can officially change the name. And they called the Vote. They said that the vote was not a real vote because of the boycott. So we wound up staying Shirley. But you'll see, if you drive through the town, and I hope you do, it's exit 68. If you're on your way to the Hamptons this summer at all, you'll see there's still the William Floyd Pharmacy, there's the William Lloyd Animal Hospital. And they are. Right now, we're in the midst of more trauma because of the very cheap rents there. The government has been dumping sex offenders there. And there are these houses full of 10 to 14, mostly men, who are registered sex offenders. And the government pays their rent when they first come out of jail. And Shirley has been a hotbed for it because the rents are so cheap. It's one of the cheap again. It's one of the most affordable places on Long Island. And I think two years ago, there was a house with 12 men, and they're in neighborhoods like the one that I grew up in. And a father, I think his daughter was maybe a year and a half old, and he was just obsessing over it and obsessing over it, and one night tried to burn the house down. And I call that Shirley justice, which is not to say that that is the right thing to do, but I feel like that is part and parcel with the lab when we keep saying, this isn't right, this isn't right, and nobody listens. Sometimes I think people are driven to take things into their own hands. And there were three sex attacks within one week in the town. And so suddenly, we were front page news. And also in Shirley fashion, it turns out that one of the attacks was false. It was a girl who actually just didn't want to take a test at school. So she called the cops and said, I was attacked. And that is exactly how Shirley's history seems to go. We get on the front page, and people almost listen. And then they say, oh, those people. But I think that even though the one sex attack was not real, there still were two others. And again, I think Shirley on the front page is always a good thing. But more often than not, I actually have a Google alert for Shirley and the mastics, and I have a Google alert for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. And I'm working on an essay right now where I talk about the frustrations, because all of the Google alerts for Shirley are, you know, man shot other man with bow and arrow and, you know, deer with elevated levels of cesium 137, and all of these sort of really not so great things about Shirley. And then the lab. The lab Google alerts are always, you know, lab finds why breast cancer is so prevalent in astronauts. And they keep winning lots of awards. So this book is really an attempt to tell the story from Shirley's side. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor. But memoir, I think, is wonderful, although it's come under some fire lately. I think memoir is a wonderful genre because it allows you to be a witness. And there have been many health studies and environmental studies and science studies on Long island, but they all seem to miss Shirley and they all seem to miss the lab. And so this is my unscientific memoir version. I think it is the truest and the closest that I could get to telling the real story of Shirley. So I think with that, I'm going to open it up to questions, if you'd like. Hi. Hi.

First of all, thank you very much for coming today. And I haven't read the book. I very much look forward to it. I think this type of work is very important. Also, thank you for choosing to include memoirs in it. We have this type of issue when we bring it home to people. And it's not just statistics, somebody's uncle or somebody's neighbor, that's when it starts to matter. So thank you very much for that. When it comes to. You said that sometimes getting people to listen has been difficult. What would you suggest that people, blue collar towns that perhaps face issues. I mean, there are many. You cited some and there are others. It's not uncommon. What can those towns do or what would you suggest that they do to make their issue known?

I think that's a really good and difficult question to answer, but I hope that this will show how community activism can work. There were some really amazing activist stories in here. One in particular, there's a forge. It's called the Forge River. And. And every, usually about early June, it clouds over and there's a fish kill, and it's just black and reeks. And then because of that fish kill. You get dead fish and dead ducks and dead crabs lining. And so that adds to the smell. And so it's sort of the curse of Shirley. You get waterfront property, but you can't open the windows in the summer. And there's a guy there named Ron Lupski, and he started this group called Save the Forge River. And Ron is a carpenter. His wife drives a school bus. And he had no idea. No experience in anything, really, but he just started talking to his neighbors. And, you know, I sat down. This is in the book. I sat down his wife, and he had me over for dinner one night, and I said, you know, why. Why did you get into this? Because now he's knee deep and has almost no time for his carpenter stuff anymore. And he. He said, well, you know, I only had two choices. One, you know, leave and two, fight. So I'm fighting. And I said, well, right, but why didn't you leave? And he said, this is my home, man. I can't. I can't just let it go. So I think he's a really great example of what people can do. I think there are a lot of civic organizations that have sprouted up over the past few years in Shirley, and really, all I think it comes down to, it's sort of the Earth Day question, right? Since it is Earth Day Week, and they like to. On the news show, all of these elementary school classes, you know, going out and picking up trash and planting flowers, which then you have all the plastic containers. So I'm not quite sure how that's good, but I think it's nice to do that on Earth Day and on Earth Day Week. But I think if we. And not to bash technology in any way, but I think right now, especially at this age, in this moment, we live very solitary lives, and we forget that what we do affects our neighbor. And by neighbor, I mean, you know, the person next to you who sleeps next to you in bed, the person who sleeps in bed at the next house. And like Brookhaven and Shirley, the people who are connected to you through land and water, you know, if you dump your motor oil out next to your driveway, well, that's going right back into your drinking water. So.

