The Managers
During the war, Hanford was a part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers top-secret Manhattan Project. The Corps' Colonel Franklin T. Matthias served as the chief military officer at the Hanford Engineer Works. The E. I. DuPont de Nemours company, of Wilmington, Delaware, served as the Manhattan Project's general contractor for construction and operation of the plutonium production facility at Hanford during the war. With the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission at the end of the war, Hanford was transferred from the military control of the Army Corps of Engineers to the civilian management of the Atomic Energy Commission. General Electric took over from DuPont as the site's general contractor, followed by a long line of industrial and engineering giants. Today, Hanford is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy, and Hanford clean-up operations are jointly overseen by the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington state Department of Ecology, and individual aspects of the clean-up are managed by a variety of prime contractors.
[Archival research to be completed: What were the proactive attempts at risk mitigation? How were safety complaints/whistleblowing handled by specific agencies at particular times?]
