The metal plaque that marks Surface Ground Zero of the Rulison blast that took place Sept. 10, 1969. The federal government said the blast was meant to wrest natural gas from tight sandstone. Gas unlocked by the blast was deemed too radioactive to use.
Jim Hill/CPR News
Parachute resident Judy Beasley remembers the Project Rulison blast on Sept. 10, 1969. “We were whooping it up,” she says. “We were really fortunate that we didn’t have that much damage.” Beasley’s chimney lost some bricks, and a few pickle jars fell to the floor in her pantry.
Jim Hill/CPR News
A concrete slab covering the site of “Project Rulison,” a 1969 underground nuclear blast near Parachute. Today the Energy Department prohibits drilling below 6,000 feet in a 40-acre radius of the site that it says encloses the contamination.
Associated Press file
On Sept. 10, 1969, 6½ miles south of Rulison, a 40-kiloton nuclear bomb exploded in the subterranean depths of the Piceance Basin.
The device, more than twice as powerful as the weapon at Hiroshima and with muscle equivalent to 40,000 tons of TNT, was an unorthodox tool in a grand experiment to free natural gas and kick-start a boom. The nuclear age wanted to give the oil and gas age a hand up.
“It felt like a very slow-moving tremble,” Parachute resident Judy Beasley said. “It was like a flowing of energy (underground).”
Miles closer to the blast zone, it “was like a train rushing up the canyon,” Lee Hayward told Look Magazine in 1970. Hayward’s family owned the land where the experiment took place.
“Cliffs started pouring rocks. It was quite a show, really,” Hayward said.
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