ORNL's famous 'hot' frogs had the world's attention for a while.
In the summer of 1991, radioactive giant frogs from Oak Ridge roamed the Tennessee hills, looming over tall buildings and terrorizing livestock and the public. At least this was the story that made its way into the supermarket tabloids, which took an actual wildlife-related event at ORNL and ran with it.
What actually happened that summer was a population explosion of leopard frogs in the central campus retention ponds. The frogs, which multiplied after predatory birds had been discouraged from the ponds, began a migration. During their short, happy lives the amphibians had picked up low levels of the pond's contamination -- about .5 to 1.5 microcuries -- about as much as naturally exists in the human body -- but detectable just the same.
Automobiles ran over the wayward frogs and they picked up the contamination, which was then detected in industrial hygiene surveys. That in turn triggered the issuance of an occurrence report, which was irresistible news fodder in what must have been a slow summer news cycle.
Joe Culver, now a retired resident of Monkey's Eyebrow, Ky., worked in ORNL's public affairs office at the time. He was moving into a new house on a Saturday when the Laboratory Shift Superintendent called.
The LSS was beset with news media, wanting details on radioactive frogs. Culver wasn't exactly caught off guard. The public affairs office had taken note of the occurrence report, which had actually come out about a month earlier, and expected interest. This was in the days before the Internet and before the term "gone viral" was common parlance.
Culver interrupted his move "bewhiskered and in Bermuda shorts" to meet local TV crews who arrived to investigate the "scourge of radioactive frogs that had escaped from the Lab." He also took calls from the BBC and Italy, and recalls one tabloid's purported interview of a Roane County farmer who complained the frogs were "big as dogs, scaring his cows and they glow in the dark."
The public affairs office enlisted a media-savvy staff member in the environmental compliance organization, Frank Kornegay, to explain what had happened and the actual risk involved, which was negligible. Kornegay became the expert cited in the coverage that amused the public for a while.
Here's what the more conventional Associated Press filed:
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Radioactive Frogs Flee Pond at Lab
August 04, 1991|Associated Press
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In a case that at first glance could pass for a science fiction movie plot, radioactive frogs are loose at a government lab.
About 100 so-called "hot frogs" have been caught hopping away from a contaminated pond where they hatched this spring, officials at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory said.
"They don't have six legs and four eyes," said Frank Kornegay, the lab's environmental coordinator. He said they look like ordinary leopard frogs that are common in Tennessee.
The radioactive frogs are safe unless you eat them--and leopard frogs are not exactly a delicacy, he said.
The frogs--brownish green and up to two inches long with long skinny legs--appear healthy. But they will set off Geiger counters with radiation levels well above background readings.
The frogs became contaminated from the mud of a half-acre holding basin for waste water from the lab's nuclear research during the 1940s and 1950s, officials say.
The lab plans to install "frog fencing," a fine mesh screen about three feet high, to prevent them from escaping, Kornegay said.
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ORNL turned the event into a teaching moment, emphasizing the Lab's efforts to locate contaminated areas and properly clean up and deal with low-level radiological waste. The monitoring of wildlife for contamination continues today. One example is the scanning of deer and turkeys taken during the annual hunts, of which a few of the hundreds taken reveal contamination.
The Laboratory has also worked in the ensuing years to remove the potential hazards. In fact, the retention ponds where the frogs originated were drained and are now the South parking lots.
Facilities & Operations staff work with the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency to monitor the health and status of wildlife on the reservation. Since 1991 the Oak Ridge Reservation has experienced, beyond the usual deer and turkeys, increased sightings of and encounters with groundhogs, coyotes, raccoons, elk and the occasional bear and bobcat.
Frogs, on the other hand, since 1991 have managed to stay out of the headlines.
