Oregon L.O.W.F.I

I posted this in June of this year on my Trickster Northwest blog, which I’m in the process of merging into a couple of my other blogs, like this one here at Oregon L.O.W.F.I.  Here you go: Radioactive Wasps:

Yakima, Washington, has a haunted history, full of Fortean stuff. The area is known for UFOs, weird “batsquatch” type sightings; all kinds of unusual phenomena. Adding to the list of high strangeness is this news item on radioactive wasps:Radioactive wasps bug out nuclear cleanup workers:
<blockquote>
YAKIMA, Wash. – If workers cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site didn’t have enough to worry about, now they’ve got to deal with radioactive wasp nests. Mud dauber wasps built the nests, which have been largely abandoned by their flighty owners, in holes at south-central Washington’s Hanford nuclear reservation in 2003.

That’s when workers finished covering cleaned-up waste sites with fresh topsoil, native plants and straw to help the plants grow — inadvertently creating perfect ground cover for the insects to build their nests. Nearby cleanup work also provided a steady supply of mud, which the wasps used as building material.

Today, the nests, which could number in the thousands, are “fairly highly contaminated” with radioactive isotopes, such as cesium and cobalt, but don’t pose a significant threat to workers digging them up.</blockquote>

Supposedly the wasps are “long gone” it’s just the nests that are a worry. Uh-huh.