| PERSPECTIVE |
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[February 19, 2003] -
Thousands of Nebraskans helped fight three major wars without picking up a rifle, piloting a fighter plane or even leaving the Grand Island area. The front line for these soldiers – mostly women – was the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant. Today it’s a ghost town. The Army is in the process of removing the buildings and selling off the land. "Statewide’s" Mike Tobias reports that for many Nebraskans, the memories will always remain.
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Transcript of Bomb Plant
[John Anderson/Grand Island, Former Bomb Plant Worker] Quite a site to come back and look at it again.
[Mike Tobias/Reporting] It's a homecoming for 79-year-old John Anderson. He's visiting an old workplace, one he hasn't seen in 58 years.
[Anderson] This is where they hauled the powder or whatever you want to call it up from building nine up here on the elevator up to the third floor.
[Tobias] Anderson was one of more than 4,000 people who worked at the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant during World War II. Poor eyesight kept him out of the military. Instead of dropping bombs, he helped make them, working here as a motor pool driver and electrician.
[Anderson] Patriotism, mainly. Wanted to do something to help the war effort.
[Tobias] The plant is a sprawling 20 square mile complex of oddly shaped buildings and bunkers. It's centered around four main production lines, the longest a mile long. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Army built the plant - quickly.
[George Leiser/Grand Island] They just notified us to get out, and they gave us, I think at the time they notified us, they gave us 5 days to move out.
[Tobias] A teen-aged George Leiser lived here with his parents and five brothers and sisters in the spring of 1942. The Army wanted their land for the ammo plant. The family, especially George's mother, wasn't too excited to leave - they'd just built the house three years earlier. But the army seized the house and land - and gave the family 15 thousand dollars for it, probably a fair price at the time. The house would become guard headquarters. George and his brother slept in a nearby school for a few months.
[Leiser] We just put a mattress over there on the floor. School was out when we finally got out of here, so we slept over there that summer.
[Tobias] Leiser's family and others say they were offered the option of buying the land back when the plant was closed. But that never happened.
[Gene Budde/Local Historian] They offered the people an average of 50 dollars an acre, with the stipulation, and unfortunately it was not on paper, that you can buy it back when we're done.
[Tobias] Gene Budde never worked at the plant. But he knows more about it than most. He's a local historian who has collected a room full of photos and other materials about the plant. He's working on a book and video presentation about a place he says is amazingly well built - considering the Army had the first production line up and running in eight months.
[Budde] And you look up at those trusses up there, all wood, bolted together and so on. All the joints were exact fits. They didn't have the tools back then like the saws and stuff like we've got now.
[Tobias] Ironically, German prisoners from an area POW camp helped build the some of the plant. John Anderson drove the POWs to work.
[Anderson] They got a little belligerent once in a while, maybe slow up on their work or something like that. But the old ones, man, you didn't have no trouble with those old prisoners of war. Them guys, they're glad to get things over with and get home.
[Tobias] The Army called Cornhusker an L-A-P plant - load, assemble and pack. The empty shells came in one end and worked their way down the long production lines. Workers melted down explosive materials like TNT in large vats...and filled the bombs, sometimes simply pouring explosive from a bucket. The shells were cleaned and painted - with a color they called "army olive drab." Some were even sawed in half for inspection. Finished bombs were stored in bunkers, called igloos, before they were shipped out. Workers at Cornhusker, sometimes operating three shifts, 7 days a week, assembled more than 10 million bombs and shells during World War II.
[Tobias] The bomb plant was Bess Clark's first job. She started as an 18-year-old in 1945, and stayed through three wars. Her sister Mabel worked here during the Vietnam War. Clark made about a dollar an hour during World War II - a good wage for the time. Especially for women, who made up most of the workforce.
[Bess Clark/Grand Island, Former Bomb Plant Worker] Most of the men that worked there were past draft age. The women were all people looking to make money to support their families.
[Budde] I would say that probably two-thirds to three-fourths would be women. And a lot of them were doing work that you would normally, back at that time, you would think would normally be man's jobs.
