A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

Missouri lawmakers will convene a special committee to study the consequences of nuclear weapons production in the St. Louis area and recommend legislation for next year, House Speaker Dean Plocher announced Thursday. 

In a press release, Plocher said the Special Interim Committee on the Impact of U.S. Nuclear Weapon Programs on Missouri will allow “policymakers, health professionals, environmental experts and affected community members to document their concerns and develop legislative solutions.”

“Missouri has long felt the effects of nuclear weapons production, and it’s our responsibility to address the consequences head-on,” said Plocher, who represents part of St. Louis County.

The St. Louis area has struggled with the ramifications of nuclear weapons production since the development of the first atomic bomb. Workers refined uranium in downtown St. Louis as part of the Manhattan Project, which was used in the first successful nuclear chain reaction, which took place in Chicago.

But after the end of World War II, the waste from the bomb development was allowed to spread and pollute sites in St. Louis and St. Charles counties. 

Immediately after the war, the waste was transported haphazardly — with waste falling off trucks — to St. Louis County and dumped at the airport. Deteriorating barrels of radioactive waste polluted the site and leaked into Coldwater Creek. 

Heaps of radioactive material and debris were also dumped in a quarry in Weldon Spring, adjacent to the Missouri River. 

The waste was then taken to a nearby site — also along Coldwater Creek — where it remained exposed to the elements and continued to pollute the creek. It was sold so another company could extract precious metals from the waste, and the remaining radioactive material was dumped in the West Lake Landfill where it remains today.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing the cleanup of Coldwater Creek, which is expected to last until 2038. The Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing the development of a plan to remediate the West Lake Landfill.

In the meantime, generations of St. Louis-area residents have been exposed to radioactivity from Coldwater Creek and the quarry where state Rep. Tricia Byrnes has said she would sneak in and swim as a teen. 

Byrnes will chair the interim committee. In the release, she said the committee will listen to “survivors, production workers and remediation workers to understand the real-world impact on their health and financial stability.” 

“We must take a comprehensive approach to address the lasting impact of nuclear weapons production in Missouri,” Byrnes said. “The health and well-being of our residents and the environment are at stake.”

The first meeting of the committee will take place Oct. 15 at from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Spencer Creek Library in St. Peters. 

Rep. Mark Matthiesen, a Republican from O’Fallon, will serve as vice chair of the committee, and Rep. Raychel Proudie, a Ferguson Democrat, will be ranking member.

The remaining members are Republican Reps. Don Mayhew, Renee Reuter and Richard West and Democratic Reps. Aaron Crossley and Ian Mackey.

The Trinity explosion, 16 milliseconds after the atomic bomb test detonation on July 16, 1945. The viewed hemisphere’s highest point in this image is about 660 ft. (Berlyn Brixner / Los Alamos National Laboratory / Public Domain)

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson is holding up compensation for generations of Americans who developed cancer after exposure to the nation’s nuclear weapons program, several members of Congress said Tuesday. 

At a news conference in Washington, D.C, U.S. House members and Senators stood beside advocates from Missouri and tribal nations in the southwest who have — for months, or even years — cried out for help from the government as they and their loved ones suffered from cancer because of exposure to radiation.

Dawn Chapman, who lives near the contaminated West Lake Landfill in suburban St. Louis, said Johnson was the “only reason these people are suffering right now in this room.” 

“He can fix it,” Chapman said. “There are a lot of things in this world that you cannot fix. This one can be fixed. This one can pass.”

Fred Vallo, who endured a 37-hour bus ride from New Mexico., said his community can’t keep coming to the nation’s capital “begging” for help. He urged Johnson to visit New Mexico and see where the contamination originated for himself. 

“I’ll even take you with my own truck if you don’t believe us,” Vallo said.

Vallo and fellow advocates called on Johnson to bring the stalled Radiation Exposure Compensation Act up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation has twice passed the U.S. Senate and would offer compensation to individuals suffering from certain cancers after exposure to improperly stored radioactive waste, uranium ore or bomb tests.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, who — along with New Mexico Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján — championed the legislation in the Senate, said he’d spoken with Johnson. But the House leader hadn’t committed to taking action on RECA. 

Luján encouraged advocates to pray for Johnson “to give him the strength and the wisdom to allow this legislation to the House floor, to be voted on, and to work to earn Republican and Democratic votes to get this to the President of the United States.”

Johnson’s office declined to comment.

Congress first passed RECA in the 1990s to compensate uranium miners and individuals exposed to bomb testing, known as “downwinders,” but the program only covered bomb testing victims in parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah. 

Since the original RECA legislation passed, Hawley said, the radiation was found to have traveled further than the government originally thought. And communities that were known to be affected at the time were left out.

The expansion would offer coverage to downwinders in the remaining parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah and expand coverage to Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. It would also offer new coverage for residents exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

In Missouri, uranium refining and improper storage of radioactive waste has affected residents for decades. Coldwater Creek, which runs for miles through busy St. Louis suburbs, is contaminated with radioactive material, and exposure to its waters increased the risk of cancer for generations of residents — primarily children. 

Waste was haphazardly trucked from site to site in St. Louis county before being dumped at the West Lake Landfill where it remains today. 

Hawley said he was confident there was enough support in the House of Representatives to pass RECA. 

“The wait has been too long,” Hawley said, “and it has been too cruel. And there is no need to wait any longer.” 

One family still suffering the effects of the bomb is Carol Rogers’. 

Rogers, of Shiprock, New Mexico, said her father was a miner. She and her mother could see the gold-hued uranium ore falling from his clothes as they scrubbed them and wrung them out. At the time, she didn’t know helping wash her father’s clothes would cause her to develop cancer decades later. 

When she was diagnosed, Rogers said, her doctor asked if she had worked with uranium. She said she hadn’t.

“Who did?” she said he asked. 

“He said, ‘Yes, it’s uranium,’” Rogers said.

After treatment, she said, she was in remission from cancer for three or four years. It came back, affecting her eye. She’s currently undergoing radiation treatment.

“It’s painful,” Rogers said. “I have to take pain medicine almost every day, sometimes twice a day.”

Rogers said her father died of lung cancer. Her grandson was diagnosed with cancer at 19. Now 20, he’s going through testing again along with his one-year-old baby. Doctors have recommended, she said, everyone in her family get tested, even infants. 

U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, said the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb at the Trinity Test site made it look like the sun rose over New Mexico at 3 a.m. one day in July 1945. And almost 80 years later, it’s still affecting New Mexican families. 

“For too many decades, New Mexicans have suffered generational impacts,” Vasquez said, “while being gaslighted…for having intergenerational disease, cancer, gastrointestinal issues, tumors, so much more.”

An undated photo from the 1980s, of two teenagers stepping on rocks and wooden planks on Coldwater Creek. The photo is from a scrapbook kept by Sandy Delcoure, who lived on Willow Creek in Florissant and donated the scrapbook to the Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

Federal officials plan to post warning signs along a contaminated suburban St. Louis creek where generations of children were exposed to radioactive material.

Coldwater Creek, which winds between homes and parks in St. Louis County for 14 miles before meeting the Missouri River, is plagued with nuclear waste left over from World War II. For decades, families had no idea the danger it posed to the children who played along its banks and swam in its waters. 

More than six years ago, a federal study found residents who live near the creek or regularly came in contact with its waters faced a higher risk of certain cancers. 

Still, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is cleaning up the creek, did not post signs warning visitors of its danger. 

But this fall, the Corps plans to post signs along Coldwater Creek, warning of the “low-level radioactive materials present.” In a Facebook post, the Corps’ St. Louis branch said the first of the signs will be placed in mid or late November. 

The signs, marked with an eye-catching cautionary yellow border, instruct readers not to dig near the creek but say the waste doesn’t pose a health threat as long as the ground is left undisturbed. Corps officials had previously released a draft of a warning sign with a blue banner that said there “may” be radioactive materials near. 

Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL to advocate for St. Louis-area families harmed by radioactive waste, said the group was happy with the new signs and thinks they’ll save lives. 

“But also, we’re so sad because we know people that are hurt that probably wouldn’t have been if they were up a long time ago,” Chapman said. 

The Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which has advocated for signs along Coldwater Creek for more than 25 years, said in a press release that the signs mark a “step in the right direction,” but don’t fully acknowledge the danger present along the creek.

The sign doesn’t acknowledge areas where contamination may be at the surface, doesn’t use the universal symbol for radioactive material and may confuse visitors by referring to the material as “low-level,” the Missouri Coalition for the Environment said. 

St. Louis has struggled with radioactive contamination since World War II. Uranium used in the development of the atomic bomb was refined in downtown St. Louis. After the war, the waste was dumped at the airport and, later, a nearby property — both along Coldwater Creek. The waste was further refined to extract valuable metals and the remaining material illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. 

The Corps is leading the cleanup of Coldwater Creek and the Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing work at the West Lake Landfill.

Last summer, The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that, for decades, federal officials and companies handling the waste downplayed or failed to investigate the true danger of the material. Since the revelation, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and members of Congress from Missouri — along with southwestern states affected by nuclear weapons testing — have been fighting for compensation for victims of radioactive waste exposure.

To do so, Hawley and U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico, proposed expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, originally passed in 1990 to compensate uranium miners and those who were exposed to atomic bomb testing in parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. 

Hawley and Luján’s bill would expand the program to remaining parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah and provide coverage for the first time in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam, where residents were exposed to radiation from weapons tests. It would also expand coverage to those exposed in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

The legislation twice passed the Senate, but was never heard on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. When the House failed to pass a RECA expansion or extension in June, the legislation expired. 

Hawley said on the U.S. Senate floor last week that the legislation is being “attacked” and exposure victims labeled as “greedy and unthankful and ungrateful and undeserving of any help or recognition or thanks from this country.” 

Hawley called on members of Congress to “stand up and be counted” and support the legislation.

“We will not stop fighting,” he said. “We will not stop working until every nuclear radiation victim who has given their life and health for the support of this nation is thanked and compensated.”

Chapman said RECA advocates are returning to Washington, D.C., next week to advocate for the expansion. She said she believes Congress will act on RECA sometime in the coming months. 

“I feel very close,” Chapman said. “We feel like this could be it for us next week.”

The three major-party candidates for Missouri attorney general, from left, Will Scharf, Andrew Bailey and Elad Gross (campaign photos).

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey insists his office is working to hold the federal government accountable for the decades-old radioactive waste contamination that plagues the St. Louis area.

“We are fighting to ensure that the federal government protects Missourians from the poison that the federal government injected into the streams and creeks there in eastern Missouri,” he told The Independent. 

But the two candidates vying to oust him from the office say Bailey is just the latest in a long line of Missouri officials who have failed the victims who have suffered from the effects of radioactive contamination left in the area since World War II.

Activists tried for months last summer to get Bailey’s help, and “they were met with a closed door,” Will Scharf, who is challenging Bailey in the Aug. 6 GOP primary, told The Independent. 

Both Scharf and Elad Gross, the Democrat running for attorney general, say Bailey could be doing much more.

The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the world’s first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium refined downtown was used in experiments in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project.

After the war, dangerous radioactive waste was dumped at the St. Louis airport right next to Coldwater Creek and contaminated the creek water and banks for miles. Generations of families moved into new suburban homes springing up along the creek without knowing the dangers it posed. A federal study shows children who played in its waters face a higher risk of cancer.

The waste sat at the airport for years before it was sold and moved to a property in Hazelwood also adjacent to the creek. A company bought it to extract valuable metals and trucked the remaining waste to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton and dumped it illegally. It remains there today.

Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are working to clean up the creek, and the Environment Protection Agency is overseeing the cleanup of the landfill. 

But after an investigation by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed last summer that the federal government knew the waste posed a threat to St. Louis residents years before revealing that to the public, Missouri officials and activists have said the federal government should be held accountable for the damage.

Gross argued Bailey, as the state’s chief attorney, wasn’t doing enough to ensure that happens. 

“Our attorney general can sue Joe Biden for everything under the sun,” Gross said during a candidate forum last month, “but he can’t figure out how to sue him to protect Missouri families when we need him the most.”

Gross, who previously worked in the attorney general’s office, said the state should reinstate the environmental division, which was dissolved when Josh Hawley was attorney general in 2017. Bailey should have more attorneys dedicated to investigating nuclear waste and pushing the federal government for better management of the cleanup, Gross said.

If that’s not enough, Gross said, the state should sue the federal government. He pointed to Washington, where the attorney general’s office sued over the slow cleanup at the Hanford nuclear production facility and inadequate protections for workers.

The state previously sued Republic Services, which owns the West Lake Landfill, under former Attorney General Chris Koster over a subsurface smolder in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill that emitted a foul odor and risked coming into contact with the radioactive waste. It was settled under Hawley. 

Bailey said his office has reviewed documents the news organizations used in the investigation last summer and found that they “paint a picture of the federal government poisoning Missourians.” But he thinks there are documents missing. 

His office filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Department of Energy in March seeking further information. Madeline Sieren, a spokeswoman for Bailey, said the attorney general’s office hasn’t received a response from the Department of Energy.

Those documents, Bailey said, will help determine whether the state should sue the federal government.

Bailey said he’s also supporting Hawley, who now serves in the U.S. Senate, as he seeks compensation for St. Louis residents who have developed cancer following exposure to the radioactive contamination. Hawley sought to add Missouri — along with southwestern states exposed to bomb testing — to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The 35-year-old federal program, however, expired before the U.S. House of Representatives took a vote on extending and expanding it. 

Last month, Bailey wrote to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, demanding that the agency put up signs along Coldwater Creek, where there is currently no warning that radioactive contamination may be present. 

Gross’ criticism, Bailey said, was “an oversimplification and a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the attorney general’s office.” 

“I’m not withholding any tool at our disposal to ensure transparency, accountability and justice for the victims,” Bailey said. 

Gross said “writing letters is one thing.“Getting results is something entirely different.” 

Scharf called Bailey’s Freedom of Information Act request “a good start” but said he’d like to see if the state could sue the federal government or the private company that dumped waste in the West Lake Landfill.

“My strong suspicion,” Scharf said, “is that there is much more that can be done, from a legal perspective, to vindicate the rights of Missourians…who have been grievously injured by the federal action, federal inaction and the federal cover up here.”

The Independent’s Jason Hancock and Anna Spoerre contributed to this story.

A sign warns of radioactive material at the West Lake Landfill. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped there in the 1970s (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Crews working to clean up the West Lake Landfill in St. Louis County detected contamination in nearby groundwater, forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether radium might have left the site.

In a periodic update to nearby communities last month, the EPA said it would add groundwater monitoring wells around the site, which sits in Bridgeton, about a mile from the banks of the Missouri River. 

The expansion, which came after contamination was detected at the edge of the landfill, will help determine whether contamination may be migrating from the site and whether it could reach the river. Radium has been detected near the site at slightly above drinking water limits, the EPA said in a statement, but the radioactive element also occurs naturally in rock formations and aquifers.

Initially, the EPA had anticipated all necessary groundwater wells would be installed by August 2022, the project manager for the groundwater remediation at West Lake, Snehal Bhagat, said in a briefing in December.

“But the detections in offsite locations required a significant expansion of the network in order to delineate exactly where the impacts are found,” Bhagat said, “so a lot more wells were put in. We’re still putting them in as we chase the edges of the impacts.”

EPA: Radioactive contamination at West Lake landfill is more widespread

The West Lake Landfill, formerly a municipal landfill, is one of several sites in the St. Louis area contaminated by decades-old nuclear waste. 

St. Louis was pivotal to the development of the world’s first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium refined in downtown was used in experiments in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II-era nuclear weapons program. 

After the war, radioactive waste from the downtown uranium plants was trucked to the St. Louis airport, often spilling off of trucks along the way, and dumped, unprotected on the ground next to Coldwater Creek. The creek, which runs through what are now bustling suburbs, was contaminated for miles, increasing the risk of cancer for generations of children who played on its banks and in its waters.

