Groom Range


Message posted by RickB on October 11, 2010 at 12:32:03 PST:

In the spring of 1984 Pat Sheahan was driving to his Groom Range mine in southern Nevada when he was stopped on his own road by armed Air Force guards. The Groom Range, 89,000 acres of public land had been taken over by the Air Force for "national security reasons" he was told. He was not allowed to work, or even proceed to his own property, an active silver and lead mine that had been in his family since the 1940's. Stockmen whose cattle grazed on the range and recreationalists were kept out as well. This radical appropriation was done illegally without prior consultation with the state, Congress or local residents. It was not the Sheahan's firt run-in with the Department of Defense. When the Atomic Energy Commission began testing nuclear bombs at the nearby NTS, Dan and Martha Sheahan, Pat's parents, were advised to abandon their mine and clear out. No compensation was offered. The mine was their livelihood and the Sheahan's decided to stay. No one warned them of radiation, they claimed. They received severe burns from the fallout, sores appeared on their cattle, and horses were found with their eyes burned right out. In the summer of 1954 a high-explosive incendiary bomb leveled their $100,000 concentration mill. The property was also repeatedbly strafed, they said. The Air Force has never answered the charges. Dan and Martha subsequently died of cancer.

Source: Bruce Farling "The U.S. Air Force Appropriates 89,000 acres of Nevada", High Country News, 4 March 1985; Western Sportsman, August 1984, Bob Sheahan and Bill Vincent, of Citizen Alert, interviews with Richard Misrach, Spring 1988.
As further published in the book "Bravo 20, the Bombing of the American West", Richard Misrach, 1990, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

"Bravo 20..." is a very interesting read (the political and environmental views and perspective notwithstanding).


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