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 ::2. Other target vessels, such as USS Independence (CVL-22) and USS Pensacola (CA-24), be declared hopelessly contaminated and beached to let their radioactivity decrease by natural decay


 * 3. Scientific equipment be retrieved where it was safe to do so.

Decontamination Operations

Decontamination operations encountered the same basic obstacle that had been encountered during the program to develop decontamination methods. The radioactive particles were firmly attached. Initial efforts produced significant results by removing lightly attached radioactive particles, but more deeply embedded radioactivity could be reduced only slowly by additional hosing and scrubbing. The exact number of men involved in the decontamination effort cannot now be determined, but 41 percent of the task force personnel was assigned to units involved in decontamination, inspection, towing, or salvaging. Many of these personnel, because of their skills or occupations however, were not directly involved in that work. The brunt of the reboarding and decontamination effort was borne by the 8,463 target ship crewmembers, although it appears that only a portion of them actually worked on contaminated ships. See Chapter 12 for a discussion of personnel exposures.

On 7 August, in another memorandum to CJTF 1, the Chief of the Radsafe Section argued that under the conditions at Bikini, it was not possible to decontaminate the target vessels without exposing personnel to a serious radiation hazard. Safety measures on target vessels were deteriorating, and adequate monitoring personnel and instruments were no longer available. Contamination was erratically distributed so that an individual's exposure could not be estimated. The potential of inhalation of contamination was a major concern. Furthermore, the untrained men doing the decontamination work could not be expected to follow safety precautions consistently (Reference C.0.14).

On 8 August, CJTF 1 asked the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) to allow him to decommission, or place out of service at Bikini, 39 target vessels because with the resources at hand (Reference C.10.11): "They cannot all be made absolutely safe to board in the near future for sufficiently long periods to either prepare them for movement to Pearl [Harbor] or to assess fully in all cases the damage sustained."

During this period, problems developed in strict enforcement of radsafe regulations. Inadequate supervision of men doing decontamination work on Prinz Eugen and New York was reported (References C.0.11, C.2.2, and C.2.3). Monitors visiting Prinz Eugen noted an apparent indifference among the ship's officers to the 0.1 R/24 hours standard, and the monitors suspected some men had been on the ship overnight (Reference C.2.2). As a result there was concern that unbadged working parties aboard the target ships might have overexposures similar to those recorded by their monitors (Reference C.0.8). No substantiation of these serious allegations about activities on Prinz Eugen can be found in the ship's deck log or that of USS Rockingham (APA-229) where its evacuated

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