The Radium Dial company had come to Ottawa during the First World War and, after a few years, dial painters began to suffer cancers. When we finally returned to the realtor’s office, she shut off her car, turned to us and said, “I have to tell you something.” She revealed a closely guarded secret in Ottawa. His chilling reply was, “You’ve come to the right place.” When he asked what I did for a living, I said I was a cancer researcher. He was recovering from brain cancer surgery. Our last stop was to see the realtor’s husband, who owned a rental unit. Now alarm bells were ringing in the back of my head. As she drove us to rental properties, I observed a second individual with the same birth defect as the first. During lunch we decided to find a realtor to help in our search. As we were entering the restaurant, I saw a passenger in a car driving by with the physical manifestations of a rare birth defect. (1937-1978) had been manufacturing radium-based luminous dials in Ottawa.Īfter a morning of unsuccessful apartment hunting, we broke for lunch. Unbeknownst to us, the Radium Dial Company (1918-1936) and Luminous Processes, Inc. She was to begin her postdoctoral work at an Illinois state prison nearby.
My wife and I were there looking for an apartment for her. I have just completed reading your article, “ The Girls With Radioactive Bones,” and I want to share an incident in Ottawa in the late 1990s. Concerns remain.Īfter publishing my interview with Moore about the dial painters, I received a letter from a reader who lived in the area: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the sites still pose a hazard to human health, but groundwater contamination should be under control. Moore recalled driving to the cleanup site with the niece of one of the dial-painters, a hundred years after her aunt was first poisoned. Today, 16 sites in and around the city comprise the Ottawa Radiation Areas Superfund site.
#RADIUM JAW PHOTOS FULL#
These buildings were full of radium particles from the days of dial-painting. The Luminous Processes building was later used a meat locker after that company closed. It was finally demolished in 1968, when its radium-contaminated rubble was used as landfill around Ottawa. The old Radium Dial Company building became a meatpacking plant and then a farmer’s co-op. Its owner opened up another radium-dial factory nearby, called Luminous Processes, which operated until 1978. While the women were taking their case through court, the Radium Dial Company, where they worked, went out of business. That seems like it should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. Earlier this month, I spoke with Kate Moore, author of the new book The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, about how the surviving women fought for justice in court in the 1930s.
The element gets absorbed into the bones like calcium, and these women would go on to lose their teeth, jaws, and limbs to the radium poisoning. They were told that the glowing radium in the paint was safe. They were told to lick their brushes to a fine point. In the 1920s, young women worked in an Ottawa, Illinois, factory painting radioactive glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watches.
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