Delbert Devin

“They (American flight crew I had been scheduled to be on) were (imprisoned) within six hundred feet from the point of impact of the bombing of Hiroshima…Six hundred feet from impact, you know what that means,” recalled Delbert Devin, founder of Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping. “When we were on that nuclear waste stuff, I was obsessed with it. I couldn’t sleep at night. I read DOE materials at night. I wondered why. I had never been this caught up in something I couldn’t turn loose of. But I think I know why.”

After World War II, Delbert returned to wheat farming in Swisher County, Texas. In the early 1980’s, the Department of Energy placed Swisher and Deaf Smith counties on the short list for a repository for the national mandated nuclear waste dump. Delbert emerged as a leader in the Nuclear Waste Task Force, a coalition of area farm organizations opposing the high level nuclear waste dump. Beverly Gattis, another leader in the Task Force, explained. “Delbert Devin was as savvy as they ever would run up against any place. Delbert was a man who helped people understand they had a right to be in this conversation and that they should, in defense of the land and the water that they cared about. And he cared deeply about this agricultural land and water.”