System.

You know, your Brita is not meant to remove estrogen from your water. Your Brita is not meant to remove radioactive substances from your water. And I think we are sort of lulled into this very solitary. Well, if I. If I do something good for myself or just focus on myself and make sure I'm safe, or maybe my Children are safe. That's all that matters. But I think increasingly it becomes very obvious that we can't live that way anymore. And I hope that Earth Day is one example of how important it is for people to join together. But I think for small towns, I think they need to understand that they are the backbone of this country. And I mean, I'm sure most of you came from small towns. And even though we live in this great city, most people come from small towns. And I think there is a feeling of not mattering, what can I do? But everybody can do something, whether it's writing a letter, learning your facts. So the letter that you write tomorrow will be even stronger and just working together.

Thank you.

Thanks.

So thank you again for coming today. Googlers are by nature people who like to take action and make this a better world. So I have two questions for you. First, what was Brookhaven's response to this, the research that you're doing in the book? And then second, what can we do? Because I think after reading this book, it made me a little bit angry. I want to. I had grown up thinking of Brookhaven as a place that wins prizes and does all of this research, not knowing what the consequences were, which are awful, awful consequences. So what can we do to try and help fight the fight and have them do the right thing?

They haven't had an official response yet, but when I was working on the book, I tried to work with them and I, gosh, I must have emailed them and called them every few months or maybe two years. And for a while I really thought, gosh, I'm going to have to write this book without them, which I didn't want to do. And finally they let me in and we had talked about a week long, basically a week long tour where I would go every day. And I gave them a list of what I wanted to see. There's this area called the Cesium Forest. And from the 50s to the 70s, they basically were like, well, let's see what, what, you know, nuclear holocaust will look like on plants. And so they went into an area and again, this is five miles from my house and just dropped cesium uncontained and watched it. And even still today, you know, that was 30, almost 40 years ago. If you look at an aerial view, there's. It looks like a target because everything was dead and it's slowly, slowly starting to grow back. But I wanted to see that and I wanted to see, gosh, I wanted to see everything. And when I called to confirm, they said well, we have you on for two meetings one day. And so I said, okay, I'll go, and I'll just try to muscle my way in. And when you drive to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, you know, it used to be this army induction center with them, so there's this big barricade in front, and it's not something that you just sort of can see from the highway. It's surrounded by the Pine Barrens. And so I drove in and had to get, you know, go into this little security trailer and get my first badge and then get. Continue on and get my second badge. And there's this great LED sign that flashes that says, brookhaven Science for the World. And then that sort of goes away. And then this new message pops up and says, safety never hurts. And I think that is really, really exactly how they feel sometimes about safety. But as an afterthought. And when I finally did go, I was able to meet with maybe about six people. And most of them were just very sort of, you know, the lab is wonderful. And, you know, of course they work there. They have to believe, and I think they do believe that they have to believe that to go there every day. And finally I found one man who was there. There was a big meeting between Shirley and the lab when there were all of these leaks of chemical waste. And they finally said, okay, everybody was on wells that work from the side of your home. So they said, okay, we're going to put in municipal water, and we're going to pay for it. So they gave 800 homes in Shirley Municipal Water. I'm sorry, 640 of the homes were in Shirley. The rest were in Manorville. And this, I think this guy's second day at work, he had to host this community meeting to talk about that, because the lab said, well, you know, you can't prove that the chemicals are from us, but we're going to do this nice neighborly gesture anyway. And he did. He was the first person who said, yeah, we really mishandled things. People learned about this through the radio. They heard that there was a leak, and they're going to be getting hooked up to water over the radio. And then they wonder, oh, my God, is that my house? So people were coming, just terrified out of their mind. And after we had a really good conversation, and he was really the first person at the lab to say there was more that we could do. And after he got up to leave, the woman who was my guide for the day said, and although it was very clear why I was there, And I had my notepad out and she said, that's all off the record, you realize. And I think it was because he was the first person to sort of let the light shine through the cracks a little bit. And I put that in the book. I felt that was very important. But they did, or I did sort of muscle my way into the library for three days into their public records room, which again, you have to pass like three or four different security measures to get into. And a lot of what I learned there was put into the book. And I think so far it seems, you know, they're saying, oh, well, we've done this study and we've done that study, and you're wrong and you didn't take this study into consideration. And besides the fact we're cleaning it up and I first, the point of the book is most of the studies that have been done have left out both surely in the lab and also the large breast cancer study that took 10 years and millions and millions of dollars was mostly funded by the Department of Defense. And it seems a little fox in the henhouse to me. I really have lost a lot of confidence in the way science works in this country today. I think that, you know, just the other day in the newspaper, there was a study that they found that said cigarettes definitely do not cause cancer. And it was. The study was run by. Was run with money, used money that came from the cigarette companies. So science, I think, while it seems like such a pure. A pure art in a way, I really, I've learned to sort of start looking behind where the science is coming from. And not that I think all science at all is funk. That's not what I'm saying. Please don't misunderstand me. But what I would love is for someone independent, truly independent. It's hard because most of this happened in the 80s and most of the people are dead already who this could have saved. But, you know, in 2006, there were 372 pounds of volatile organic compounds, which are VOCs, and 5.3 millicuries of radioactive strontium 90 removed from the groundwater more than 1.5 billion gallons of treated water that they had to strip and return to the aquifer. And £5,592 of VOCs have been removed from the drinking water to date. And I think it's wonderful that they're cleaning it up and Superfund has made it so they have to clean it up. But what I would love is if a. They just said, yeah, we do have a relationship. Not only do you support us in the jobs that the people who live in, Shirley, take there, but we want to support you. We want to give a, you know, a science scholarship to your high school. We want to, you know, be. Have an open relationship. And I think. I think in terms of what we can do, the first thing you should do is go to epa.gov and see what the Superfund sites are where you live and track them. And I think epa.gov is a really great source for that. They have maps. And for me, a really important moment was when I brought the breast cancer map of New York State up on my computer and then brought the Superfund map in New York State up on my computer. They're the same map. They are almost exactly the same map. And I think we just need to really start demanding that not only our government, but everybody pays more attention to what we're putting in our water. Thanks.

