An examination of extended community an oral history of the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (Cemp), 1981 - 2003

From 2002 until 2004, on behalf of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), I conducted an oral history project that focused on the participants in the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP). In the late 1970's, Nevada scientists who participated in the response to the Three Mile Island event returned to Nevada with the idea for a program similar to one being implemented in Pennsylvania. That program directly involved local stakeholders in an independent monitoring effort. As a result, the CEMP was established in 1981, with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) providing the funding and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) providing technical and scientific direction, maintaining instrumentation and sampling equipment, analyzing the collected samples, and interpreting and reporting the data. Initially, DRI was largely responsible for identifying and hiring community participants and organizing annual training workshops, later assuming complete responsibility for technical operation of the monitoring network from EPA. The goal was to establish fixed monitoring stations around Nevada, Utah and California, and directly involve stakeholders in the monitoring process. Local teachers would be recruited to receive training and maintain the stations while reporting back to their communities on the monitoring activities and any risks they, or their citizens, perceived. This active stakeholder involvement was intended to provide communities with an immediate resource for any questions or concerns related to testing. It also created a vehicle through which to educate the public about radiation and testing. In the early years of nuclear weapons testing, interactions between local residents and the government were often defined by a lack of communication and understanding. The distrust that existed between government agencies and Nevada, Utah, and California residents, was a perspective that persisted for years after the testing moratorium and continues to endure, to a lesser extent, today. It was this distrust that the Community Environmental Monitoring Program was designed to ameliorate, providing communities and ranches with impartial scientific evidence to address their many concerns. A goal of the oral history project was to gain a better understanding of the CEMP by exploring and documenting its origins and allowing the people who continue to make it a part of their lives tell their stories. Within those stories, we wanted to discover if the program established trust in Nevada, Utah and California communities and ranches; what the program meant and continues to mean to the government, state institutions and local people who participate, and why the program is unique. In order to achieve these goals, DOE funded a two year oral history project. I interviewed the program founders, DOE, EPA and DRI participants, local station managers, and many people with an interest in testing and the government response to downwind communities. This paper includes the purpose, process, and development of the oral history project; why oral history was chosen as the appropriate methodology; who was chosen for an interview and why; some of the pitfalls encountered; what lessons were learned and what value the project has to DOE and the stakeholders in local communities. (authors)