The waste sat at the airport for years before being sold and relocated to a property in nearby Hazlewood, also adjacent to the creek. In the early 1970s, after valuable metals were extracted from the waste, it was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and dumped illegally. It remains there today.

Now, the landfill is a Superfund site subject to EPA cleanup, and in recent years, the agency has discovered the contamination is more widespread than it thought. Despite outcry from the community, the EPA, for years, relied on a decades-old radiation reading taken from a helicopter to determine where the waste was.

Now, it’s working to determine the “size and mobility of the plume.”

“To date, no conclusions have been made about the source(s) of the radium in off site groundwater because data collection is ongoing,” Kellen Ashford, a spokesman for the EPA’s regional office said in an email.

Dawn Chapman, a co-founder of Just Moms STL, a nonprofit that formed to advocate for communities near contaminated sites around St. Louis, said she was concerned that the EPA hadn’t yet identified the edges of the contamination. 

Given both the radioactive waste and the other chemical contaminants that are in the landfill, she feared it could be “one hell of a nasty plume.”

Chapman noted the parties responsible for the site — the landfill’s owner, the company that dumped the waste and the U.S. Department of Energy — are nearing the end of the process to plan the cleanup at West Lake. 

“I really would have hoped,” Chapman said, “that by now they would have found the edge.”

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who is running for governor, speaks at a press event about St. Louis area nuclear waste Wednesday, June 12, 2024 in Florissant. (Clara Bates/Missouri Independent)

Several Republican candidates for Missouri statewide office on Wednesday evening urged stronger state and federal action to clean up St. Louis-area radioactive waste and compensate victims.

Parts of the St. Louis area have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II. 

Secretary of state Jay Ashcroft, who is running for governor, Will Scharf, who is running for attorney general and House Speaker Dean Plocher, who is running for secretary of state, attended the news conference outside the Florissant Municipal Court building. They spoke alongside advocates, victims and legislators representing the region.

The press conference preceded an annual update from the Army Corps of Engineers on cleanup efforts at the downtown site, Coldwater Creek, St. Louis Lambert International Airport and Latty Avenue.

And it came as the fight in Washington, D.C. to extend compensation to St. Louis-area residents continues, because the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act failed to get a reauthorization vote in the House and expired Friday.

“Let me tell you, I understand that most people that go to Washington D.C. are not exactly profiles in courage, but if you can’t stand up to stop little kids from getting incurable diseases because of radioactive waste that is left in the ground, there’s something wrong with you,” Ashcroft said. 

“And you know, if it’s not a problem, why don’t we have 10, 20 representatives, 10, 20 senators, come and wade through Coldwater Creek and talk about it?” 

Scharf said he’d been calling members of Congress and urging them to reauthorize RECA with St. Louis area victims included.

“The region has paid enough,” Scharf said, “and it’s time for the games to end and for the people who have been harmed to finally receive the compensation they deserve.”

Plocher said he was there to support Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, who has been an advocate for compensation and cleanup of the waste and has “brought so much light to something I was completely unaware of.”

“…It’s astounding the cover up, the lack of transparency from the federal government that has befallen this community, all in the name of protecting our national sovereignty to create weapons to help defend us in the war,” he said. “So it’s about time somebody does something about it.”

Byrnes organized the press event. 

 “I do not want to make this about politics,” she said when asked if she has endorsed the candidates who participated in the news conference. 

Byrnes grew up in the area and, as a teen, swam in a quarry she didn’t know was contaminated in Weldon Spring.

The news conference was a last-minute decision and she reached out to the people “who have helped champion it,” including Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark, D-Florissant, she said.

In an interview with The Independent, Scharf, who was policy director for former Gov. Eric Greitens, said he first met advocates who work on the radioactive waste issue in 2016.

“I’d like to see a much more vigorous investigation and potentially a lawsuit against the Department of Energy,” Scharf said.  “I want to use every legal tool at my disposal as attorney general to fight for justice for the victims of this region.”

Ashcroft told The Independent he’d been “trying to raise awareness and get the state involved” for years.

If elected, he said, “the governor can help move policy,” pushing for more money in a statewide testing fund, and working with the Missouri congressional delegation to “push the feds to do more work with Congress.” 

“And the last thing the federal government wants is publicity about it. They buried it through multiple ways for 75 years. And one thing that I know I can do, even as Secretary of State is, I can be public about it. I can force them to face the issue.”

Plocher pointed out he didn’t mention his campaign in the news conference and told The Independent he hadn’t come as someone “running for office today. I’m here to be the speaker of the House,” and said he wanted to help Byrnes and Nickson-Clark. 

“The two of them have been working tirelessly,” he added.

‘People are still dying’

Around 80-90 people attended the annual community meeting held at the Florissant Municipal Courts Building Wednesday night. 

The Corps of Engineers has authority, through the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, over the downtown, Coldwater Creek, airport and Latty Avenue sites. Cleanup of the West Lake landfill is being overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

After World War II, waste from the downtown site was trucked to St. Louis County, sometimes spilling along the way, and dumped at the airport. Decaying barrels released radioactive waste into Coldwater Creek, and despite acknowledging the risk of contamination, the private company that produced the waste thought it was too dangerous for workers to put the material in new barrels.

Eventually, the waste was sold to another private company and moved to a property on Latty Avenue, also adjacent to Coldwater Creek. The material was stored in the open where it continued to contaminate the creek. 

At the meeting, several residents expressed frustration with the government’s progress in cleaning up the sites and a lack of communication.

Ray Hartmann, a Democrat running for Congress in the 2nd District, said he had been to a similar meeting in 2013.

“What reason do these people have to believe you that this is going to be different than it was in 2013?” Hartmann asked.

Col. Andy Pannier, commander of the Corps’ St. Louis District said the agency is trying to make its  actions match its words and see “constant, continuous progress.”

At another point, Pannier added that “There is no property that can wait till tomorrow or the next day or the next day,” which was met with applause.

“There’s only so many we can work on at any given time. And so we try to prioritize that…we try to prioritize the areas that would have the highest risk for potential exposure to the public to be first and then move to the next and the next,” he added.

Pannier said “the timeline that we’re working off of is completion by 2038.”

The Corps has promised signs warning of the contamination but they haven’t been installed, said Deborah Bowles, who said she grew up in Florissant and has come to Corps meetings for years.

“It’s just not hard on our mental health,” she said. “It takes a lot out of us physically to come and try to advocate for this.”

Cleanup is a “huge process…but does it take this long to get signage out?” she asked, adding that people who move to the area may not know the risks.

Pannier said “I know this is absolutely an area of concern for many of you and so I will sit with my team and figure out how we got to what you saw versus what you’re asking.”

Nickson-Clark also raised the issue of sign placement at the news conference.

“People are still dying, children are becoming diagnosed with rare cancers…Where are the signs?” Nickson-Clark said. “This community is still walking, playing in Coldwater Creek. Families are still being affected by Coldwater Creek.”

A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office on Wednesday scrapped a proposal to extend a compensation program for victims of radiation exposure without expanding it to thousands of Americans across nine states.

In a statement that came less than four hours after Johnson’s office said a proposal to expand the program was too expensive, a spokesperson said Republican leadership had decided not to bring the bill up for a vote next week. The statement said the decision came after discussions with U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs.

Wagner said in a statement she was glad Republican leaders “listened to my concerns and those of my constituents and pulled the floor vote on this misguided proposal.” 

“We’re going to keep fighting for expansion…so Missourians impacted by radiation get the support and compensation they deserve,” Wagner said.

The existing Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expires in less than two weeks, and as the deadline nears, federal lawmakers have been caught between the need to extend the program to keep it available for people who already qualify and pressure to expand it to cancer patients from St. Louis to the Navajo Nation.

Members of Missouri’s Congressional delegation decried Johnson’s plan to extend the program without expanding it. Early Wednesday afternoon, Johnson’s spokesperson said Republican leaders were “committed to ensuring the federal government fulfills its existing obligations to Americans exposed to nuclear radiation.” 

“Unfortunately, the current Senate bill is estimated to cost $50-60 billion in new mandatory spending with no offsets and was supported by only 20 of 49 Republicans in the Senate,” the spokesperson said.

It’s unclear after leadership’s reversal whether a vote on an expanded program will be held before the law expires. 

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, originally passed by Congress in 1990, offers compensation to uranium miners and civilians who were downwind of nuclear bomb testing in Arizona, Utah and Nevada. It expires June 10, and for months, advocates and members of Congress — especially from Missouri and New Mexico — have been lobbying Congress to expand it.

U.S. senators have twice passed legislation that would expand RECA, but it hasn’t gone anywhere in the House of Representatives. The legislation would add the remaining parts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada to the program and bring coverage to downwinders in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. It would also offer coverage for residents exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL to advocate for communities affected by World War II-era nuclear waste that contaminated parts of the St. Louis area, called Johnson’s initial statement a “pitiful excuse.” 

Chapman welcomed Johnson’s change of mind and gave credit to Wagner, but she said advocates couldn’t sit an enjoy the victory because it’s unclear where the legislation will go from here.

“We went from feeling good to horrible to, I guess, good now,” she said.

Chapman and supporters of the legislation believe the $50-60 billion price tag is an overestimation, and she noted that cost is spread over five years. 

She said supporters have worked to cut the costs of the program, including narrowing the list of health conditions that would qualify for compensation. If costs were a concern, Chapman said, Johnson should have met with advocates to work on further cuts. 

Chapman said she’d return to Washington, D.C., next week, and “the least he can do is meet with us for 10 minutes.”

Johnson’s earlier position was revealed Tuesday evening on social media by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and sparked outrage among the state’s congressional delegation. 

U.S. Reps. Cori Bush, a Democrat from St. Louis, and Ann Wagner, a Republican from the nearby suburbs, vowed to oppose any extension of RECA that didn’t add Missouri.

On social media Wednesday afternoon, Hawley said the federal government “has not begun to meet its obligations to nuclear radiation victims.”

“(Missouri) victims have gotten zilch,” Hawley said. 

Parts of the St. Louis area have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a breakthrough in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the bomb. 

After the war, waste from uranium refining efforts was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties and dumped near Coldwater Creek and in a quarry in Weldon Spring, polluting surface and groundwater. Remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today. 

Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes near contaminated sites without warning from the federal government. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found exposure to the creek elevated residents’ risk of cancer. Residents of nearby communities suffer higher-than-normal rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers and leukemia. Childhood brain and nervous system cancers are also higher. 

This article has been updated since it was initially published with an update that House Speaker Johnson reversed course and to add new comments from Dawn Chapman.

Tammy Tesson Puhlmann, 63, who now lives in Villa Ridge, Missouri, shows photos of her son Drew as she sat in the Russell Senate Office Building on May 22. Puhlmann’s son died of cancer at age 30, and she was among 10 eastern Missouri residents speaking to lawmakers on Capitol Hill about expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. (Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — A fund to compensate Americans sickened by exposure to atomic bomb tests, uranium mining and radioactive waste expires in just under 15 days, and activists and lawmakers are scrambling to keep the fund active and open to additional victims.

A bill to reauthorize and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, often shortened to RECA, sailed through the U.S. Senate in early March on a bipartisan 69-30 vote, but the House has yet to take it up for a vote.

Critics cite high costs, but bipartisan lawmakers and activists rallying in favor of the bill say the victims have already paid the price through medical bills and lost loved ones, and that it’s ultimately the government’s wrong to make right.

The U.S. Senate-passed legislation, championed by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, aims to extend the program by six years and expand eligibility to several new locations, including his state of Missouri where, over decades, residents witnessed numerous rare similar cancers among neighbors in and around St. Louis.

Chemical plants in downtown St. Louis and Weldon Spring, Missouri, processed uranium during the nation’s WWII effort to build the first atomic bomb. Radioactive waste from the plants were stored and dumped around the area.

States Newsroom’s Missouri Independent, in collaboration with the Associated Press and MuckRock, obtained and combed through thousands of government records that revealed the government downplayed and ignored the dangers of the radioactive waste.

‘The government has done this’

Tammy Tesson Puhlmann, 63, who lived for decades in Florissant, Missouri, sat in the Russell Senate Office Building Wednesday showing photos of her son Drew — first, as a baby who was born with a rare blood disease, and then as a thin 30-year-old man just a week before he died of cancer.

“If I can prevent one mom from having to go through something like this, I would do anything,” she said through tears. “It’s the most unbearable feeling in the world to know that there is nothing you can do for your child, and to know that the government has done this.”

Puhlmann was among 10 eastern Missouri residents and state representatives who met with 10 lawmakers on Wednesday, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise; U.S. Reps. Ann Wagner and Blaine Luetkemeyer, both Republicans of Missouri; and the state’s GOP Sens. Eric Schmitt and Hawley.

Missouri state Reps. Tricia Byrnes and Richard West, both Republicans, who represent districts just outside St. Louis, flipped through maps and photos documenting the contaminated sites, including where a uranium processing plant and byproduct dumping ground were located next to Francis Howell High School, which Byrnes attended.

“Look how close it was to all of the contamination. That high school is still there,” Byrnes said, pointing to a map.

To Byrnes’ left sat Kristin Denbow, a 1988 Francis Howell graduate who has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer in the bone marrow.

“We have memories of men in full containment suits walking around the grounds of our high school while we were there,” Denbow said.

‘This has been our lives’

Three generations of Susie Gaffney’s family made their homes in the suburbs of St. Louis near Coldwater Creek, unaware that radioactive waste relocated from the downtown uranium plant was leaking into the water.

Susie’s husband, Jim, grew up in a house beside the creek and not far from Jana Elementary School, which closed in 2023 because of radioactive contamination.

“Jim grew up playing in the creek, everybody did. Everybody who tells the creek stories played (there). It was awesome, it wasn’t deep. Kids fished, they made mudslides. It was a great place to live,” Gaffney said.

Jim, whose mother died of colon cancer after being diagnosed in her 40s, developed lymphoma at the age of 24.

When Susie and Jim’s son Joey was an infant, they moved to a nearby subdivision named Wedgewood, a few miles down the creek. Joey also played in the water as a child.

Joey was diagnosed at 18 with thyroid cancer and eventually underwent a thyroidectomy. Gaffney, now 66, recalls the doctors telling her, “This kid is Chernobyl.”

“‘This is what happened in Chernobyl. He has metastasized thyroid cancer. This is what happened there. He had to be exposed to radiation’ and naively I said, ‘Well, where?’ And so this has been our lives,” she said.

Joey is now 45. Jim, 68, was also diagnosed with bladder cancer and is now living with myelodysplastic syndrome, Gaffney said.

“He’s living on blood transfusions,” she said, pointing to a photo of him on a packet of papers she was handing out to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Below the photo of Jim was a map of the region with red dots for each cancer case.

“I just want people to tunnel in,” Gaffney said. “Pretend you’re on Google Earth, zoom all the way down and get on those front doors and picture our lifespan with health care, with depression, with anxiety, fear. Our quality of life has definitely been affected, all of us.”

Debate on Capitol Hill

The government’s nearly expired compensation program pays one-time sums of $75,000 to those who developed certain diseases after working on U.S. nuclear tests before 1963. It pays $50,000 to those who lived in select counties downwind from test explosion sites between January 1951 and October 1958, and the month of July in 1962, in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Uranium industry workers who were employed in 11 states from 1942 to 1971 and subsequently developed eligible illnesses qualify for $100,000.

Hawley’s bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, would also expand to include the entirety of Arizona, Nevada and Utah, and include downwind and affected areas in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Guam. Additionally, the one-time compensation sums to victims or surviving family members would increase to $100,000.

If enacted, the legislation would reach areas including ZIP codes in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, where communities were impacted by radioactive waste dumping, uranium processing and other related activities surrounding the testing.