This ties into what you were just saying from Brian, and Brian's in Cambridge. I assume that's Cambridge up on the screen. So, Brian, are you there? How much is there a culture of secrecy around Brookhaven that prevents looking into environmental problems left over from. From the waste? I grew up in Los Alamos, and I think pretty little is known about the environmental pollution waste problems there. In some places, it's expected and almost lapped off that there's waste buried where there used to be lan, I guess Los Alamos National Lab activities. There have been cleanups where there have been cleanups where before there was no indication of anything in places where I used to go hiking. How do we find out about these things?

I wish I knew how to find out about these things, but I think one real blessing was that Superfund stepped in. And do you guys remember the Shoreham nuclear power plant in Long island that they spent millions of dollars on? It was going to be a nuclear. It was going to be an energy plant. The nuclear reactors at Brookhaven were purely for science, not for energy. But the Shore Arm nuclear power plant got a lot of press and there were all these activists out with their no nuclear power on Long island because, well, if you're on the other end of the island, unless you have a rowboat, you're not getting off. So it's just a really ridiculous place to put nuclear reactors. And I think they were surprised to find that, oh, actually we already have three reactors. And that's really when this whole thing started. So I think. I think Superfund really uncovered a ton of information and that was a researcher's dream. You know, everything from what my neighbor Jerry, the maintenance man who actually unfortunately dies from multiple cancers. In the book, he, you know, one of his jobs was to dig these holes. And, you know, they would just dump their radiated lab equipment or the animals that they were doing experiments on. They would just take the carcasses. And there are rules. You know, they're supposed to dig a certain amount of feet down. And, you know, rules aren't always followed. And I think all those pits were dug up through Superfund and found. And that was the first time that they actually realized how shallow all of that was. But I don't know. I mean, how can we make our government tell us these things? I think there is certainly these conspiracy. I think what's troubling is the conspiracy theorists, I think, are great for raising questions. But then at the same time, they sort of make the true activists look a little ridiculous. There's a scene in the book where most of Shirley is convinced that a UFO has crashed. And then later on when the TWA flight that was going to Paris crashes just off the coast of the town. And everybody in Shirley says, no, we saw a missile or something go up and hit. You know, they say, and you also saw a ufo. And so there are. I don't know. It's a really tough question. We. I was living in Carroll Gardens a few years ago, and I actually chose that place because it was on a sort of commercial, really quiet block. And there on the other side, there was this really large open space. It was a few acres, and where do you find that in Brooklyn? And so we got so much sunlight and it was really quiet and beautiful. And one morning I walked out and this is Carroll Gardens, like just off of Smith Street. I walked out and looked into the. And it was fenced, but I looked into the. Into the. Into the lot. And there were these people in moon suits walking around, I mean, completely with, you know, full on gloves, white, you know, suits. Their heads were covered and they were. They really looked like they were on the moon. And they had all these, you know, machines and they were taking soil samples and water samples. And I was like, and I'm in. You know, it was summer. I was in flip flops. And I just. I was like, oh my God, what is going on? And so I did some research and it's a brownfield. Brownfield is a less contaminated site than a super fun site. But there were these old gas plants that are all over Brooklyn, actually, and they want to build there because it is one of the last large acre sites in Brooklyn. So, of course, that's a good, extremely valuable real estate. And so there were these, actually Columbia scientists, they were professors, and it was a class and students, and they were testing for all of the chemicals. But it's really unsettling when you realize you've been living next door to this and what you thought was sort of a bucolic, attractive thing, and it turns out to be almost deadly, and that that site actually is going to be rebuilt and there's going to be a big condo there. Our, you know, our, our elementary school in Shirley is built on a dump. You know, it's, it's. It again, comes back to this idea of what you put in the ground stays there. And I think if you can try and just educate yourself. And again, epa.gov is a great place to do that, to find out what's around you. Start there and then after that go back to your hometown and figure out what's there.