[Tobias] Safety was a big concern. Workers changed in and out of non-sparking cotton clothing on site. In fact, anything that could create a spark was off-limits. The buildings were heavily bunkered...and built far from each other. And there were lot of emergency escape slides. Nice for publicity photos taken during drills, but folks who worked here say its unlikely anyone would have time to use them if something went wrong. In spite of working in a potentially dangerous environment, former workers speak fondly of their days at the bomb plant, which became a small town, complete with dorms, a hospital, and cafeteria; big band dances and bowling leagues; summer picnics and "fat man races"; and Christmas parties and parades with costumed characters.
[Clark] Lots of friends, lots of new recipes and all that kind of stuff. Lots of gossip. You learned about everybody's life, their kids and everything. It was, just like you say, a little town.
[Anderson] They'd even have some parties like birthday parties in the change house at lunchtime.
[Tobias] Workers from line 4 were having one of those lunch hour parties on May 26, 1945. Many were a little late getting back to their jobs in this part of the building, where explosives were melted and poured. That delay saved lives when something went wrong at 1:03 p.m.
[Clark] All of the sudden this loud explosion and they hollered get down, get down.
[Anderson] It was just like that building was sawed off at the bottom there and it blew it straight up.
[Budde] This one fellow explained, that he says he thought at least the roof of it went a thousand feet in the air. Nine people were killed. Two of the bodies, I hate to even say this, two were never found.
[Tobias] The cause of the explosion, if known at all, has never been made public.
[Tobias] These day’s explosions are planned. Last summer the Army burned down the first of the four main production lines. After World War II, the Army reopened the plant for Korea and Vietnam - keeping it in a state of readiness in between wars. By 1989, it wasn't needed anymore, and the plant closed for good. Burning down the production lines is part of the process for getting the land ready for public use.
[Mark Vess/MKM Engineers] OK, there's a secondary explosion there. There's explosives in the buildings that you, I mean that could have been in a wall space, could have been anywhere.
[Tobias] Mark Vess works for the company hired to remove the lines. This former military bomb disposal expert says the buildings are too contaminated with explosive residue to salvage.
[Vess] What happens is over time, that explosive changes and becomes much more sensitive. So the actual disassembly and the process of removing all of this explosive contaminated piping and machines and all those other type of things becomes very hazardous for the workforce.
[Mary Wellensiek/Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant] When we are done here with our safety action, we're hoping, we're sure it's going to be clean enough for all the public to be on it.
[Tobias] Another problem lies underneath. About 20 years ago officials discovered that bomb-making materials had seeped into the groundwater table. Now a million gallons of groundwater a day are extracted, pumped into this facility, cleaned-up and put back. It's a process that's working decrease a plume of contamination that started under the plant and spread about 7 miles long and a couple thousand feet wide toward Grand Island. There have been no complaints of health problems caused by the contamination...and local environmentalists are comfortable with the clean up, so far. But it will likely be another 30 years before this multi-million dollar Superfund project is complete. Contaminated groundwater hasn't curbed the enthusiasm economic developers have for the site.
[Monty Montgomery/Grand Island Area Economic Development Corp.] The state and NPPD's economic development operation feel this is one of the premier economic development sites in the state of Nebraska today. We're looking to do many things with it in terms of heavy industry, industry that wouldn't fit within the confines of our existing industrial parks.
[Tobias] That could include a 900 million-dollar coal-fired power plant being considered by Nebraska Public Power. NPPD already made a quarter million dollar down payment on the land occupied by the production lines. And the Southern Power District is developing an industrial park. But much of this is in the distant future. The Army will remove and clean up the other three production lines in the next couple years. Some economic development, including the power plant, could be a decade or more from happening. So for now the ghost town that is the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant will live a little longer.
[Budde] These are x-rays of the bombs and shells and stuff.
[Tobias] Gene Budde hopes that even when the buildings are gone, we'll always remember how thousands of Nebraskans helped fight three wars from a rural Nebraska frontline.
[Budde] Even though I didn't work there, but just for what it did, realizing the importance, as to America winning the war, the contribution that it made. I get a little emotional, thinking about that part of it.
[Tobias] Reporting for Statewide, I'm Mike Tobias.