While this was going on Windscale managers were in a panic. No-one seemed to know what to do and for a while the site resembled a film set for the Keystone Cops.
Guards from the on-site Atomic Energy Authority police were issued with protective suits and respirators, and ordered to guard the perimeter. But the sight of these unfamiliar figures, reeking of rubber and grunting incoherently into facemasks sent their Alsatian guard dogs wild, the result being they immediately attacked their masters.
As the guards and dogs ran hither and thither over the site, the managers were desperately trying to find out what was happening inside the furnace. An old periscope from a submarine was used to look inside the furnace while a contingent of men were despatched to strip a nearby building under construction of its scaffolding.
Scores of men, working without protective clothes, used the scaffolding to push thousands of highly radioactive fuel elements out of the stricken reactor pile. Others wrestled with burning graphite as the furnace began to glow red hot.
They worked through the night but the pile carried on burning and the scaffolding glowed white hot and melted. They soon became exhausted and most had far exceeded the radiation limit. Other volunteers were bussed in from outside.
After two days, and with the fire burning out of control, the decision was taken to try to put the fire out with water hoses. This was a highly risky procedure which could have culminated in a huge explosion.
But the bosses decided they had no choice; only then was the local police force alerted and evacuation procedures put in place. Luckily the feared explosion never materialised and the situation was gradually brought under control.
But by this time the word was out and a ripple of panic spread throughout the surrounding communities. Local media representatives arrived at the gates of the plant and their ranks were soon swelled by hundreds more who swept up from Manchester and London to report on the “Plant of Doom.”
Windscale managers felt as though they had been transported back to the French revolution as the clamouring mob besieged the gates to the plant. The situation was not made any better by the all-pervading stench of thousands of gallons of sour milk dumped by local farmers in fields after officials warned their cattle had been grazing on contaminated land.
With the world now watching, the government was desperate to play-down the incident. Press releases spoke of only “minimal” releases of radiation and reassured the public that the release of iodine-13, which could cause thyroid cancer, would deteriorate in less than a week.
But prime minister Harold McMillan wanted to bury the issue, and summoned one of the few men he could trust to clear up the mess: William Penney.
Penney, already overloaded with work on the imminent Grapple X H-bomb trial at Christmas Island, rattled through the proceedings with almost indecent haste and “faults of judgement and inadequacies of instruments” were blamed for the accident.
A White Paper, published barely a month later, stated that the “Windscale mishap” caused injury to no-one and did not cause any local contamination.
An early press release suggested that most of the contamination was blown into the Irish Sea, although this was later amended when it was admitted there were two distinct plumes, one that carried fallout toward the north-east and the second south-east over densely-populated areas of England.
Contamination eventually reached western Europe. Penney insisted that much of the evidence presented to the inquiry be presented in secret because of national security considerations. The effect was to put a cloud of distrust over the site. And there was much to be suspicious about.
Joseph Corrie, a Sellafield worker who helped put out the fire later died from bone cancer. His widow Sheila told an inquest her husband had worked at Sellafield since 1947.
On the day of the 1957 fire she said: “He had been working right underneath the fallout. They were told the following Monday to wash all their clothes, but he had worked all day in those clothes. Someone told him he was contaminated.”
She said her husband’s illness started with pain in his back and ribs and was in “terrible pain.” Sellafield’s chief medical officer Dr Geoffrey Schofield said he carried out tests on Mr Corrie’s liver, lung and bones. These showed levels of plutonium in the organs between five and 10 times that in the general public. He added that the quantities of plutonium were “extremely small.”
The eight-man jury at Whitehaven returned an open verdict on Mr Corrie’s death.
Nuclear scientist Joseph McMaster was enjoying a day off at Seascale with his family when the fire broke out. He, his wife Stella and baby daughter Lynn were all exposed to radioactive fallout as they enjoyed a brisk walk along the coast.
Mr McMaster recalled: “On the day of the accident I remember seeing this plume of black smoke coming from one of the reactor stacks and thinking, God, I hope that’s not what I think it is. But no warning was given for days, so we thought things were all right and continued to walk; we enjoyed a picnic in the sand dunes while all the time fallout was raining down on us. No-one told us.”
Over the next 24 years the couple were to bury three of their four children. Daughter Lynn died of a rare form of leukaemia, linked to radiation exposure, when she was still a teenager. Second daughter Jill died of a similar sickness a few years later. Mrs McMaster later gave birth to twin girls one of whom, Judith, died after three days. Doctors said her lungs were not properly formed. The Ministry of Defence rejected out of hand any connection with the Windscale fire.
Twelve miles up the coast from the plant is the village of Maryport which experienced a sudden sharp spike in Downs syndrome births in the aftermath of the 1957 fire.
Very high levels of radiation were found on the beaches which many believed caused the problem. Researchers found that on average 164 babies a year were born in Maryport during the 1970s. Figures show you would expect one Down’s syndrome child for every 1,600 live births to women in their twenties.
On that basis one Down’s baby would be born in Maryport every 10 years. Yet in the same period eight Down’s babies were born to women with an average age of 25.
Another extraordinary cluster of Down’s babies was linked by two Irish doctors with women who were at school together in Dundalk, across the Irish Sea from Windscale. The authorities dismissed both claims as “fanciful”.
But the slow drip, drip of cases was starting to build and in 1983 the dam burst. A Yorkshire TV documentary revealed that childhood leukaemia in the Seascale area was 10 times the national average.
The programme struck a chord and dovetailed neatly with the claims being made by the nuclear veterans. It soon transpired that many men who worked at the plant, now renamed Sellafield because the Windscale name had become so toxic, had fathered children with a range of genetic disorders.
The controversy reached fever pitch when it was discovered doctors had been secretly “harvesting” the dead bodies of stillborn children and those killed in road accidents for tissue samples to test for radiation uptake.
This hugely controversial research, carried out by West Cumbria Health Authority, also studied samples of foetal tissue and placenta without the consent of parents. The discovery of a document signed by the local District Medical Officer stating it would be “inappropriate to disclose results to parents“, added fuel to the flames.
But these “baby experiments” were only the tip of the iceberg. It turned out that pathologists had been collecting bones and body parts from dead and stillborn children for decades and sending them to America for a so-called “sunshine experiment.”
Apparently thousands of body parts had been shipped from all over Britain, and other parts of the world, to a research centre in Chicago were tests were carried out on the uptake of Strontium 90, a key ingredient of nuclear bomb tests fallout.