Carmadean’s Dance Camp: The Girls Who Played in Trinity’s Fallout
Updated: Oct 10
Early on 16 July 1945, a group of girls at a summer dance camp in the mountains of New Mexico were thrown out of their bunk beds. Their teacher thought the water heater had blown up. A few hours later it started to snow, which was odd for July, and odder still because the flakes were warm. The girls put on their bathing suits and went out to play in it.
What was falling on them had started the day about 40 miles away as the world’s first atomic bomb. One of those girls, Barbara Kent, spent the last decades of her life telling people what happened next. Here’s what she said, what can be checked and what can’t.
Quick Answers
What was Carmadean’s dance camp? A summer dance camp near Ruidoso, New Mexico, where 13-year-old Barbara Kent was staying in July 1945.
How close was it to the Trinity test? Roughly 40 to 50 miles.
What was the “snow”? Radioactive fallout from the first atomic bomb test, which fell for days afterwards.
Was Barbara Kent the only survivor? She said so, but her accounts differ and the other girls have never been named, so it can’t be checked.
Is the photo of girls in front of a mushroom cloud real? No. It appeared in July 2025 and shows the signs of an AI-generated image.
Were the people downwind ever compensated? Not until July 2025, almost exactly 80 years later.
A Dance Camp in the Mountains
Barbara Kent was 13 and lived in El Paso, Texas. That July she was at a summer camp near Ruidoso with her dance teacher and a group of other students. They had tap and ballet lessons during the day and slept in a cabin beside a river at night.
The camp has gone down as “Carmadean’s”, which is how the name appears in National Geographic’s account. Vice, which interviewed Kent in 2016, gave the teacher’s name as Karma Deane. That matches a real person. Karma Deane was a well-known El Paso dance teacher who ran studios in the city and taught classes in towns across southern New Mexico, Alamogordo among them. She died in El Paso in 1959.
How many girls were there depends on which interview you read. National Geographic has Kent and nine others. The Santa Fe New Mexican and Vice both say twelve. None of the published accounts names any of them apart from Kent.
5.29am, 16 July 1945
The Trinity test went off at 5.29am in the Jornada del Muerto desert. The plutonium device, nicknamed the Gadget, sat on top of a 100-foot steel tower and exploded with the force of about 21,000 tons of TNT. That was three to five times what its designers had expected.
At the camp, girls in the top bunks ended up on the floor. Deane assumed the heater had exploded and hurried everyone outside. Kent remembered a huge cloud overhead and a light so bright that it hurt to look up, as though somebody had switched the sun on early.
Snow in July
A few hours later, white flakes started coming down. The girls changed into bathing suits, went down to the river and played in it, catching the flakes and rubbing them on their faces.
Kent’s memory of how it felt never changed. “Instead of being cold like snow, it was hot,” she said. They decided that must be because it was summer.
It wasn’t snow. Only about three of the bomb’s 13 pounds of plutonium had actually fissioned. The rest went up in the cloud and came back down across thousands of square miles, and it kept falling for days. Plutonium is the same material that sits at the centre of the Karen Silkwood case three decades later.
One genuine photograph survives from the camp. It shows Kent and other campers in the river that day, and Kent supplied it to National Geographic herself.
What the Girls Were Told
The next day Deane took the girls into Ruidoso, where officials were telling people there’d been an explosion at a dump and there was nothing to worry about. Lesley Blume, who interviewed Kent for National Geographic, later told NPR that the campers were among those called to a meeting to hear it in person. Kent’s verdict, decades on, was three words long: “they lied to us”.
The same story went out nationally. The official line given to the Associated Press was that an ammunition magazine had blown up, with no loss of life or injury.
Nobody living near the site was warned beforehand or evacuated afterwards. Thousands of people lived within 40 miles and some were as close as 12. Five days after the test, the Manhattan Project’s chief medical officer, Stafford Warren, wrote to General Leslie Groves describing a serious radiation hazard across roughly 2,700 square miles downwind. He advised that any future test should be at least 150 miles from where people lived.
Three weeks later the weapon was used on Hiroshima, a mission its co-pilot never got over. Only then did people in New Mexico learn what the flash had been.
What Happened to the Campers?
This is the part of the story that gets repeated most often, and it’s the hardest part to pin down.
Kent said that as the years went by she kept hearing that girls from the camp had fallen ill. She told National Geographic that by the time she was 30 she was the only one left. In 2015 she told the Santa Fe New Mexican that only two of the twelve had lived to 40. Vice reported the same figure a year later, with ten dead before 40, and described Kent as the sole survivor by then.
She also said that her mother, who’d been staying nearby at the Noisy Water Lodge, died of a brain tumour, and that the teacher’s daughter, who was at the camp too, died of cancer. Kent herself had her thyroid removed and survived several cancers, including endometrial and skin cancer. She had no doubt about the cause. “This is no coincidence,” she told Vice.
None of it can be independently checked, because the other girls have never been identified in print. Nor has any study been able to tie one person’s illness to Trinity. A National Cancer Institute study published in 2020 estimated that up to 1,000 people may have developed cancer from the fallout, a figure critics argue is too low. Louis Hempelmann, who ran the Los Alamos health group, conceded in 1986 that civilians had probably been overexposed but said it couldn’t be proved.
The Viral Photo Is Fake
In July 2025, around the test’s 80th anniversary, a picture spread across social media showing eleven smiling girls standing in a river with a mushroom cloud rising behind them. It isn’t real.
Fact-checkers pointed out that the bomb went off at 5.29am, when the girls were in bed. The cloud doesn’t match known photographs of Trinity, several of the faces look almost identical and the image is far too sharp for a 1945 snapshot. It has no source and doesn’t appear in any of the original reporting. The story it illustrates is true. The picture was made up.
Eighty Years to Be Recognised
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 paid out to people downwind of the Nevada test site but left out those downwind of the very first test. Campaigners led by Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium spent years trying to change that.
It finally happened on 4 July 2025, when an expanded version of the act became law as part of a wider budget bill. Trinity downwinders can now claim $100,000. Figures reported in July 2026 put the number of claims received by the US Justice Department at about 4,400, with 558 approved. The application window is due to close in 2027.
Kent was 83 when she spoke to the Santa Fe New Mexican in 2015. Her summary of the previous 70 years was that “the government never wanted to acknowledge anything”.
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Further Reading
Want the full story? The Day the Sun Rose Twice by Ferenc Morton Szasz is a historian’s account of the Trinity test and what its fallout did downwind.
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