Washington Highway 240 bisects the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It’s a desolate two-lane blacktop through the gently rolling sagebrush, with a massive, treeless ridge to the west and a clump of rectangular brown Hanford buildings in the distance to the east.
Tom Carpenter, then a 30-something whistleblower lawyer from Washington, D.C., and Seattle, drove the highway for the first time in about 1988. Curious, he looked at the nondescript buildings in the distance — Hanford’s battleship-sized chemical processing plants — stopped his car, got out and took some photos.
A helicopter popped up and circled above him. As he drove off, a gray van with black-tinted windows followed for a while.
“I knew at that point: This is gonna be fun,” Carpenter recalled.
More than 30 years later, on April 1, Carpenter, now 65, stepped down as executive director of Hanford Challenge, one of the leading watchdog organizations keeping tabs on what is arguably the most radioactively and chemically contaminated spot in the Western Hemisphere.
He and Marina King, his wife of 38 years and an artist and retired historical preservationist, plan to move to Anacortes. They have two children — Zoe who is studying to become a social worker in Buenos Aires, and Sam, a Western Washington University graduate studying coding in Seattle. Carpenter plays guitar, reads and hikes for fun, but he still will keep a hand in his watchdog work.
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