The bill’s estimated cost of $50 billion to $60 billion has drawn criticism. Hawley’s office confirmed the estimate. There is not an official budget score.

On Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, asked for unanimous consent on the Senate floor for his proposed “clean extension” of the program as it exists for another two years — only covering those affected in areas of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Lee cited the risk of “inflating the deficit by at least $60 billion” and questioned whether enough data backs contamination in the additional areas in Hawley’s bill.

“You see, the House of Representatives has thus far declined to take up and pass Sen. Hawley’s previous bill, with some signaling concern and raising some of the concerns that I just restated,” the Utah Republican said.

Hawley objected, and Luján spoke in support of the objection.

“Study after study has shown the expanse of the nuclear radiation. Here is a study from 1997, from 2005, another from 2005, from 2023, all showing that the nuclear radiation is far beyond the contours of the original RECA bill passed in 1990,” Hawley said. “Yet my friend from Utah wants to keep doing the same old thing, leaving out in the cold hundreds of thousands of Americans. I will not consent to it.”

Lee responded, saying he understood the “impassioned pleas” from Hawley and Luján. He offered an updated version that includes Missouri and New Mexico, but leaves out other states and Guam. His office cites an unofficial budget score of $30 billion.

“There are other states in (Hawley’s) legislation pending in the House that deal with law in the Marshall Islands, Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Alaska, and perhaps one or two other jurisdictions. The claims of those states are not on equal footing,” Lee said.

“That is where a lot of the — not all, but a lot of the expense is accrued and a lot of concerns expressed in the House impeding its quick passage over there that might lead to it not being able to be passed at all,” he continued.

Hawley again objected, saying he “will not be party to any attempt at some halfway measure, some short stopgap bill, or some effort to sweep this under the rug.”

A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson, of Louisiana, told States Newsroom on May 15 that “The Speaker understands and appreciates Senator Hawley’s position and is working closely with interested members and stakeholders to chart a path forward for the House.”

RECA was established in 1990.

The U.S. conducted more than 1,000 atomic weapons tests from 1945 to 1992 — the first at the Trinity Test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where scientists detonated the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb prior to the U.S. dropping the weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II.

As of June 2022, the government has approved more than 36,000 RECA claims for more than $2.3 billion in benefits.

Unless the fund is extended, claims have to be postmarked by June 10, 2024, according to the Department of Justice, which administers the payouts.

The National Nuclear Safety Administration plans to expand its Kansas City facility, which develops and manufactures the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons. Missouri lawmakers are hoping to approve a sales tax exemption on construction materials for the private developer building the expansion (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

An effort to create a program for St. Louis-area residents affected by radioactive waste nearly derailed a Missouri Senate bill backed by the Kansas City delegation to help expand a facility manufacturing components of nuclear weapons. 

But after defeating the proposed amendment pertaining to St. Louis on Tuesday, senators approved the bill on a first-round vote Wednesday with only the Kansas City provisions. It still faces a final Senate vote before it moves to the Missouri House.

The bill offers a sales tax exemption on construction material to help finance an expansion of a National Nuclear Security Administration campus, operated by Honeywell International Inc., in south Kansas City. Workers there produce non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons.

State Sen. Nick Schroer — a Republican from the outer suburbs of St. Louis, where the federal government once had a uranium-processing facility — tried to add an amendment to create a tax credit for residents to have soil and water tested or remediated. 

Missouri lawmakers push tax break to expand Kansas City nuclear weapons facility

But while the Honeywell bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Greg Razer, a Kansas City Democrat, said he believed St. Louis’ radioactive waste struggle needs to be addressed, he wanted to pass the bill as it was. 

“This is too important to my community,” Razer said. “I’d rather not have hiccups along the way, especially when I’m not here, hopefully, to shepherd it through the last few weeks.” 

Razer has been nominated by Gov. Mike Parson to the State Tax Commission and will leave the legislature if he’s confirmed by the Senate. He asked Schroer to let his Honeywell legislation go through and find another bill to amend and create the St. Louis tax credit.

Razer told a Missouri Senate committee earlier this year that the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, plans to add 2.5 million square feet of new facilities and hire thousands of new employees.

To expedite the expansion, the federal government plans to acquire the facilities from a private developer who can build them more quickly. If the federal government built the facilities itself, it would not pay sales tax, so supporters of the legislation argue exempting the private developer allows it to keep its costs on par with what the federal government’s would be.

According to a fiscal analysis on Razer’s bill, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to spend more than $3 billion on Kansas City facilities. Razer’s bill would divert almost $61 million in state revenue over 10 years, which he said the construction job creation alone would offset. Jackson County, the city of Kansas City and the Kansas City Zoo would see a combined $81 million diverted from their budgets over 10 years.

Similar legislation has passed the Missouri House and awaits action in the Senate.

Schroer’s amendment, which had not been heard by any Senate committee, is the latest in a series of efforts by state and federal lawmakers and activists to bring some form of relief to St. Louis-area residents who have lived for decades in close proximity to radioactive waste.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Reps. Cori Bush and Ann Wagner have been trying to pass legislation to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides payments to people who were exposed to nuclear weapons development and developed certain cancers. It has twice passed the U.S. Senate but has yet to be taken up by the House of Representatives. 

“People in my community, St. Louis County, St. Louis City who are still impacted by this — they want to see action, they want, they need something to be done,” Schroer said Wednesday. 

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Schroer told his Senate colleagues  that “time is of the essence” to do something to help St. Louis residents harmed by radioactive waste, citing an investigation published last summer by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press documenting the area’s long history with the contamination.

“We have three weeks to address something — at least put a bandaid on it and encourage the federal government to get off their behinds and actually do the same thing of putting the people first,” Schroer said. 

Starting during World War II and for much of the Cold War, plants in St. Louis and its suburbs processed uranium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. The waste created from those efforts was haphazardly trucked to storage sites where it sat unprotected and polluted Coldwater Creek, bringing generations of children into contact with radioactive waste when they played in the creek waters. 

A 2019 study found that residents who lived near Coldwater Creek or played in its waters faced an elevated risk of developing certain cancers.

Anecdotally, residents of the area have blamed a bevy of mysterious illnesses and autoimmune disorders on the waste. 

Coldwater Creek won’t be fully remediated until 2038. The Environmental Protection Agency is designing a cleanup efforts for the West Lake Landfill, where radioactive waste from the World War II-era refining efforts was dumped in the 1970s.

Schroer implored several Kansas City-area lawmakers to support the legislation, including Sens. Mike Cierpiot and Rick Brattin, both Republicans from the suburbs of Kansas City near the Honeywell site. 

Cierpiot said he respected the long Senate tradition of deferring to other senators on issues that solely impacted their communities, but he was uncomfortable with the fact that Schroer’s amendment hadn’t been vetted by a committee.

Brattin said he recognized that “life is so much more important than even potential jobs.”

“I’m behind you 100% of how we can fix your situation,” Brattin said, “but I appreciate you being willing to work with our situation as well.”

A group of people with the Army Corps of Engineers exit a home on Cades Cove on Monday, March 4, 2024, in Florissant. The Army Corp of Engineers were drilling into the foundation of the house to test soil for radioactive material (Zachary Linhares/Riverfront Times).

Federal officials are investigating whether residents of a small subdivision in the St. Louis suburbs are living on top of contamination dating back to World War II after finding radioactive material in their backyards.

The Cades Cove subdivision, a small enclave in Florissant, was built on top of where Coldwater Creek once meandered. The creek, which runs through several St. Louis suburbs and into the Missouri River, was contaminated decades ago by waste left over from the development of the world’s first atomic bomb. 

Now, 78 years after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, waste from their development lingers in Cades Cove residents’ backyards. And federal officials are drilling through their basement floors to determine whether it’s under their homes. 

“There are homes built on top of the Manhattan Project in St. Louis,” said Dawn Chapman, a co-founder of Just Moms STL, an advocacy group for affected communities, “and there are residents who have been living in those homes on top of this for decades.”

Chapman was speaking on a press conference call about legislation that would compensate St. Louis-area residents who have developed illnesses because of exposure to radioactive waste.

“This is not a 50-year-old problem,” Chapman said. “This is a today problem.”

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Following the conference call and media inquiries on Monday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for cleaning up Coldwater Creek and surrounding properties, announced the sampling efforts in a news release. The agency said it was planning a public meeting.

Phil Moser, a program manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said in an interview with The Independent that the agency, which is responsible for cleaning up Coldwater Creek, discovered radioactive contamination in several backyards in Cades Cove, leading officials to sample under residents’ foundations. 

Moser said it’s the first time since the agency began sampling efforts — meant to inform its cleanup plan — that it has needed to go inside residents’ homes to collect samples. He called the neighborhood an “outlier” for its contamination in residents’ yards.

Contamination in Cades Cove, Moser said, has been found deep underground because the creek meander was filled in with dirt when the neighborhood was built more than 30 years ago. He said several yards will need to be remediated. 

It’s less clear what will happen if contamination is discovered under residents’ homes. Moser said the Army Corps is going to ensure it gets all the contamination. Asked if homes may need to be demolished or whether residents might have to move, Moser said he couldn’t speak about hypotheticals. 

“We’re not taking anything off the table as far as what we would eventually have to do,” he said.

He said “no matter what” the agency will remove all the contamination.

In an email to activists about the sampling and in an interview with The Independent, Moser said the agency had been in contact with Cades Cove residents and the local homeowners’ association.

“As expected, this is a difficult time for (residents) to navigate and we are striving (to) not make it worse with too much outside attention,” Moser said in an email to activists. The Corps’ St. Louis spokesman, Jeremy Idleman, said the same in an emailed statement.

Parts of St. Louis and surrounding counties have been contaminated for decades by waste generated during the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago, a key breakthrough in the bomb’s creation.

After the war, waste generated from uranium processing was trucked to St. Louis County and dumped, uncovered, at the airport, right next to Coldwater Creek. Wind and rain spread the waste, polluting the creek for miles. Over the ensuing decades, tons of waste were moved around St. Louis and St. Charles counties, polluting numerous sites.

Radioactive contamination remains at sites around the St. Louis metro today, and the cleanup of Coldwater Creek and surrounding properties is expected to take until 2038. 

Even at the time the homes in Cades Cove were built, the federal government had known for years that radioactive waste stored nearby had polluted Coldwater Creek. An investigation published last summer by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed that federal officials and the company that refined uranium for the Manhattan Project knew the waste posed a risk to St. Louis residents for years before acknowledging it to the public. 

“I’m angry,” said Karen Nickel, Chapman’s fellow co-founder, who visited the neighborhood Monday. “I’m angry. I’m frustrated, disappointed, and I feel very, very bad for the people that are living in those homes, living in that subdivision.” 

Nickel said Just Moms hopes to share resources and information with Cades Cove residents and ensure those outside the neighborhood know what is being found. She criticized the Army Corps for not making the findings public more quickly.

“Stop using this excuse,” Nickel said. “…the rest of this community has the right to know.”

The revelation of the Cades Cove contamination comes at a time when St. Louis’ radioactive contamination is in the spotlight. 

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on legislation that would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to residents of Missouri sickened by radioactive waste and several western states where atomic bomb testing exposed huge swaths of the nation to airborne radioactivity.

And Chapman is attending President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address on Thursday as U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s guest. 

The Riverfront Times’ Zach Linhares contributed to this report.

(Illustration by Tyler Gross)

Local governments in the St. Louis area could request radioactive waste testing from the state under a Missouri House bill that would appropriate money to a long-unfunded program. 

The Missouri House Conservation and Natural Resources Committee on Monday heard testimony on a bill that would transfer $300,000 to a radioactive waste investigations fund created six years ago. 

Despite the fund passing the legislature in 2018 and being signed into law by Gov. Mike Parson, it has never had any money allocated to it.

The funding — double what Parson recommended in his proposed budget — would allow the state to test sites that are feared to be contaminated with decades-old radioactive waste. 

“Legacy waste from the Manhattan Project has been bought, resold, moved around the area, leaving in its path radioactive contamination to the extent that we don’t necessarily know every single last place that it still exists,” said state Rep. Mark Matthiesen, an O’Fallon Republican.

Five revelations about St. Louis’ history with radioactive waste

The committee took no action on the bill Monday evening. 

Federal agencies are working to clean up several sites, but Matthiesen said the fund would allow state environmental regulators to identify nearby residential areas that could be contaminated.

“There’s many areas where we have known contamination but there could potentially be some areas surrounding those known areas where there could still be contamination that is yet to be identified,” he said. 

The St. Louis area has struggled for decades with remnant radioactive waste from World War II. The city was integral to the Manhattan Project, the name given to the war-ear effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Waste from uranium refining efforts in downtown St. Louis was transported to several sites in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, contaminating parks, lakes and Coldwater Creek.

Parts of the region aren’t expected to be remediated until 2038 — 93 years after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and almost 90 years after the waste was identified as a risk to Coldwater Creek.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is remediating Coldwater Creek, which runs through what are now busy suburbs. It was contaminated in the years after World War II when radioactive waste was dumped at the nearby St. Louis airport and at a property in Hazelwood. 

For decades, the contaminated creek water exposed residents to radioactive waste. A federal study found the creek contamination raised the risk of certain cancers for people who lived nearby and children played in the creek. 

From the airport, the radioactive waste was sold and moved to Hazelwood where it again sat next to and leaked into Coldwater Creek. The Cotter Corporation, which bought the waste to extract valuable metals, then requested to dump the remaining waste that had no economic value at a quarry in Weldon Spring or bury it onsite. When the federal government denied the company permission, it illegally dumped the waste at the West Lake Landfill where it remains today.

The Environmental Protection Agency is leading the effort to design a remediation for the landfill.

The decades-long problem has come under new scrutiny as the EPA works to start remediation at West Lake and an outside expert identified contamination at an elementary school next to Coldwater Creek.

The Missouri Independent, in partnership with MuckRock and the Associated Press, revealed last summer that federal officials and companies that handled the waste knew the radioactive waste posed a risk to St. Louis-area residents for years before making it known to the public. 

In 1949, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium in downtown St. Louis for the Manhattan Project, realized waste stored in decaying steel drums at the airport threatened to leak into Coldwater Creek. It determined that workers couldn’t move the material to new containers because “the hazards to the workers involved in such an occupation would be considerable.”

But despite knowing the waste was spreading, federal officials downplayed the risks for years. 

State Rep. Paula Brown, a Democrat from Hazelwood, noted despite the EPA reaching a decision on how to handle the West Lake Landfill, “there is still no shovel in the ground.” She noted activists for years told the EPA the agency didn’t have a handle on where all of the radioactive waste was and urged further testing of the landfill.

“They kept saying, ‘No, it’s not. No it’s not,’” Brown said. “Well, they have found it. It is awful…so this is an important bill.”

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri said past mismanagement of nuclear plants and waste sites put communities at severe health risks — impacts the federal government hid for decades (Drew Angerer/Getty Images).

The United States should not expand nuclear energy use, at least until the federal government can make up for the harms caused by previous nuclear projects, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri said at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

Bush cited the health problems nuclear waste has caused to many in her predominantly Black St. Louis-area district.

Bush, a Democrat who is aligned with the party’s progressive wing and serves as the ranking member on the U.S. House Oversight & Accountability subcommittee that held the hearing, said past mismanagement of nuclear plants and waste sites put communities at severe health risks — impacts the federal government hid for decades.

Bush alluded to an investigation last year by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press that found private companies and the federal government for decades downplayed potential health risks of contamination in the St. Louis region.

In internal memos dating to the 1940s, they minimized health risks from exposed nuclear waste leaching into groundwater and neighborhood creeks as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-risk.” Residents in the area were never warned of the dangers.

“Records released last July showed that the federal government both hid and downplayed the risks of this radioactive waste in St. Louis for nearly 75 years,” Bush said in an opening statement Thursday.

