SESSION V 243 DUNHAM: I think Merril's point about it having political significance may be important. EISENBUD: The red flag is what the Loyalists carried during the Spanish Revolution.. LANGHAM: Yes. Maybe that did it. All I know is that we had to get the red flags down fast for some reasun or another, Scraping up the plutonium contamination where we felt it was dangerous was begun even though no agreements had been made with the Spanish Government as to the extent of cleanup. In other words, remedial action was started even before there was any agreement. FREMONT-SMITH: Yes. speak, by the soil. LANGHAM: Yes. Starting to occupy a bit of Spain, so te By the time we were through with the land operation, Palomares took ona different appearance, The houses had been hosed down in many places; some of them had been rewhitewashed. The fields had been plowed clean, with the exception of irrigation ditches, which we finally got the Spanish to agree to let us leave; the soil is so bad that it takes 10 years to stabilize an irrigation ditch, and if we had stripped the vegetation at the irrigation ditch we would have had a problem there. So, the Spanish agreed to let the irrigation ditches stay, Some of the fields were not stripped. In other words, we had agreement with the Spanish, finally, as to what we would strip and what we would plow and what we would compensate for, and so forth, , Great piles of contaminated soil and trash were collected at impact point number 2. The question was what do you do with it? We talked to the Spanish and asked them if we could bury it and started digging atrench. The Spanish became concerned and asked that their geologists and hydrologists look the situation over to see if there was any possibility that this could eventually get into the water shed. This action delayed things a week or so, The size of the burial pit would resemble something approaching the length of a football field, half the widtn and 40 feet deep, depending on what kind of agreement we could get with the Spanish as to how much we had to remove. But we started digging anyway. Before digging anywhere, we used tank trucks and sprinkled, theoretically to hold down the innalation hazard of the people working there.