This necklace of more than 60 coral islands was engulfed by high-level fallout from the 1954 “Bravo” hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll, at 15 megatons the largest American nuclear test conducted. Today, American government scientists say the main island — which has been the focus of a more than $30 million nuclear clean up and rehabilitation program since the late 1990s — is safe.
Construction bids for new housing at Rongelap Atoll are in the process of being awarded as the Rongelap Atoll Local Government moves forward to prepare the northern island for possible resettlement. Rongelap Mayor James Matayoshi and his council is under pressure from the United States Congress and Obama administration officials to begin resettlement by October 2011, when U.S. officials say funding for the community now living in exile will be cut off.
But in an interview Friday, Matayoshi said he doesn’t believe Rongelap islanders will be forced into making a move before infrastructure is ready, and he says it is likely Rongelap won’t be ready for resettlement until 2012.
“I expect these 40 new homes to be completed by December 2011,” he said.
That will bring to 50 the houses constructed at the atoll for displaced islanders to return to.
“Our role is to facilitate the process of resettlement,” Matayoshi said.
“We are building accommodations for those willing to resettle.”
The Rongelap community is split over the plan to return to the atoll, partly because the cleanup has focused only on the main island, leaving many other islands still contaminated nearly 60 years after the Bravo test.
Rongelap islanders exposed in 1954 are also highly skeptical of statements by U.S. government scientists after hearing scientists from the 1950s onward tell them that Rongelap was safe only to learn from independent studies in the late 1980s that the islands needed nuclear clean up.
Rongelap islanders were evacuated after the Bravo blast, many suffering from acute radiation exposure including serious skin burns after radioactive fallout rained down on their islands for hours on March 1, 1954, a day that is now a national holiday in the Marshall Islands to commemorate “nuclear victims day.” The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission allowed Rongelap islanders to return home in 1957. But in 1985, the islanders with the help of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior evacuated themselves and have been living in exile since for fear of radiation exposure at Rongelap.
“Since 1985, our concern has been for lingering radiation at Rongelap,” said Kenneth Kedi, who represents Rongelap in the nation’s parliament. “The original agreement with the U.S. government was for cleaning all of Rongelap Atoll. But the program has focused on Rongelap Island and the small islands have not been touched.”
In the early 1990s, U.S. Congress established a $45 million resettlement trust fund that Matayoshi is overseeing.
New roads, an airport, power plant, dock and other infrastructure has been built, with housing the final piece of the resettlement plan.
The question is, will people return?
Lemeyo Abon, a Rongelap elder who was exposed to the fallout ash from the Bravo test in 1954, does not believe it is safe to return.
“I don’t want to return to Rongelap,” said Abon, who recently turned 70.
“I am afraid,” she said in reaction to the U.S. government’s push to have Rongelap resettled by 2011. “If we go back it will be our death — is it the United States’ intention to eliminate us?”
But others are interested to move back to the atoll that outwardly appears to be a pristine Pacific island, with spectacular white sand beaches, coconut trees and crystal clear lagoon water.
Matayoshi said that many in the community are “anxious to resettle.” He said, however, that the October 2011 deadline proposed by the U.S. government is unlikely to be realistic based on realities of getting work done on this remote island. He said contracts for the 40 new homes will be awarded by the end of the year, with construction work to start in early 2011.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Interior Department, which oversees spending by the Rongelap local government, warned Rongelap leaders that the $500,000 in U.S. funding now used to support a community of Rongelap islanders living in exile on Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll will be halted in 2011.
Interior’s Director of Insular Affairs Nikolao Pula told Matayoshi in a letter that work on the resettlement needed to move forward more quickly, with all U.S. funding focused on supporting a return to Rongelap from 2011 onward.
“We all want to return when the environment is injury and risk free,” Kedi said. “The question should be, ‘is Rongelap Atoll ready for us to go back?’” He said the answer is Ono.’
U.S. government scientists and scientists hired by the islanders to provide independent advice say that the main island is now safe to live on because remedial work has been effective in reducing radiation exposure, including scraping of the village area and replacing the contaminated soil with rocks, and using potassium-based fertilizer on agriculture lands that reduces the uptake of radioactive cesium by plants. Coupled with the people’s use of imported foods, scientists estimate exposure to people living on the island will be well below a 100 millirem maximum exposure level established as part of the resettlement plan.
But Kedi, Lemeyo and others oppose the resettlement. “Rongelap people remember the thyroid tumors, cancers and miscarriages,” Kedi said. “The Atomic Energy Commission told us it was safe to return in 1957 and now the same people (Department of Energy) are telling us it is clean again.”
“The local government is not forcing people to go back,” said Matayoshi in response to critics of the resettlement plan.