“Action needs to be taken to remediate the damage that … has already been done before we start talking about expanding nuclear energy in this country,” she said. “We have a responsibility to both fix — and learn from — our mistakes before we risk subjecting any other communities to the same exposure.”

Nuclear waste in general has been “especially” harmful for communities of color, Bush said.

A state analysis showed that effects from radioactive waste that contaminated St. Louis’ Coldwater Creek and the surrounding area led to harmful health outcomes, Bush said.

Brain cancer and other cancers related to the nervous system were 300% more common in children in eight ZIP codes near Coldwater Creek than the national average, she said, citing a state analysis. Breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers were also significantly more common, she added.

Bush renewed a call for a field hearing in her district to examine the issue. Her comments came at a hearing of the U.S. House Oversight & Accountability Committee Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs focused on how to further nuclear energy use.

Subcommittee Chairman Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican, said committee staff was working on Bush’s request for a field hearing, but that her concerns weren’t relevant to Thursday’s hearing.

“I think we’re talking about properly stored nuclear waste,” he said after Bush’s statement.

Nuclear power potential

Fallon described himself as “a proponent of the all-of-the-above approach where we use oil, natural gas, clean coal, wind, solar, hydro and — of course — nuclear.”

Nuclear power is among the most powerful and cleanest forms of energy available, providing more than 70% of U.S. non-greenhouse gas-emitting power, Fallon said.

Kathryn Huff, the assistant secretary at the U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told the committee that nuclear energy should be part of the national strategy to transition away from carbon-emitting energy sources.

At the United Nations climate summit late last year, President Joe Biden and other countries committed to tripling nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Biden has requested $2.16 billion in supplemental funding for long-term enrichment programs, she said.

Huff said the government has stored and transported nuclear fuel without incident for 55 years, but acknowledged that storage and disposal of nuclear fuel could be controversial. The department would seek a “consent-based” approach to siting nuclear processing and waste sites, she said. 

“But the promise of new and advanced reactors can only be responsibly realized in conjunction with progress on the long-term management of their U.S. nuclear fuel,” she said. “A consent-based approach is not only the most equitable and just way to approach siting but also represents our best chance of success.”

Nuclear waste and environmental justice

Bush told Huff that “consent is definitely a good start,” to improving the process for making siting decisions.

But she and other Democrats raised issues about the health impacts from nuclear power, especially in communities of color.

New Mexico Democrat Melanie Stansbury said the government never apologized for the effects people in her state suffered from the testing of the first atomic bomb.

“New Mexico has been a dumping ground for nuclear waste since the 1940s,” she said.

The problem of nuclear storage still troubles the state, she added.

And despite talk of consent-based siting decisions, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed a nuclear facility over numerous requests not to approve the site from local, state and federal officials, she said.

“The NRC licensed a nuclear facility in New Mexico in May of last year against our dissent,” she said. “And we are not OK with that.”

The comment came after Stansbury’s five minutes for questioning had expired, and she struggled to speak over Fallon’s gavel and calls that she was out of order.

“You know what, it is out of order to dump nuclear waste in our communities,” she said.

“I agree,” Fallon responded. “But you didn’t remove one bit of nuclear waste by being out of order here.”

Ohio Democrat Shontel Brown also noted that nuclear waste sites have historically “been far more likely to be placed in close proximity to communities than their white counterparts.”

She noted the inherent health risks involved in those placements and asked Huff and Daniel Dorman, the executive director for operations for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, how the Biden administration was handling issues of environmental justice, a movement that seeks to address the disproportionate impacts of pollution and other environmental problems on underserved communities.

Huff said the Energy Department added community benefit plans as part of the application process for grants, which provided a way “to incorporate the concerns and needs of historically underserved and Black and Brown communities.”

 Dorman added that the commission has updated its longstanding objectives on environmental justice strategy and had recently updated its strategy with a focus on outreach efforts. 

(Photo illustration by Tyler Gross)

Americans are typically told the story of the scientists who built the atomic bomb as an intellectual race for the world’s most powerful weapon during wartime. 

More than 100 atmospheric weapons tests were conducted in the U.S. and its territories between 1945 and 1962. It resulted in widespread radioactive fallout across much of the U.S., largely spread by prevailing winds and rain. In addition, contaminated waste was shipped and haphazardly stored across the country, creating new toxic Superfund sites stretching from Colorado to New York. 

The narrative skips radioactive fallout all over the United States — in towns near the first blast, neighborhoods downwind of testing sites, villages next to uranium mines or suburbs by nuclear waste dumps. U.S. residents have lived in these places and died young from cancers and other illnesses, or given birth to babies with uranium in their bodies. 

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act is set to expire this summer. Since the radiation program first was created in the 1990s, more than 54,000 claims have been processed for those affected. But not everyone has been eligible. 

Thousands more could have been recognized and compensated with legislation proposed in Congress last year. The measure cleared the Senate with bipartisan support but was struck from the final version of a massive defense spending bill as lawmakers haggled over details in the House. 

Source New Mexico: RECA expansion passes U.S. Senate

By Danielle Prokop

The U.S. Senate voted to expand eligibility and extend the life of a fund for people exposed to radiation by the federal government — including New Mexicans harmed by the first-ever nuclear test at Trinity.

In a 69-30 vote, the Senate passed S. 3853, which funds the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act — called RECA — past its June sunset date for another six years. The bill also increases the payment amount and broadens who can receive payments from the fund around the country.

Many “downwind” communities are excluded from compensation. The expansion bill would fold in for the first time thousands of New Mexicans from the area surrounding the Trinity Test Site, along with people from Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Guam. And instead of just a handful of counties where fallout fell, the entire states of Utah, Nevada and Arizona would be included.

In addition, the bill would significantly expand how many uranium workers could be covered by extending the time period past 1971 through 1990.

And the bill acknowledges communities where nuclear waste was dumped in Missouri, as well as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alaska.

The Missouri Independent: U.S. Senate approves compensation for St. Louis nuclear waste exposures

By Allison Kite

The legislation, sponsored by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, extends the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which is set to expire, and expands it to cover individuals who were exposed to the radioactive waste that remains scattered across the St. Louis region.

“The United States Senate has the opportunity to do its part — its small part — to continue to make this nation what it could be, what we promised it will be, and to put right things that have been wrong,” Hawley said just before senators voted 69-30 in favor of his bill.

The legislation, which is backed by President Joe Biden, would represent a federal recognition of — and apology for — St. Louis’ decades-long struggle with radioactive waste.

The St. Louis area was instrumental to the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II-era effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined uranium in downtown St. Louis during the war that was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a key breakthrough in the bomb’s development.

The Senate last summer voted 61-37 in favor of Hawley’s update to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. But the expansion was included as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act and stripped out by a conference committee of senators and representatives.

Hawley has criticized Senate Republican leaders, particularly Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, for allowing the expansion to be removed from the defense bill.

McConnell voted in favor of the bill senators passed Thursday, which was a standalone expansion of RECA. It still needs approval by the House of Representatives.

The White House announced its endorsement of the legislation Wednesday evening, saying in a statement that the administration looks forward to working with legislators to ensure funding for the program.

“The president believes we have a solemn obligation to address toxic exposure, especially among those who have been placed in harm’s way by the government’s actions,” the statement says.

Hawley said on a conference call Monday that the standalone RECA expansion bill was expected to cost only about one-third as much as the version senators approved last summer. (The Union of Concerned Scientists said the new cost estimate is less than half the original CBO estimate of $147 billion.) The legislation still covers the same geographic areas, he said.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has not released an independent analysis of the new legislation.

The standalone RECA legislation would offer coverage for individuals who were exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska or Kentucky and were diagnosed with multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and cancer of the thyroid, breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gallbladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary, bone, kidney or lung. It covers liver cancer as long as the patient doesn’t have cirrhosis or hepatitis B.

Surviving spouses and children could also seek compensation if the individual exposed to the radioactive waste has died.

The legislation senators considered last summer would have also covered diabetes, systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis or Hashimoto’s disease. Those conditions are not in the new version of the bill.

Under the bill, the fund for uranium workers and miners would be extended for six years. Last summer’s bill would have extended it by 19.

In urging his colleagues to vote for the bill, Hawley noted the federal government is now testing underneath homes in the St. Louis area to determine whether a subdivision built in the 1990s was constructed on top of radioactive contamination.

New Mexico

‘They scrapped us’: The Trinity downwinders and New Mexico mine workers who remain unrecognized

The world’s first downwinders keep up the fight, as more communities in the state punctured by uranium mines step forward.

By Danielle Prokop and Marisa Demarco, Source New Mexico

Those living nearest to the first nuclear blast in history have suffered for generations.

In New Mexico, Trinity Test site neighbors weren’t warned or evacuated before the U.S. government detonated the atomic bomb in 1945. The light was so bright it could be seen hundreds of miles away. Nearly half a million people resided within a 150-mile radius of the blast. Witnesses said ash rained down for days.

Cancers, diseases, early deaths, infant mortality and more have plagued people in New Mexico ever since the United States government set off the bomb in the Jornada del Muerto. But despite organizing and advocacy for well over a decade, they were neither recognized nor compensated.

Declassified documents show that in the days immediately following the blast, Manhattan Project planners realized the fallout radius was much larger and more dangerous than they’d expected. 

The impacts of the Atomic Age are broad in New Mexico, in Indigenous lands and throughout the region. Not only were many exposed to radiation during the Trinity Test in 1945, subsequent uranium mining for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons sickened and killed workers and their families.

Though the mines were mostly privately owned, the U.S. government was the customer paying for that uranium ore for decades after World War II. Hundreds of dormant and unaddressed mines remain like open wounds in the land, continuing harm to their neighbors.

Lawrence and Arlene Juanico never knew the land without uranium mines. Now, they are fighting for recognition of their impact on Laguna Pueblo. The Juanicos and other volunteers have worked to track diagnoses, and help people apply for benefits for family members. 

“No one was taking notes here,” Arlene Juanico said. “My partner and I are working to get an accurate amount of who was all affected by that.”

Arizona

‘We’re running out of time’: Program for Arizonans exposed to radiation set to expire in June

Survivors, politicians and Navajo Nation officials react after legislation to compensate more downwinders and miners fails in Congress.

By Shondiin Silversmith, Arizona Mirror

Marti Gerdes remembers living in Prescott as a kid and, every winter, she and her family would make snow ice cream, mixing milk and sugar with snow.

It was a treat she recalls having any time it snowed — except for one year when her mother told them they couldn’t have snow ice cream because “there’s something bad in the air.”

“I had no clue what she was talking about,” Gerdes said. 

Gerdes and her family lived in the northern Arizona city in the 1960s, at least 300 miles from the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. government tested nuclear weapons north of Las Vegas. 

Those tests sent radioactive fallout into the atmosphere, dispersed by clouds and precipitation in several states, including Arizona, government modeling and data have since shown, putting people at risk of serious illnesses for decades.

Over the years, several Arizona political leaders have advocated for broadening RECA-covered areas in Arizona. 

In July, U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., introduced the Downwinders Parity Act, which proposed updates to the RECA to include all the affected areas of Mohave County in Arizona and Clark County in Nevada. The bill would have also instructed the attorney general to outline for Congress what efforts will be made to educate and conduct outreach to those made newly eligible. The bill was co-sponsored by Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz. 

When the amendments failed to be included in the defense spending bill, Stanton said he would keep working to expand and extend the RECA. 

Utah

‘How much money are our lives worth?’: Utah downwinders call RECA expansion’s failure a betrayal

More people across the state could have been included in the U.S. program for those who may have been exposed to radiation during Cold War-era weapons testing

By Kyle Dunphey, Utah News Dispatch

People like Mary Dickson aren’t legally considered downwinders, the term used to describe those exposed to radiation during Cold War-era nuclear weapons testing in Nevada and New Mexico.

“Every time I say I’m a downwinder, I get ‘Oh, you grew up in St. George?’” said Dickson, of Salt Lake City, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1985. “It’s been really frustrating because for 30 years, I’ve been trying to raise awareness that no, it wasn’t just southern Utah, it went everywhere.

In Utah, the government’s radiation compensation program covered residents who lived in one of 10 counties —– Beaver, Garfield, Iron, Kane, Millard, Piute, San Juan, Sevier, Washington and Wayne —– for two consecutive years from 1951 to 1958, or during the summer of 1962. People who worked in uranium mines, mills or transporting ore in Utah from 1942 to 1971 were also eligible. 

With the proposed expansion, anyone in Utah diagnosed with certain cancers caused by nuclear testing would have been eligible for compensation. The measure also would have extended RECA, which is set to expire this June. The limited eligibility under the current bill has been a source of major frustration for health care providers like Becky Barlow, director of the Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program in St. George, which screens people exposed to radiation and helps them apply for compensation.

“Obviously radiation doesn’t stop at the county line,” said Barlow, whose program covers the lower half of Utah, and parts of Nevada and Arizona. Still, Barlow gets calls from all over the Mountain West from those who suspect they got sick from radiation, but who aren’t eligible under the federal program. 

Idaho

‘The fight isn’t over’: Idaho downwinders persist after Congress cuts compensation for them

Residents work to understand the ongoing impacts of nuclear test fallout and radiated clouds over Idaho decades ago.

By Mia Maldonado, Idaho Capital Sun

For nearly two decades, Tona Henderson collected newspaper articles, letters and photographs documenting who in the small town of Emmett was diagnosed with cancer, including her own family. The result is a wall in her home covered in pictures and pages displaying the names of community members who may have been exposed to lethal radiation during the country’s Cold War-era nuclear weapons testing program.

Henderson is the director of the Idaho Downwinders, a nonprofit representing people who lived in Idaho between 1951 to 1962 when the United States tested nuclear weapons aboveground in Nevada. She has been a leading advocate for the federal government to provide financial compensation to Idahoans impacted by that nuclear testing, which sent radiated clouds beyond Nevada’s boundaries to other neighboring states, including Idaho.

Gem County, along with Idaho’s Custer, Blaine and Lemhi counties, are among the top five in the U.S. that were most affected by fallout from Nevada nuclear tests in the mid-20th century, according to research by the National Cancer Institute.

American children at the time faced a high risk of developing thyroid cancer if they consumed milk from pastures where cows and goats grazed that were contaminated with iodine-131 — a radioactive element that is released into the environment during nuclear weapons testing.

Children, with smaller and still-developing thyroids, consumed more milk than adults, placing them at greater risk for cancer because of the concentration of iodine-131 in the thyroid gland.

Emmett is a tight-knit community, Henderson said. The population stands at about 8,000 people today, according to the latest census numbers. She used to run a doughnut shop in town, and customers, knowing her role in tracing diagnoses, would tell her about locals facing cancer. From 2004 to 2019, she said she recorded hundreds of instances of cancer diagnoses among Emmett residents who were present during the testing period. 

“That’s a lot of people for such a small town,” she said. “The fight isn’t over.”

Montana

‘What do we have to do?’: Fresh awareness of historic nuclear radiation in Montana neighborhoods

Fallout from weapons tests elsewhere could have had devastating health consequences in the state. Political support for recognition and compensation grows.

By Blair Miller, Daily Montanan

Growing up in Cut Bank, Montana, Patti Jo Ruegamer would spend most summer days going to the farm with her mother and father in Meriwether, about 25 miles west.

While her parents worked, she would go to the neighbor’s place, where she and other children drank fresh milk from the cows there, and would spend the day riding horses, swimming in the river or roaming the area.

The clouds drifting above them, though, may have contained radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons experiments performed by the U.S. government hundreds of miles away in the 1950s and ’60s.

A landmark study by the National Cancer Institute in 1997 showed that out of the top 25 counties in the United States that received the most radioactive byproduct from weapons tests in Nevada, 15 were in Montana. The report identified Montana’s Meagher County, home to White Sulphur Springs, as having received more radiation than any other county in the U.S.

