Karen Dorn Steele is a journalist. As a reporter for the Spokesman Review, she broke the story about the Green Run test, in which the U.S. government released radioactive gases in 1949 over areas surrounding the Hanford Site. Subsequently, she covered the Hanford Downwinder Litigation, in which residents living around the Hanford Site from the 1940s through the 1960s were suing the federal government for the health complications they suffered from as a result of the exposure to radiation from Hanford.
In this interview, she discusses how she discovered the Green Run test through FOIA document requests. She describes covering the Downwinder Litigation and her thoughts on how the trial was managed. Dorn Steele remembers meeting and interviewing some of the plaintiffs, and how their lives were impacted by the Hanford Sites.