According to Lansing Lamont in his 1965 book Day of Trinity, life at Trinity could at times be very exciting. One afternoon while scientists were busily setting up test instruments in the desert, the tail gunner of a low flying B-29 bomber spotted some grazing antelopes and opened up with his twin.50-caliber machine guns. "A dozen scientists,... under the plane and out of the gunner's line of vision, dropped their instruments and hugged the ground in terror as the bullets thudded about them."[5] Later a number of these scientists threatened to quit the project.
Workers built three observation points 5.68 miles (10,000 yards), north, south, and west of Ground Zero. Code named Able, Baker, and Pittsburgh, these heavily-built wooden bunkers were reinforced with concrete, and covered with earth. The bunker designated Baker or South 10,000 served as the control center for the test. This is where head scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer would be for the test.
A fourth observation point was the test's Base Camp, (the abandoned Dave McDonald ranch) located about ten miles southwest of Ground Zero. The primary observation point was on Compania Hill, located about 20 miles to the northwest of Trinity near today's Stallion Range Gate, off NM 380.
The test was originally scheduled for 4 a.m., Monday July 16, but was postponed to 5:30 due to a severe thunderstorm that would have increased the amount of radioactive fallout, and have interfered with the test results. The rain finally stopped and at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time, the device exploded successfully and the Atomic Age was born. The nuclear blast created a flash of light brighter than a dozen suns. The light was seen over the entire state of New Mexico and in parts of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico. The resultant mushroom cloud rose to over 38,000 feet within minutes, and the heat of the explosion was 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun! At ten miles away, this heat was described as like standing directly in front of a roaring fireplace. Every living thing within a mile of the tower was obliterated. The power of the bomb was estimated to be equal to 20,000 tons of TNT, or equivalent to the bomb load of 2,000 B-29, Superfortresses!
After witnessing the awesome blast, Oppenheimer quoted a line from a sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita: He said: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds."[6] In Los Alamos 230 miles to the north, a group of scientists' wives who had stayed up all night for the not so secret test, saw the light and heard the distant sound. One wife, Jane Wilson, described it this way, "Then it came. The blinding light [no] one had ever seen. The trees, illuminated, leaping out. The mountains flashing into life. Later, the long slow rumble. Something had happened, all right, for good or ill."[7]
General Groves' deputy commander, Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, described the explosion in great detail: "The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined..."[8]
Immediately after the test a Sherman M-4 tank, equipped with its own air supply, and lined with two inches of lead went out to explore the site. The lead lining added 12 tons to the tank's weight, but was necessary to protect its occupants from the radiation levels at ground zero. The tank's passengers found that the 100-foot steel tower had virtually disappeared, with only the metal and concrete stumps of its four legs remaining. Surrounding ground zero was a crater almost 2,400 feet across and about ten feet deep in places. Desert sand around the tower had been fused by the intense heat of the blast into a jade colored glass. This atomic glass was given the name Atomsite, but the name was later changed to Trinitite.
Due to the intense secrecy surrounding the test, no accurate information of what happened was released to the public until after the second atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. However, many people in New Mexico were well aware that something extraordinary had happened the morning of July 16, 1945. The blinding flash of light, followed by the shock wave had made a vivid impression on people who lived within a radius of 160 miles of ground zero. Windows were shattered 120 miles away in Silver City, and residents of Albuquerque saw the bright light of the explosion on the southern horizon and felt the tremor of the shock waves moments later.