Researchers found people in 15 Montana counties — Meagher, Broadwater, Beaverhead, Chouteau, Jefferson, Powell, Judith Basin, Madison, Fergus, Gallatin, Petroleum, Lewis and Clark, Blaine, Silver Bow and Deer Lodge — received estimated doses of iodine-131 to their thyroids between 9 and 16 rads.

But much of the rest of the state, including the Blackfeet Indian Reservation where Ruegamer lived, saw an estimated 6 to 9 rads, also among the highest in the United States.

Colorado

‘It lives in geologic time’: Nuclear contamination and health risks remain throughout Colorado

How the proposed expansion of a compensation program could impact the state, and the ongoing fight to make it happen.

By Chase Woodruff, Colorado Newsline

When Jane Thompson moved away from Uravan in western Colorado decades ago, it was still a quiet company town of about 1,000 residents, all of whom had some connection to the uranium mill owned by Union Carbide.

“It was a great place to grow up,” said Thompson, who helps keep the town’s legacy alive as president of the Rimrocker Historical Society. Her grandfather was a miner until retirement. Her father was, too, after her parents married.  “They were the second-to-last to leave Uravan when they sent everybody out.”

Uravan and the surviving mining towns nearby, including Nucla and Naturita, are just a few of the many places in Colorado where residents were caught up in — and in many cases bore the risks of — the Manhattan Project’s sprint for the bomb and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

Missouri

‘We got mad’: Years of pain after a childhood near radioactive Coldwater Creek in Missouri

RECA expansion could have helped with care for people suffering after living near contaminated waterways and sites in the state. A U.S. senator vows to keep fighting for it.

By Allison Kite, Missouri Independent

His parents bought a new house as thousands of other families flocked to the growing St. Louis suburbs. Winters’ neighborhood was full of other kids to play with. He spent almost every day splashing in a creek that ran near his home.

But Winters didn’t know at the time that the creek waters could be dangerous. The creek he was playing in was a small tributary to Coldwater Creek, which unbeknownst to him had been contaminated with radioactive waste left over from World War II. When Coldwater Creek flooded, its waters would back up in the creek near Winters’ family home.

The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the first nuclear bomb in the 1940s. Uranium for the Manhattan Project — the name given to the effort to develop the bomb — was refined in downtown St. Louis. The leftover radioactive waste has plagued the metro area ever since.

Private companies and government agencies with oversight of the radioactive material documented the possible dangers of the radioactive waste repeatedly but made little effort to keep it from spreading as suburbs sprung up around the airport and Coldwater Creek throughout the 1950s and 1960s. An investigation last summer by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press laid bare the way they dismissed the spreading contamination as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”

The reaction from federal and Missouri state lawmakers to "Atomic Fallout" was swift. Within days, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, pledged action, calling the investigation “devastating” and decrying the federal government’s “negligence." "This report confirms what we in the community have known for decades: that for the past 75 years, the federal government actively and knowingly treated St. Louis as a dumping ground for harmful and toxic radioactive waste," Bush said. 

In response, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced his office would “do everything in our power to hold the federal government accountable.” His office assigned several attorneys to the case and are still investigating. A state representative for the affected area convened a townhall, telling residents:

“Because of the journalists dropping these documents and finding out for us that our federal government knew this and never told the public for 50 years, it was huge. We were desensitized to the insanity."

The U.S. Senate, with bipartisan support, narrowly voted in late July to expand a program that compensates Americans who become ill because of exposure to radiation from the country’s development and testing of nuclear weapons and the buildup to the Cold War. President Joe Biden has signaled his support for the proposal and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm visited one of the contaminated sites during a visit to St. Louis. Senators attached the legislation to the annual defense bill; despite our reporting being described as a “bombshell,” it was ultimately stripped out of the final version of the legislation after the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost $147 billion over a decade. 

Still, legislators and affected families in seven Western states are vowing to reintroduce legislation to extend and expand the federal radiation compensation program in 2024 and a flurry of pre-filed bills in Missouri would increase state funding for a victims’ compensation fund, citing our reporting.

And, in perhaps the clearest sign that the federal government is taking ownership of the contamination at Coldwater Creek, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced in January that it would install signs along the waterway warning people of the risks — more than 70 years after workers first realized barrels of radioactive waste were left nearby.

A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

Billy Winters’ childhood in Florissant in the 1960s sounds enviable. 

His parents bought a new house as thousands of other families flocked to the growing St. Louis suburbs. Winters’ neighborhood was full of other kids to play with. He spent almost every day splashing in a creek that ran near his home.

But Winters didn’t know at the time that the creek waters could be dangerous. The creek he was playing in was a small tributary to Coldwater Creek, which unbeknownst to him had been contaminated with radioactive waste left over from World War II. When Coldwater Creek flooded, its waters would back up in the creek near Winters’ family home. 

His father worked for McDonnell Douglas, an aerospace manufacturer near the St. Louis airport. A 21-acre parcel on the airport property had become a dumping ground for radioactive waste produced downtown.

Winters, who has lived in Florida since 1983, only found out about the poisonous waste that had been dumped at sites all over St. Louis County a few months ago. But it could explain the myriad chronic illnesses he has developed over the years. His wife, Kathy Winters, said that the first 24 hours after they learned about the contamination felt “almost like a sense of relief.”

“This is it, maybe,” she said. “This is why Billy has all this stuff going on. And then, after the first 24 hours, we got mad.”

The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the first nuclear bomb in the 1940s. Uranium for the Manhattan Project — the name given to the effort to develop the bomb — was refined in downtown St. Louis. The leftover radioactive waste has plagued the metro area ever since.

‘I can’t describe how much pain I would be in’

Winters’ health struggles began in the early 2000s with an inexplicable high fever and headache. Despite a dayslong stay in the intensive care unit, doctors weren’t sure what was wrong. His lab reports seemed to point toward congestive heart failure. 

He never found out what caused the fever, but he got better.

Next, his joints started locking up, and a biopsy revealed sarcoidosis, a rare inflammatory disease that can cause fatigue, swollen lymph nodes and joint pain and swelling. At times, he said, he couldn’t walk to the end of his driveway. 

“I can’t describe how much pain I would be in,” Winters said.

A couple of years after that, Winters was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer that has been found at higher-than-expected rates in parts of St. Louis County. He also suffers from scleromyxedema and diabetes. 

The pain those diseases left Winters in forced him to retire in 2016. 

He can’t walk half a mile because his joints will start to hurt so badly.

“I had expected in my earlier years that I’d be a whole lot healthier when I retired,” Winters said. 

Radiation exposure is a possible risk factor for developing multiple myeloma, but the connection isn’t clear. Even so, programs for workers and residents exposed to Manhattan Project tests include multiple myeloma and diabetes as compensable diseases.

Billy’s illness has limited the Winters in what they can do in retirement. In the spring, they’ll visit Billy’s sister in Virginia and will get a powered wheelchair for the trip. Sometimes Billy feels guilty the two can’t be more active, but Kathy says they will manage, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.”

Proving and environmental exposure was the primary cause of someone’s illness — rather than family history, diet or other risk factors — is difficult. But for years, St. Louis-area residents have pointed to the remnant nuclear waste that contaminated huge swaths of north St. Louis County to explain rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other diseases.

History of contamination

Even before Winters’ family moved into their Florissant house, the radioactive waste from uranium refining operations in downtown St. Louis posed a health risk.

After the war, waste from Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis was trucked to the city’s airport, at times falling out of trucks only to be picked up by a worker with a shovel and broom. For years, the waste was left in the open on the north side of the airport property, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, where wind and rainwater dispersed it. 

Winters’ father worked nearby and died in the 1990s from liver cancer.

In 1949, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium for the Manhattan Project, discovered radioactive waste in deteriorating steel drums at the airport risked leaking into Coldwater Creek, according to an internal memo.

Private companies and government agencies with oversight of the radioactive material documented the possible dangers of the radioactive waste repeatedly but made little effort to keep it from spreading as suburbs sprung up around the airport and Coldwater Creek throughout the 1950s and 1960s. An investigation last summer by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press laid bare the way they dismissed the spreading contamination as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”

While at the airport, the waste — a 29-foot-tall mound including almost 200 tons of uranium — produced “some minor contamination to Coldwater Creek,” according to a report by the Atomic Energy Commission that claimed it was “well within permissible and acceptable limits.”

After a few years, the waste was sold to a private company to be further processed to extract valuable metals — such as copper, nickel or cobalt — and moved up the road to Latty Avenue in Hazelwood. It once again sat exposed to the elements and adjacent to Coldwater Creek.

Despite the move, soil and drainage ditches at the airport remained contaminated for decades until crews excavated more than 600,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and scrap material. Remediation at the site wrapped up in 2007.

The Atomic Energy Commission initially planned to allow whatever was left after processing at Latty Avenue to be dumped in a quarry in Weldon Spring but reversed course after the U.S. Geological Survey warned it would likely contaminate the Missouri River just above the intakes for St. Louis County and St. Louis City’s drinking water. 

The Cotter Corp., which owned the waste at Latty Avenue, eventually dumped it in 1973 at the West Lake Landfill, where it remains to this day.

The Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of planning an excavation and cleanup at the landfill but didn’t discover the true extent of the waste until earlier this year. 

For almost 50 years, federal agencies relied on a reading taken from a helicopter to determine where in the landfill the radioactive material had been dumped. 

But in May, the EPA announced the waste was spread throughout the landfill, not confined to two specific portions, as officials had long maintained. In some areas of the property, the waste was at the surface. In other locations, it was found deep underground. 

The agency said the health risk “remains unchanged” and that the site doesn’t pose a threat to nearby residents at this time.

Still no compensation 

After the investigation was published this summer, lawmakers quickly pledged to take action to support people who have been exposed to nuclear waste.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, joined senators from the Southwest and sponsored an expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which currently covers only some residents who were exposed to atomic bomb testing from 1945 to 1962 and developed any of a list of serious illnesses.

Expanding the program would open up coverage to more “downwinders,” a term for people exposed to airborne radiation from atomic bombs detonated as tests, in Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana and Guam and expand coverage to more regions in Arizona, Nevada and Utah. Missouri residents exposed to waste from the Manhattan Project would also be eligible.

Of particular significance, it would extend coverage to the Navajo Nation, one of the tribal areas most affected from the first atomic bomb testing in 1945. 

Since the radiation program first was created in the 1990s, more than 54,000 claims totaling about $2.6 billion have been approved. The program does not require claimants to prove their illnesses were caused by radiation, which is difficult to do, but rather presumes a connection if a sickened individual lived in a covered area at a time they could have been exposed. 

In Missouri, the expansion would have covered individuals who lived in one of 20 ZIP codes for at least two years after 1949. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the RECA expansion would cost $147.1 billion over 10 years. Missouri’s portion would be $3.7 billion of that.

The proposal was attached in the Senate to the National Defense Authorization Act with bipartisan support, and President Joe Biden signaled his support for it.

But the legislation was stripped from the NDAA in a conference committee where members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate met to work out differences in their versions of the bill.

Hawley decried that decision, calling it an “injustice,” but he said “the fight is not over.”

“I will come to this floor as long as it takes,” Hawley said on the Senate floor last month. “I will introduce this bill as long as it takes. I will force amendment votes as long as it takes until we compensate the people of this nation who have sacrificed for this nation.” 

Winters’ illnesses would have entitled him to compensation under the expansion. 

Multiple myeloma is one of the diseases covered by the bill, and he grew up in one of the affected ZIP codes. 

For uranium miners, millers and transporters, RECA currently provides a one-time lump sum of $100,000. People who were onsite at weapons tests can get $75,000, and those who lived downwind of a test site in Nevada can get $50,000. Under the proposed expansion, onsite participants and downwinders would have received $150,000. 

Billy and Kathy Winters are still hopeful the compensation program might come to fruition. Kathy said they would use the money if her husband’s illness progressed to the point he needed to go to an assisted living home. 

With his medical conditions, Billy doesn’t qualify for long-term care insurance policies, Kathy said, so they’d be fully responsible for the cost. 

“That money won’t go far,” Kathy said, “but every little bit would help.”

Coldwater Creek runs by the St. Louis airport and through Florissant and Hazelwood before flowing into the Missouri River. The creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

More than 70 years after workers first realized barrels of radioactive waste risked contaminating Coldwater Creek, the federal government has started work to put up signs warning residents.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement Monday that it was working with the Environmental Protection Agency to add signs along the creek to help it monitor areas “that may pose a risk if disturbed.”

Coldwater Creek has been contaminated for decades with radioactive waste left over from the World War II-era effort to build an atomic bomb. But though the creek winds through some of St. Louis’ busiest suburbs and past public parks and schools, the federal government had resisted calls to post signs warning visitors of the contamination.

“This is decades of potential exposure that could have been prevented that they drug their feet on,” said Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, an organization formed to advocate for communities affected by St. Louis-area radioactive waste.

Despite the delays, Chapman said she’s thankful that the signs are finally going to be installed. 

The St. Louis area has long struggled with a radioactive waste problem. Uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the first atomic bomb, was refined in downtown St. Louis.

After World War II, radioactive waste left over from those efforts was trucked to the St. Louis airport and dumped — some on the open ground and some in barrels — next to Coldwater Creek. As early as 1949, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, the company that refined uranium for the federal government, was aware the waste could escape deteriorating barrels and enter the creek.

The waste was later sold and moved to a property in Hazelwood where it once again sat in the open next to Coldwater Creek. In the 1970s, the remaining waste that couldn’t be processed to extract valuable metals was transported to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton and dumped there illegally. It’s still there today. 

Coldwater Creek is expected to be cleaned up by 2038 — 89 years after Mallinckrodt realized the waste could pose a risk to the creek.

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, whose district includes all of St. Louis City and much of northern St. Louis County, introduced legislation in 2022 that would have required the Army Corps to install signs around Coldwater Creek. In a statement Monday, Bush said she was proud her office was working with the Army Corps and EPA to get the signs posted.

“North County residents have been unknowingly living and raising their families amongst radioactive contamination dumped by the federal government for years,” Bush said.

Bush said the community deserves to be “made whole,” which starts by “ensuring residents are aware of the existence of any environmental harms in our own backyard.” 

While the Army Corps, which has overseen the sites since the late 1990s, said the remaining contaminated sites surrounding Coldwater Creek only pose a risk if they’re disturbed, in previous decades exposure to the creek’s waters may have raised the risk of cancer for St. Louis residents. 

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 2019 that children and adults who played in or near Coldwater Creek or lived in its floodplain between the 1960s and 1990s may have been exposed to radioactive materials that raise the risk of certain cancers. The agency — part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — recommended signs be placed along the creek to warn residents of the potential exposure risk.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Army Corps said at the time doing so wasn’t its role.

The Army Corps said there was nothing specific that caused the agency to change its mind on installing signs. The decision was “driven by our commitment to continuous improvement,” George Stringham, a spokesman for the Army Corps, said in an email. 

Stringham said the Army Corps would “continue to prioritize the health and safety of the community.”

“We are adding signage to help inform the community and let them know where to go to for accurate information as well as provide a resource for anyone that needs to dig in areas near Coldwater Creek that may need support from our office,” Stringham said. 

The Army Corps doesn’t yet have details to share regarding the number of signs and locations along the creek where they would be posted.

The EPA said the decision to add the signs “does not reflect a new or increased level of concern about the human health risk.”

The announcement comes at a time of renewed focus on St. Louis’ radioactive waste problem. Bush and U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley have sought compensation for residents sickened because of exposure to radioactive waste, and an investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that private companies and government agencies downplayed the risks associated with the contamination for decades .

Andy Quinones, senior communications manager for the city of Florissant, said the Army Corps had requested to put signs in several of the city’s parks that sit along the creek.

“I’m glad,” Quinones said, “that they are taking the initiative to start doing a better job of informing the public.”

