A fire prevention celebration on Saturday will include a parade as part of Oak Ridge’s 75th anniversary celebration.

The celebration will kick off with a “Then and Now”-themed parade that will start at Oak Ridge Fire Department Fire Station Number 3 on Tuskegee Drive and end at Alvin K. Bissell Park. Lineup for participants begins at 9 a.m., with the parade getting underway at 10 a.m.

The city that is now Oak Ridge was built as part of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret federal program to build the world’s first atomic weapons during World War II. Among other things, uranium enriched at Y-12 fueled the first atomic bomb used in wartime. Code-named “Little Boy,” it was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, shortly before the end of the war. [Read more…]