I just want to make a comment. As someone who actually worked on an accelerator in Chicago. I've never been to Brookhaven. Yeah, but.

And an accelerator is different than the reactors. But. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Well, they also have an accelerator.

Yes. Yeah.

So anybody in the field who's working with either reactors or any sort of nuclear material are very well aware of the dangers that it poses to their health and the health of the environment. And generally, through everything that I've seen as a graduate student, safety is taken actually very seriously. And people will, for certain violations of safety rules, people will get kicked out, even if there were no ramifications or no danger, no harm done. However, at the same time, I think this sort of resonates with what you are saying. A lot of the decisions, they are driven by a lack of willingness to take responsibility for the decision. And that seems to be a general feature of the US Government, and it definitely is a feature of the leaders of the labs. So while the people who actually do the work, they will take responsibility for their action, people higher up will essentially avoid doing that as much as they can. And I think that's largely part of the problem where as much as possible, things will be covered up before they're made public, if they even have to get to the stage where they're made public.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I know a lot of the scientists have to wear badges to show. It's sort of like, remember when, I think in the 80s where you take your temperature and you put it with A little band and it changes color. And did you have to do that?

Yes. The reason for doing that is that if you work in an area where there is potential radioactivity, they quarterly read the badges to figure out how much radioactivity you were actually exposed to and how much higher it is than the natural level of radioactivity that you get from the atmosphere and elsewhere.

Yeah, I think one thing that interested me about that is that while you know, up in, I guess, like, where you would be working, they were. They did have the badges on. I think a great example of the bureaucracy that you're talking about. There is a decision. There are these underground holding tanks that basically contain a lot of the waste. And Suffolk county law, which is the county where Shirley is in, required that it have a double liner just for safety. The federal government doesn't have that requirement. And so because the lab is a federal entity, they didn't have to abide by that law, which would also cost double the money, of course. So they decided to just line it once. And that was one of the instances where it leaked. And I think that I wish that there was some big badge that they could stick under the lab and check that to see, you know, where. Because it's not just walking around, but it's. You know, there are other directions. But I think that it is an irresponsibility. I mean, they've known that this stuff is pretty lethal for a very long time. And the fact that the lab leaked, you know, once, and then twice, and then a third time. And I made a playlist for this book, and there's. For the lab chapter. It's the Depeche Mode song. Oh, I'm blanking on the name, but. And it's the idea of, you know, you say never again over and over and over. And each time, it did take a very long time for these leaks to. To become public. And there was actually a huge shift where the management company was fired. And that was really when the changes started happening, when that management company was switched. And suddenly, because there was a release of tritium and nobody said anything for a few months. And then when it came to light, of course, everybody said, how could you not tell anyone? We have to check this. And so I think. I mean, the government is ultimately a large corporation. And so just as a lot of us sit in our cubicles and maybe are looking at YouTube or something else, sometimes I think same thing happens in the government.

We have to end right now. But, Kelly, thanks so much for coming today.

It.