Coldwater Creek runs by the St. Louis airport and through Florissant and Hazelwood before flowing into the Missouri River. The creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Cleaning up Coldwater Creek and other radioactive waste sites in St. Louis County will cost more than twice what federal officials thought six years ago, a new federal report finds. 

A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released Tuesday finds the government’s financial liability at the sites ballooned from $177 million in 2016 to $406 million last year, primarily because of additional contamination that forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expand the investigation and cleanup to include the creek’s 10-year floodplain. 

The report takes to task the Army Corps, which is overseeing the cleanup of Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River that has been contaminated for decades by radioactive waste leftover from the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II. 

GAO auditors found the Army Corps didn’t sufficiently meet several best management practices, which could help prevent cost overruns or identify risks with cleanup projects. The Army Corps largely agreed with the findings of the report. 

Tuesday’s report follows the GAO’s earlier findings that the U.S. government’s environmental liabilities pose a high risk. 

“In our most recent high-risk list update, we found that departments and agencies, including the Department of Defense, need to take additional steps to monitor, report on and better understand their environmental liabilities,” the report says. 

The GAO’s report focuses on sites within the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, which was created in the 1970s to clean up areas contaminated in the course of the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II nuclear weapons program.

A monthslong investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press published earlier this year found radioactive waste was known to pose a threat to people living near Coldwater Creek as early as 1949, but federal officials repeatedly wrote potential risks off as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”

St. Louis was pivotal to the Manhattan Project, resulting in a decades-long radioactive contamination problem. Uranium was refined in downtown St. Louis during the war, contaminating surrounding properties.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

After the war, waste from the downtown site was trucked to St. Louis County, sometimes spilling along the way, and dumped at the airport. Decaying barrels released radioactive waste into Coldwater Creek, and despite acknowledging the risk of contamination, the private company that produced the waste thought it was too dangerous for workers to put the material in new barrels.

Eventually, the waste was sold to another private company and moved to a property on Latty Avenue, also adjacent to Coldwater Creek. The material was stored in the open where it could continue to contaminate the creek. 

The Cotter Corp., which purchased the waste to extract valuable metals, dried and shipped most of it to its facility in Colorado before dumping the rest in the West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. 

The Army Corps has authority through FUSRAP over the downtown, Coldwater Creek, airport and Latty Avenue sites, but cleanup of the landfill is being overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, requested the GAO investigate the Army Corps stewardship of the sites in 2021. She noted in a statement the report found that, compared to other FUSRAP sites, the St. Louis sites are near some of the most underserved communities.

“The federal government bears full responsibility for ensuring that this waste is expeditiously cleaned up and that all those harmed are made whole,” Bush said.

The Army Corps’ liability at the downtown site where Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined uranium during World War II also rose precipitously. 

The GAO report evaluated the cleanup efforts and costs at 19 FUSRAP sites spread across eight states, totaling $2.6 billion in environmental liabilities. Four of those sites make up about 75% of that total amount: the North St. Louis County sites; the Niagara Falls Storage Site in New York; the Shallow Land Disposal Area, in Parks Township, Pa., outside Pittsburgh; and Guterl Specialty Steel, also in Niagara County, N.Y. 

These four sites generally require complex cleanup work or cover large areas; for example, the Niagara Falls Storage Site has several types of buried radioactive waste that will be exhumed, packaged and shipped to an offsite location, officials say. In addition, eight of the 19 sites are within or adjacent to underserved racial or ethnic populations or have high rates of poverty compared with the rest of the county where they are located. 

All told, the liability estimate for all 19 sites has grown by nearly $1 billion, or roughly 63%, over the past seven years, the GAO found.

Difficult cleanups

For years, contaminated soil at the downtown site wasn’t accessible to the Army Corps, the report says, because it was under a building that was in use by the property owner. The owner of the site decided to grant access, and the Corps found it had additional cleanup work to do, increasing the liability for the site from $17 million to $96 million within a year. 

The GAO also found the Army Corps sites in St. Louis city and county are all situated in underserved communities. 

While 53% of the residents of St. Louis are from underserved racial or ethnic groups, the report says, 80% of individuals near the downtown Mallinckrodt site are. The area’s poverty rate is 1.5 times higher than the rest of the city. 

In St. Louis County, 29% of residents are from underserved groups compared to 63% of residents near the radioactive sites. Like downtown, the area suffers from a poverty rate 1.5 times the rest of the county. 

The Government Accountability Office found the Army Corps could benefit from better management practices, including a risk management program. 

While Army Corps conducts risk management operations on individual projects, the GAO found it doesn’t have a risk management plan for the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program as a whole. Doing so could help it more efficiently allocate resources, the report says. 

“Furthermore, better risk management could help the Corps plan for uncertainties, such as the discovery of more contamination requiring cleanup, that may affect future environmental liability,” the GAO says. 

The report says a risk management program could also identify potential opportunities affecting the entire program. The report gives, as an example, the $182 million the Army Corps received in appropriations but hasn’t spent because of its limited staffing. 

In a response included in the report, the U.S. Department of Defense largely concurred with the GAO’s recommendations and said it would work with the Army to implement several management practices.

Bush said the report shows the Army Corps is “leaving money on the table as a result of mismanagement” and needs to build trust and improve communication with the community.

“This report validates concerns people have been raising for years,” Bush said. “The Corps must heed their recommendations without delay.”

Congressman Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a statement that the long delay in remediating Manhattan Project sites is “unconscionable.” 

“Decades after the federal government generated large amounts of toxic nuclear waste as a result of nuclear weapons production,” Raskin said, “America’s most underserved communities still bear the brunt of deadly contamination from one of the most significant environmental disasters in our nation’s history.” 

President Joe Biden delivers remarks in New Mexico on Wednesday. Biden expressed support for expanding a program to compensate people exposed to radiation from weapons production and testing to Missouri and New Mexico, among other states (Gino Gutierrez/Source NM).

President Joe Biden on Wednesday said he’s interested in expanding a federal program to compensate people who have gotten sick because of the country’s nuclear weapons development and testing programs. 

The Associated Press reported Biden told a crowd in New Mexico he was ”prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of.” The comment came a day after the president’s energy secretary stopped short of voicing support for the measure during a trip to St. Louis.

An expansion could open up compensation to St. Louis-area residents who have been exposed to radiological contamination left over from World War II. Some current and former St. Louis County residents face higher cancer risks because they unknowingly played in a creek contaminated by radioactive waste growing up.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since 1990, the federal government has offered compensation to people who processed uranium or lived near weapons production and test sites and have developed illnesses associated with exposure to radiation.

But even though the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico in 1945, residents of the state who lived downwind of the test site weren’t covered. Neither were St. Louis-area residents who were exposed to radioactive waste left over from uranium refining during the development of the bomb.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

The U.S. Senate voted narrowly last month to expand the program, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, to New Mexico and Missouri residents as well as residents of Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Guam. It would also expand coverage in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, where “downwinders” in certain areas are already covered. Senators attached the legislation to the National Defense Authorization Act, which still needs approval by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-New Mexico, urged support for the expansion. 

“For decades — decades — they told the people of St. Louis, ‘No problem. There’s no problem here,’” Hawley said on the Senate floor last month. “Meanwhile, children were dying of cancer.” 

In a news release Thursday, Hawley said he was glad the president endorsed the legislation.

“Compensating victims of government-caused nuclear contamination and negligence should not be a partisan issue,” Hawley said. “It’s about justice.” 

Hawley said “we also must hear from the Biden Administration about their next steps to support victims in the St. Louis area and beyond.”

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, said in a statement that she has long believed responsibility for the nuclear waste cleanup should fall to the federal government. She was glad to hear Biden’s support of expanding the compensation program.

Bush also met with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Tuesday to convey the community’s concerns about radioactive waste sites.

“I believe we are closer now than ever to expediting this cleanup, expediting testing and restoring health, safety and trust back in our community,” Bush said.

U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Missouri, said in a statement that she was supportive of Hawley and Lujan’s amendment and hoped a House-Senate conference committee keeps it in the final version of the bill. 

“The St. Louis area was significantly impacted by our country’s WWII nuclear program, and I will continue to advocate for those affected by it,” Wagner said. 

On Tuesday, Granholm visited St. Louis to tout projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Asked about expanding the compensation program in the defense bill, Granholm wouldn’t commit. 

“I can’t speak for the administration on that particular piece because I just don’t know the answer,” Granholm told reporters, “but it certainly is something worth looking at for sure to bring justice to the families that have been affected.” 

To this day, St. Louis struggles with radioactive contamination left behind from the World War II-era Manhattan Project.

Uranium was processed in downtown St. Louis for use in development of the bomb. After the war, it was trucked to several sites in St. Louis County where it contaminated property at the airport and seeped into Coldwater Creek. In the 1970s, remaining nuclear waste that couldn’t be processed to extract valuable metals was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and illegally dumped. It remains there today.

After World War II, uranium was still processed in St. Charles County, and a chemical plant and open ponds of radioactive waste remained in Weldon Spring for years. 

The site was remediated in the early 2000s, but groundwater contamination at the site is not improving fast enough, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, left, and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, to her right, take questions from reporters during the secretary's visit to St. Louis. Granholm would not commit to supporting federal legislation to offer compensation to St. Louis-area residents exposed to radioactive waste. (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent)

ST. LOUIS — Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a visit to Missouri on Tuesday would not commit to supporting bipartisan legislation meant to compensate people who have been exposed to radioactive material from U.S. weapons development and production.

“I can’t speak for the administration on that particular piece because I just don’t know the answer,” Granholm told reporters, “but it certainly is something worth looking at for sure to bring justice to the families that have been affected.” 

Granholm was in St. Louis to tout projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a $400 million battery materials manufacturing facility. Her visit comes as her agency faces calls from activists and elected officials to clean up sites contaminated decades ago with nuclear waste from the World War II-era Manhattan Project.

In her remarks, Granholm didn’t mention the region’s struggle with radioactive waste. But she took questions on the subject. Later in the day, she visited a contaminated site in St. Charles County with U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis.

“There is no doubt that we have to clean up these sites,” Granholm said, “and there’s no doubt that the testing and remediation is ongoing now…We’ve got to make sure that people feel safe.”

The St. Louis area was pivotal to the development of the first atomic bomb, and the Manhattan Project casts a long shadow over the region. Sites where uranium was processed or stored have been contaminated for decades, leading to higher cancer risks in some areas.

The issue has been covered extensively over the years, but a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that federal officials and private companies either downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of radioactive contamination in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, allowing generations of families to be exposed.

The findings prompted renewed calls for an end to the decades-long environmental disaster.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, called on Granholm to tour the sites and sent a list of questions to her office last month. 

“The allegations in this report demand answers,” Hawley wrote, referencing the reporting of The Independent, MuckRock and the AP. “The people of St. Louis have a right to know the full extent of radioactive contamination in their community.”

Five revelations about St. Louis’ history with radioactive waste

A bipartisan group of senators attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would expand an existing program to offer compensation to residents who have become ill because of possible exposure to radioactive waste. 

The legislation, which still faces a vote in the House of Representatives, would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to Missouri and long-overlooked communities downwind of where nuclear weapons were tested during World War II.

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, has been advocating for communities around the West Lake Landfill, a contaminated site in Bridgeton, for a decade.

Chapman believes Granholm’s predecessors at the U.S. Department of Energy and earlier nuclear regulators deceived Missouri. She had hoped to discuss the issue with the secretary during her visit, but she was unable to arrange a meeting. 

“To have her be so close to us and in town,” she said, “it is a really hard thing.”

She added: “There are people here who have just been through absolute tragedies in their family because of the agency she heads and what they did.”

Bush said in an interview Tuesday evening that Granholm wasn’t able to meet with residents who lived near contaminated sites or who had been harmed by nuclear waste because of her tight schedule.

But Bush met with advocates on Monday so she could convey their concerns to the secretary on Tuesday. Granholm was familiar with the sites and news findings about the Department of Energy’s earlier failures, Bush said.

She couldn’t share any commitments Granholm had made to take action at the sites, but Bush said the secretary was receptive to the community’s concerns. Bush said she and Granholm talked about how urgently the sites need remediation.

“While we’re waiting for this cleanup to be completed…people are still dying…people are still getting sick,” Bush said, adding: “It’s a matter of life and death.”

In the St. Louis area, contamination from the Manhattan Project lingered in numerous sites for decades. 

After the war, waste from uranium processing efforts in downtown was trucked to the airport where it sat, exposed to the elements, for years. Wind and rainwater eroded the site, and the waste contaminated Coldwater Creek, which winds through busy northern St. Louis County suburbs.

From there, it was transported to a property in Hazelwood, also adjacent to the creek. When the waste was removed, the site wasn’t fully decontaminated.

Waste left at the Hazelwood site that couldn’t be further processed to extract valuable metals was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and illegally dumped there in 1973. It remains there today.

Uranium was also processed at a separate site in Weldon Spring during the Cold War. Though production ended in the 1960s, the site wasn’t cleaned up for more than 30 years. 

Still, contamination remains in the groundwater around the site. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources wrote to the Department of Energy in 2021 that uranium concentrations in the groundwater weren’t improving.

This story has been updated. 

(Illustration by Tyler Gross)

One of Missouri’s top Democratic officials asked the governor on Monday to call a special legislative session in response to news reports of the “unacceptable mismanagement” of radioactive waste in the St. Louis area. 

“The problems related with this waste have festered for nearly 80 years,” House Minority Leader Crystal Quade said in a letter to Gov. Mike Parson. “It is well past time for us to begin the long process of finally resolving them for the sake of all Missourians.”

But according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Parson rejected the request. Parson’s spokesman Johnathan Shiflett told the Post-Dispatch “there are no plans for a special session at this time.”

“Governor Parson is concerned for the impacted communities, but this issue was caused by the federal government and should be fixed by the federal government,” Shiflett said. Shiflett didn’t return requests for comment from The Missouri Independent.

Quade, D-Springfield, is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2024. Her comments follow a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press into radioactive contamination still lingering from World War II.

Uranium for the first atomic bomb was processed in downtown St. Louis, and radioactive waste was trucked across the region. Contamination from the effort still lingers in Weldon Spring, Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill. 

The newsrooms found that, for decades, federal officials and private companies either downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of radioactive contamination in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, allowing generations of families to be exposed.

Radioactive contamination in the St. Louis area has been extensively covered over the years, but new federal documents showed the way the federal government knew in the years after World War II that radioactive waste posed a threat to the environment and wrote off the contamination as “low-level” or “minor,” even as young families flocked to burgeoning suburbs surrounded by nuclear waste.

In a letter dated Monday, Quade asked Parson, a Republican, to call a special legislative session to appropriate money to a state program so the Missouri Department of Natural Resources can investigate areas of radioactive waste under a law passed in 2018.

Over the years, the state department has routinely pushed the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy for more extensive sampling and cleanup of radioactive waste, which Quade applauded. 

“However, there is more that can and must be done by the state to protect the health and safety of our citizens,” Quade wrote in the letter.

According to the letter, the state can develop its own sampling and analysis plan, including sampling residents’ homes if they agree. 

Parson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, who grew up in the area and, as a teen, swam in a quarry she didn’t know was contaminated in Weldon Spring, has researched the issue extensively. She led efforts this spring to pass a resolution to require the state’s attorney general to seek compensation for residents who have become ill from exposure to radioactive waste.

The resolution passed the House but did not receive a Senate vote.

Byrnes said she and other elected officials and activists from the area need the help of anyone who wants to be involved, regardless of party. But Byrnes and a Missouri Senate Republican leader questioned Quade’s motivations as she campaigns for governor.

Byrnes said the area needs support, “not political moves during an election.” 

“Any politician that wants to stand in the blood of my community for a moment in the spotlight will be called out,” Byrnes said. 

Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL, which advocates for the community around the West Lake landfill in Bridgeton, said she’d like to see elected officials in Missouri put pressure on the Department of Energy to take responsibility for the contamination.

“I don’t think the state necessarily needs to do its own investigation because I think the Department of Energy’s numbers and documents are out there that say how bad this is,” Chapman said.

State Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin, R-Shelbina, said she thought there was likely a “more methodical way” to approach the issue. She said there’s a lot of work to be done talking to affected parties and researching before calling a special session, which would cost a lot of money.

“I think people sometimes tend to call for a special session prematurely,” O’Laughlin said. “I’m not going to say that she’s doing that, but she is running for governor and it is a way to kind of get yourself out there in the headline.”

Byrnes said she has been in contact since the spring with the offices of U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, and Rep. Cori Bush, a St. Louis Democrat. 

Last week, Hawley successfully attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would expand a federal program that offers compensation to people who have become ill after exposure to radioactive waste from the federal government’s weapons development and testing programs. 

Under the amendment, St. Louis-area residents would be eligible for compensation. It also expands coverage to the long-overlooked “downwinders” in New Mexico, and affected residents in a handful of other states and regions, who developed cancers and other illnesses from exposure to the testing of the first atomic bombs. 

An undated photo from the 1980s, of two teenagers stepping on rocks and wooden planks on Coldwater Creek. The photo is from a scrapbook kept by Sandy Delcoure, who lived on Willow Creek in Florissant and donated the scrapbook to the Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

The U.S. Senate voted narrowly Thursday in favor of expanding a program that compensates Americans who become ill because of exposure to radiation from the country’s development and testing of nuclear weapons to cover Missourians.

The proposal, offered by Sen. Josh Hawley, was attached as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes funding levels and sets policy for the Department of Defense. The bill itself still faces a Senate vote and agreement by the U.S. House of Representatives.

“It is about basic justice — compensating the victims of the federal government’s negligence,” Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said on the Senate floor.

The Senate vote comes on the heels of a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press, which found that private companies and the federal government repeatedly downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of the contamination from the development of the first atomic bomb.

“This is nothing short of a miracle,” said Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, which has advocated for cleanup of nuclear waste for a decade. Chapman lauded Hawley during a press call following the vote.

The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the bomb during World War II. Workers in downtown St. Louis processed uranium that was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago, a major breakthrough of the Manhattan Project.

The development of the bomb still casts a shadow over the region almost 80 years later. Radioactive waste contaminated public lakes and creeks where residents fish and swim. It polluted groundwater and park land. Several sites in St. Louis County still aren’t cleaned up.

Decades later, many St. Louis-area residents believe the radioactive waste is to blame for their rare cancers and autoimmune disorders.

“For decades — decades — they told the people of St. Louis, ‘No problem. There’s no problem here,’” Hawley said. “Meanwhile, children were dying of cancer.” 

The program Hawley seeks to amend, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, already covers uranium miners and millers as well as those who were onsite and some who lived downwind when nuclear weapons were tested in the Southwest.

Hawley’s amendment would expand the program to cover St. Louis-area residents who develop certain illnesses associated with radiation exposure. 

It’s nearly impossible to know with certainty whether a person’s illness stems from exposure to radioactive waste. Expanding the compensation law would make residents eligible so long as they lived in the area during a particular window and developed a covered illness.

U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who had yet to speak publicly on the recent reports, grew up near a contaminated site in Bridgeton and backed Hawley’s bill. He said he was proud to support the residents who had been harmed.

“Nothing will make them whole, but this is a step,” Schmitt said.

The amendment needed 60 votes to pass. It passed 61-37 without support from Republican leadership.

Amending the act would also expand coverage, for the first time, to residents of New Mexico.

Even though the first atomic bombs were constructed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and tested at Alamogordo Bombing Range, civilians weren’t eligible for compensation as “downwinders,” or residents who lived downwind of the testing site. That status was granted to residents in certain parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah. 

The amendment would also expand the law to cover Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Guam and expand coverage to remaining parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, cosponsored the amendment with Hawley. He asked the Senate to “show these victims compassion, understand their pain and suffering so that they know it’s not gone unnoticed.” 

Luján said residents with cancers, asthma and heart problems had traveled to Washington to beg the federal government to expand coverage. 

“A few years ago, an elder from the Navajo Nation traveled here to testify, and she looked us all in the eye and she asked a simple question: ‘Are you waiting for us all to die for the problem to go away?’” Luján said. 

A legacy of contamination

Following World War II, nuclear waste from uranium processing was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties.

For years, it sat in the open at the St. Louis airport where wind and rain dispersed it. As early as 1949, the company that refined the uranium realized highly radioactive waste sitting in deteriorated drums could pose a threat to Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River that winds through what are now busy suburbs.

While sampling conducted for the federal government showed radioactive waste was washing into Coldwater Creek, the public wouldn’t find that out for years.

Countless St. Louis County residents grew up swimming, riding bikes and catching tadpoles in Coldwater Creek. A federal health study shows they now face an increased risk of cancer.

Waste was moved again from the airport to a property in Hazelwood where it continued to pollute Coldwater Creek.

And in 1973, a private company that processed the waste to extract valuable metals dumped the rest at the West Lake landfill where it remains today.

Nuclear waste also sat in the open at a plant in Weldon Spring. The buildings were demolished and buried, along with the radioactive residue, at the site. But state regulators have raised concerns over the years that the groundwater remains polluted.

The sites have come under scrutiny in recent years by environmental activists and state lawmakers.

State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, said it was “huge to be heard” after decades of inaction on St. Louis radioactive waste. 

“We have a lot of parents who’ve lost children. Children have lost their parents, and unfortunately, we have some families where mom, dad and all of the siblings have died,” Byrnes said. “That is our reality. So I thank you because tonight is so amazing.”

Hawley has extended invitations to U.S. Department of Energy officials to visit St. Louis, which he said has gone unanswered along with requests for additional testing for radioactive materials.

He said it’s “absolutely sickening after what this region has been through and these folks have been through to have the government unwilling to even engage on this issue.”

The amendment was adopted without support from Senate Republican leadership, meaning it could face an uphill climb for final passage. Hawley said he would have to work hard to ensure the language stays in the bill, but he said once someone learns the facts about what happened to St. Louis-area residents, it’s hard to vote no.

“We got this done against all odds today,” Hawley said. “Will there be tough lifts ahead? Yes, there will be — absolutely there will be — and I don’t downplay those for a moment.” 

This article has been updated since it was initially published.

A plaque on top of a radioactive containment cell acknowledges the communities displaced by the federal government's efforts to build weapons in St. Charles County (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

“Atomic Fallout” is a historical re-investigation of the St. Louis region’s 75-year history with nuclear waste, conducted by a consortium of newsrooms, including The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press. It relies on thousands of pages of federal government documents, most of which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Many of the documents have either been newly-declassified or never before reviewed.

To better understand the records, journalists from different organizations spent the past six months researching and annotating them. We consulted experts to analyze the government memos and testing results anew, to see if the environmental and radioactivity testing done decades ago could be seen and understood in a different, modern light. We also tried to answer a question that Missouri state agencies, elected officials and local residents repeatedly asked government agencies and private companies, with little success:

What did the federal government and private companies know about the potential risks to public health posed by the nuclear waste and when?

What we found shows, for the first time, that Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which processed uranium in the St. Louis area for the Manhattan Project, and government agencies it contracted with, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the precursor to the Department of Energy, knew as far back as 1949 that Coldwater Creek could be contaminated by radioactive waste flowing from deteriorating steel drums.

We found multiple points in time — in the 1960s, 70s and 80s — where federal agencies knew about spreading contamination into soil, groundwater and a creek neighborhood children played in and wrote it off as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”

And, with the passage of time and the improved knowledge about the effects of thorium, radium and other nuclear residues on human health, experts helped us piece together how bad the ionizing radiation was for the environment and the people who lived near it, and how it could have played a role in the documented increase in cancers in the surrounding areas.

We found similar downplaying of human health and environmental risk at nearby nuclear waste sites, including the West Lake Landfill and Weldon Spring.

Where the documents came from and how we used them

Many of the government documents we obtained were not declassified until the 2000s and, in the absence of draft and final reports from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, many of the details were left out of the public record.

That void has, at times, fed outsized public concern. Definitively linking cancer to radiation exposure, known as proving a “cancer cluster,” is notoriously difficult, experts told us, and the data from both the West Lake Landfill and the runoff from Coldwater Creek doesn’t suggest a current public health threat. Still, a 2019 federal study by the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found elevated rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers as well as leukemia in the area in recent decades. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer rates are also higher.

The Freedom of Information Act requests were filed by Lucas Hixson, a nuclear researcher who has written extensively on the Chernobyl disaster and co-founded the Clean Futures Fund, a nonprofit that raises awareness and provides support for communities affected by industrial accidents and long-term remedial activities. In 2015 and 2016, with the help of a law firm, Hixson requested documents related to the West Lake Landfill and Coldwater Creek from a host of government agencies.

The documents produced through Hixson’s requests totaled more than 29,000 pages, released in batches between 2017 and 2020. Some were duplicative and others were fairly mundane so Hixson flagged hundreds of documents that, in his opinion, were notable and shared them with a number of advocacy groups, including Just Moms STL. But we wanted to go a step further, and see what the government had produced in total. So we re-requested the FOIAs from the agencies and downloaded the full document sets.

Many carried “Classified” markings and, in turn, declassification stamps, including dates they were declassified and the reason they were kept from public view in the first place, such as the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

A group of journalists spent weeks carefully reading through the documents while using DocumentCloud to categorize different types of documents, record the date of the document and flag the types of information the document contained. The goal of this massive undertaking of reading and annotating was to help reporters connect the dots between documents across decades of history. Attaching more information onto each document in DocumentCloud then allowed reporters to sort and filter documents quickly.

This system also enabled reporters to take that information out of DocumentCloud using [an Add-On on for scraping metadata](https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Buser%3Adillon-bergin-104081#add-ons/cam-garrison/documentcloud-metadata-grabber) on DocumentCloud and organize the documents into a timeline.

Reporters did not use any type of AI or machine learning assistance given the deeply technical and nuanced nature of many of the records. They added relevant tags to each record along with notes and questions to pose to experts.

Asking experts, the public and fellow journalists for help

MuckRock and The Missouri Independent then sent some of the more notable documents, including those that included air, soil and water readings, to a group of experts, some with deep connections to the St. Louis nuclear waste story and others who had only read about it in passing.

Robert Criss and Lee Sobotka are longtime professors from Washington University in St. Louis; Criss is a geologist and Sobotka is a physicist and both are well versed in the minutiae of the West Lake Landfill and the nuclear waste left there. Criss has oftentimes been fiercely critical of the federal government while Sobotka has cautioned that federal agencies weren’t necessarily acting with intentional malice and the current health risks were low.

Still, after reviewing the documents for our project, they largely came to the conclusion: The West Lake Landfill and the radioactive waste running off into Coldwater Creek is an environmental and public health flashpoint that will require close attention for generations to come. And the government made repeated mistakes in how they handled that waste and what they told the public.

We launched a public callout to collect stories from those who lived near Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill. We heard from dozens of current and former residents of Florissant and Hazelwood, many of whom said they never knew about radioactive waste that had been dumped nearby.

We also attended an important community meeting held in May between residents and the Environmental Protection Agency, which, since 1995, has overseen the West Lake Landfill as a federally-designated Superfund site. Handouts included and a way for residents to fill out a form about their experiences.

From those submissions, we set out to interview each one who was willing to talk to us, along with another set of residents who had testified in Jefferson City. A group of University of Missouri students, led by Virginia Young, a former Post-Dispatch reporter and bureau chief, and Mark Horvit, a former president of Investigative Reporters and Editors who now runs the school’s Jefferson City Capitol reporting program, conducted those interviews and they provided the narrative backbone for “Atomic Fallout.”

We also shared some of our lead findings with those who have covered the St. Louis nuclear story, including Carolyn Bower and Gerry Everding, who were part of the original St. Louis Post-Dispatch team that published “Legacy of the Bomb” in 1989. Their expertise proved invaluable. And we compared the findings with the public record — government reports like the 2019 federal CDC study; community-led working groups, like one convened about the St. Louis airport in 1994; and media accounts.

Our top five takeaways from our work can be found here.

If you have questions for us about this project or our work, feel free to email us at fallout@muckrock.com.

State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, center, speaks at a press conference in Weldon Spring about radiologically contaminated sites in the St. Louis region. To her left stands U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, who promised to introduce legislation to compensate residents who became ill because of radiation exposure (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

WELDON SPRING — U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley on Thursday decried the federal government’s “negligence” that allowed radioactive waste to sicken St. Louis-area residents for decades and invited Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to visit the community still suffering from the legacy of the atomic bomb.

“You all have had enough of it,” Hawley said. “I’ve had enough of it. It’s time to put a stop to this.”

But even as he joined activists and a bipartisan coalition of state officials calling for federal action, Hawley faced questions about his own environmental track record during his two years as Missouri’s attorney general. And activists said they have had no luck getting a meeting to discuss the issue with the current attorney general, Andrew Bailey.

Bailey’s office said earlier in the day that it will work to hold the federal government accountable.

Speaking at a news conference in Weldon Spring attended by Republican and Democratic elected officials, Hawley addressed the findings of a six-month joint investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press that revealed that for decades government agencies and private companies downplayed or failed to fully investigate radioactive contamination stemming from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II.

“We’re here because for 75 years…the federal government has poisoned the water, the soil and the air of this community and has lied about it,” Hawley said.

The issue has been covered extensively by journalists over the years, but a trove of previously-unreleased documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by the three newsrooms laid bare decades of failure that allowed radioactive waste created during the 1940s to linger in the St. Louis region 80 years later.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

View note

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush was in Washington for votes, but her aide read a statement saying the new findings confirm what the community already knew — that the “federal government actively and knowingly treated St. Louis as a dumping ground for harmful and toxic radioactive waste.”

“The federal government must not continue to allow our communities to be further collateral damage,” Bush said in her statement.

State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, said the region has become “desensitized to the insanity.”

Hawley, a Republican and Missouri’s senior U.S. senator, joined activists from Just Moms STL in calling on the Department of Energy to finance cleanups of nuclear sites across St. Louis and St. Charles counties and reiterated his pledge to introduce legislation to compensate individuals who have contracted rare cancers or autoimmune disorders because of radioactive exposure.

In an email Thursday evening, the Department of Energy said it does “not underestimate the impact that nuclear research and the production of nuclear weapons had on communities.

“The department proudly works alongside partners at the federal, state and local levels, including in Missouri, to protect the health and safety of community residents, and protection of the environment,” the statement said.

But Hawley faced questions about his decision to eliminate the environmental division of the Missouri attorney general’s office shortly after he took it over in 2017, as well as his campaign’s acceptance of contributions from companies that created or handled the nuclear waste.

Hawley’s decision to eliminate the environmental division raised concerns at the time that the attorney general wouldn’t prioritize defending Missouri’s natural resources.

It was among his first decisions in office, one former staffer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the time, and sent a “chilling message” that the environment “was no longer what he considered to be an important part of the mission.”

At Thursday’s news conference, Hawley denied that the division was dissolved. Rather, he said, the entire attorney general’s office was restructured, though he couldn’t recall what division included environmental enforcement.

But he said “we held those guys accountable,” referring to a settlement Hawley’s office reached in a lawsuit filed by his predecessor, Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster, against Republic Services, which owns the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton.

The landfill has held thousands of tons of radioactive waste and contaminated soil since 1973 when it was dumped there against the regulations of the Atomic Energy Commission by a contractor for the Cotter Corporation.

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, said that settlement provided a free clinic for the community.

Hawley was also asked whether he would return the combined $5,000 his state campaign committee and federal leadership political action committee received from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, which refined uranium for the federal government in the 1940s as Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, and Republic Services. Of the $2,500 Hawley received from Mallinckrodt during his campaign for attorney general in 2016, $2,254 was refunded when the committee was terminated following Hawley’s 2018 election to the U.S. Senate. Senate leadership political action committees in 2018 also received $250,000 from General Atomics and employees, the parent company of Cotter.

He said he would look into it.

Elad Gross, who served in the attorney general’s office under Koster and is making his second run for the Democratic nomination for attorney general next year, attended the news conference and said the state desperately needs an environmental division.

“Look at where we are right now,” Gross said. “We’ve got folks in the press who are doing great work and getting this information out to the public faster than the attorney general is investigating it…so we’re obviously seeing what happens when you don’t have a dedicated conservation division in that office.”

But Chapman said when Hawley replaced Koster, he reached out to her and other activists and pledged support for them. The attorneys working on the case against Republic, she said, never changed.

“I can only speak to how hard his office worked,” Chapman said, adding she had the same access to Hawley that she did Koster.

But Chapman said she and fellow Just Moms STL co-founder Karen Nickel haven’t heard from Bailey despite the fact that they provided his office in May thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press.

Bailey faced criticism Wednesday and calls to sue the federal government over the findings of the investigation.

On Thursday, Bailey broke his silence, issuing a statement saying he assigned an attorney to investigate the issue when his office received the documents from Chapman and Nickel.

“We will convey our findings to the appropriate parties,” Bailey said, “and we will do everything in our power to hold the federal government accountable.”

Chapman and Nickel said they still hope to hear from Bailey or someone in his office.

“You’ve really got to come here and meet us and let us show you what you’re seeing in these documents,” Chapman said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

A sick community

The renewed attention brought to St. Louis’ legacy of radioactive contamination was cathartic for a community that, for years, has watched as friends and family members were lost to mysterious cancers or suffered with chronic illnesses.

Byrnes said she first found out about the radioactive contamination when her son developed cancer. Growing up, she swam in a quarry in Weldon Spring just outside the banks of the Missouri River, never knowing it was contaminated with nuclear waste.

For a long time, when she talked about the issue, Byrnes said she would preface her speech: “I’m going to sound crazy.”

“For the first time ever,” Byrnes said, “I woke up this morning not feeling crazy.”

Byrnes attended Francis Howell High School in Weldon Spring. Driving southwest on Missouri Highway 94, just after the school baseball fields, the road bends and a mound of rock becomes visible on the right.

It’s the highest point in St. Charles County, and underneath lies rubble and nuclear waste from Cold War-era uranium processing. Residents can walk to the top of the pile, which contains the rubble from the Mallinckrodt plant that stood there and pits where nuclear waste was stored.

Children continued to attend the high school during the cleanup in the 1990s.

When Christen Commuso, a spokesperson for the nonprofit organization the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, was growing up in north St. Louis County, she didn’t know about contamination at several sites nearby.

Commuso said within a year in 2012, she had a total hysterectomy and an adrenal gland gland and her gallbladder removed. She developed a tumor on her other adrenal gland and suffered from thyroid cancer.

“I’m still living with the consequences,” she said.

State Rep. Doug Clemens, D-Place, found out at age 13 that he shouldn’t be playing in Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated by runoff from nuclear waste storage sites, from Kay Drey, an activist who spearheaded grassroots efforts to advocate for the cleanup of St. Louis County sites starting in the 1970s.

“Our whole region is injured by this — psychologically, emotionally, physically,” Clemens said.

Nickel said Coldwater Creek was a part of her neighborhood growing up. She played in St. Cin Park, right next to the creek. The park had to be remediated because of radioactive contamination.

Now Nickel lives with several autoimmune disorders. Her five-year-old granddaughter was born with cysts on her ovaries. Nickel’s sister, too, suffered from ovarian cysts as a child.

Getting compensation

Just getting the sites cleaned up isn’t enough for Hawley, who pledged on Wednesday to introduce legislation requiring the federal government to pay medical bills for St. Louis area residents sickened as a result of radioactive waste.

He said it would be similar to legislation that offered the same to “Downwinders,” residents who became sick after being exposed to radiation from testing of nuclear weapons in western states during World War II.

Hawley said it shouldn’t be on sick residents to prove their illness was caused by radiation. If they have a disease linked to radiation exposure and lived in the area during the period, he said, they should receive compensation.

“Victims shouldn’t be on trial,” Hawley said.

Asked if the private companies — Mallinckrodt, Cotter and Republic — that have handled the waste or overseen the West Lake Landfill should bear some of the financial burden, Hawley said he hopes there will be “some legal recourse.” He said he hoped those who could bring a legal case against the companies would “bring the heat.”

“I’ll do everything I can legislatively,” he said.

Hawley pledged to ask U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, to hold hearings about the St. Louis-area nuclear waste.

“In one sense, I say the federal government should make people whole,” Hawley said, “but we all know that the time to make people truly whole has passed because of the government’s negligence.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s campaign committee refunded most of the donation it received from Mallinckrodt in 2019.

Coldwater Creek runs by the St. Louis airport and through Florissant and Hazelwood before flowing into the Missouri River. The creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Revelations that government officials and private companies downplayed or failed to fully investigate the dangers of radioactive waste in St. Louis sparked outrage among state and federal lawmakers Wednesday and a promise from U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley to seek funding for residents who have become ill.

At the heart of the bipartisan calls for action were the findings of a six-month joint investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and the Association Press that delved into thousands of pages of previously-unreleased government documents detailing the St. Louis area’s legacy of contamination.

The issue has been covered extensively by journalists over decades, but the trove of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by the three newsrooms show that year after year, decade after decade, government regulators and companies downplayed the risks posed by remnant nuclear waste or failed to investigate them fully.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Hawley, in an afternoon Senate speech following publication of the findings, said when the U.S. has asked citizens to “bear unique burdens or when we have put them in harm’s way,” it has promised to stand with them. The government should do the same, he said, for St. Louis residents who have been exposed to nuclear waste left over from World War II.

“The Manhattan Project, which was a national project for war — the people of St. Louis have borne the burden of it,” said Hawley, R-Missouri. “And now it’s time for their government to make it right.”

The federal government needs to pay the medical bills for St. Louis residents who have contracted illnesses because of radioactive waste, Hawley said, and he will introduce legislation to create a fund to “make the people of St. Louis whole.”

Hawley and U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, both released statements critical of the federal government’s handling of the waste.

Missouri’s other U.S. senator, Republican Eric Schmitt, grew up in the area and said in a statement that the issue “is near and dear to my heart” and that he would fight for residents “every step of the way.”

While Missouri’s congressional delegation united across party lines to decry the latest revelations, there were also calls for action on the state level.

Activists and state lawmakers demanded Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican who took over the office in January, to take legal action against the U.S. Department of Energy and other federal agencies.

And three state representatives announced they will address the “dangerous situation” at a news conference Thursday and “call on Missouri’s leaders, the U.S. Department of Energy and the federal government to do the right thing and work to resolve these issues once and for all.”

“Today, we found out they knew all along people were being harmed,” Rep. Richard West, R-Wentzville, said in the release.

St. Louis’ legacy of nuclear waste starts in downtown where Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the first atomic bomb.

After the war, waste was left in the open at the St. Louis airport where it was dispersed by wind and rainwater. Government documents show it entered Coldwater Creek, which winds through suburban St. Louis before emptying into the Missouri River, from the site.

The waste was moved to a site on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood where it was dried by a private company that purchased the waste to extract valuable metals. There, it also sat in close proximity to Coldwater Creek – some of it in deteriorating steel drums.

And in 1973, the leftover waste that couldn’t be used to extract metals was dumped into the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton where it remains today.

“From downtown St. Louis to my backyard, the Department of Energy’s lack of diligence has destroyed families and lives,” said Rep. Doug Clemens, D-St. Ann. “They should be held accountable for their waste and the harm it has caused.”

Coldwater Creek

Coldwater Creek, which winds through Hazelwood, Florissant and other St. Louis suburbs was a playground for many kids growing up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. But residents didn’t know it was contaminated.

Now, decades later, droves of them, including Karen Nickel, co-founder of Just Moms STL, attribute a host of rare illnesses and cancers to the creek’s waters.

“These documents are all the proof I need to validate that I am sick,” Nickel said in a release Wednesday. “For the past 11 years, I have been labeled as a crazy, hysterical mom.”

Bush called the findings from the investigation “troubling.”
“They are not surprising and confirm what we’ve known for years,” Bush said in a statement. “For far too long, our community has suffered the consequences of radioactive waste that poisons our water, our neighborhoods and our loved ones.”

Bush has proposed legislation, alongside Hawley, to force the cleanup of a local elementary school and require the Department of Energy to publicly track radioactive waste. She said she stays in constant communication with federal agencies overseeing cleanup efforts.

“Our community needs and deserves answers,” Bush said. “We all deserve a clean environment, especially in the places we send our children. It is the responsibility of the government to protect people from harm, not expose them to it.”

While in office, former U.S Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri, worked to direct funds toward the cleanup of a contaminated quarry and uranium processing site in Weldon Spring and championed legislation to provide compensation to uranium workers from the area.

“During his time in the Senate, whether it was fighting for the justice our Cold War workers were owed or to get an old site cleaned up, the process was mired in bureaucratic red tape, funding problems, liability concerns, and authorization delays,” said Shana Marchio, a spokesperson for Bond.

According to government documents, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium in downtown St. Louis, knew as early as 1949 that radioactive residue stored in deteriorating steel drums at the airport posed a risk of contaminating Coldwater Creek.

Testing from 1976 by the Department of Energy showed contamination entering the creek. But the public wouldn’t find out about contamination to Coldwater Creek for years.

Christen Commuso, a spokesperson for the nonprofit advocacy organization the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, noted there still isn’t any signage to discourage residents from entering the creek.

“After all these years of them knowing it, the fact that there’s nothing stopping people is absolutely dangerous,” Commuso said in an interview Wednesday.

Commuso said she’s a survivor of a cancer linked to radiation exposure.

“I dare somebody to look me in the face and tell me I wasn’t harmed when one of the first questions that was asked to me (by health professionals) was, ‘Were you exposed to radiation as a child?’”

Calls for action

Just Mom’s STL’s co-founder, Dawn Chapman, on Wednesday called for Missouri’s attorney general to take action.

Chapman said Just Moms STL provided some of the same documents reviewed by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press to Bailey’s office earlier this year.

“He is the ONLY elected official who has and has had these documents!” Chapman said on Twitter.

Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, said she reached out to Bailey’s office ahead of a May community meeting held by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and was told it wouldn’t be appropriate for the attorney general to attend.

“Didn’t even call to ask how it went afterwards,” Byrnes said.

Bailey’s office did not return an email or voicemail seeking comment.

Derek Kravitz and Kelly Kauffman of MuckRock contributed to this report.

(Illustration by Tyler Gross)

For kids like Sandy Mitchell, Ted Theis and Janet Johnson, childhood in the North St. Louis County suburbs in the 1960s and ‘70s meant days playing along the banks or splashing in the knee-deep waters of Coldwater Creek.

They caught turtles and tadpoles, jumped into deep stretches of the creek from rope swings and ate mulberries that grew on the banks.

Their families — along with tens of thousands of others — flocked to the burgeoning suburbs and new ranch style homes built in Florissant, Hazelwood and other communities shortly after World War II. When the creek flooded, as it often did, so did their basements. They went to nearby Jana Elementary School and hiked and biked throughout Fort Belle Fontaine Park.

Growing up, they never knew they were surrounded by massive piles of nuclear waste left over from the war.

Generations of children who grew up alongside Coldwater Creek have, in recent decades, faced rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other mysterious illnesses they have come to believe were the result of exposure to its waters and sediment.

“People in our neighborhood are dropping like flies,” Mitchell said.

The earliest known public reference to Coldwater Creek’s pollution came in 1981, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency listed it as one of the most polluted waterways in the U.S.

By 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was advising residents to avoid Coldwater Creek entirely. Cleanup of the creek is expected to take until 2038. A federal study found elevated rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers as well as leukemia in the area. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer rates are also higher.

“Young families moved into the area,” Johnson said, “and they were never aware of the situation.”

Theis, who grew up just 75 yards from the creek and played in it daily, died in August at the age of 60 from a rare cancer. Mitchell is a breast cancer survivor whose father died from prostate cancer. Johnson’s sister has an inoperable form of glioblastoma and other family members, including her father, daughter and nephew, have had various cancers.

Families who lived near Coldwater Creek were never warned of the radioactive waste. Details about the classified nuclear program in St. Louis were largely kept secret from the public. But a trove of newly-discovered documents reviewed by an ongoing collaboration of news organizations show private companies and the federal government knew radiological contamination was making its way into the creek for years before those findings were made public.

Radioactive waste was known to pose a threat to Coldwater Creek as early as 1949, records show. K-65, a residue from the processing of uranium ore, was stored in deteriorating steel drums or left out in the open near the creek at multiple spots, according to government and company reports.

A health expert who, as part of this project, was recently presented with data from a 1976 test of runoff to the creek concluded it showed dangerous levels of radiation 45 years ago.

Federal agencies knew of the potential human health risks of the creek contamination, the documents show, but repeatedly wrote them off as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.” One engineering consultant’s report from the 1970s incorrectly claimed that human contact with the creek was “rare.”

The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press spent months combing through thousands of pages of government records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing dozens of people who lived near the contaminated sites, health and radiation experts and officials from government agencies.

Some of the documents, obtained by a nuclear researcher who focuses on the effects of radiation, had been newly declassified in the early 2000s. Others had been previously lost to history, packed away in government archives and not released publicly until now.

All told, the documents from the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission; its successors, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and the Environmental Protection Agency span the 75-year lifespan of the nuclear saga in St. Louis.

It starts in downtown St. Louis, where uranium was processed, and at the St. Louis airport, where it was stored at the end of the war; a monthslong move of the waste to industrial sites on Latty Avenue in suburban Hazelwood and a quarry in Weldon Spring, next to the Missouri River; an illegal dumping of waste at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton in the 1970s by a private company; and the declaration of the landfill as a federal toxic Superfund site in 1990.

The documents have a familiar cadence: Year after year, decade after decade, government regulators and companies tasked with cleaning up the sites downplayed the risks posed by nuclear waste left near homes, parks and an elementary school. They often chose not to fully investigate the potential harms to public health and the environment around St. Louis.

Bob Criss, a now-retired geologist and geochemist, studied St. Louis’ history with nuclear waste at Washington University in St. Louis and wrote a report in 2013 critical of the EPA’s stewardship of the West Lake Landfill Superfund site.

In an interview last month, Criss said the waste changed hands so often and was overseen by an assortment of lightly regulated private companies, resulting in what he called a “ridiculous chain of events…driven by irresponsibility.”

“The government should have been responsible for this material,” Criss said.

The Department of Energy has assisted with the costs of remedial studies at West Lake under a legal agreement called a consent decree since 1993. It referred questions about the landfill’s history and other contaminated sites to the Department of Justice, which did not respond to a request for comment, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Presented with details of the newly-revealed documents, Dave McIntyre, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a statement that the agency conducted numerous investigations and studies at the West Lake Landfill over a period of almost 20 years that were “extensively documented.” It transferred authority to the EPA in 1995 and directed further questions to the agency.

The EPA has jurisdiction only over the West Lake site. Staffers for the agency acknowledged cleanup at the site had been slow, but there has been progress toward designing an excavation plan and placing a cap on the landfill.

St. Louis becomes vital piece of Manhattan Project war effort

The St. Louis region proved pivotal to the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s.

Old downtown factories, suburban storage sites and the landfill represent some of dozens of properties that were contaminated in pursuit of the nuclear bomb.

The West Lake Landfill is one of well over 1,000 EPA Superfund sites across the country. The Department of Energy, too, is the steward of other nuclear sites, like a complex in Hanford, Washington, on the banks of the Columbia River, in desperate need of cleanup.

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to build the bomb, in downtown St. Louis. Uranium from the Mallinckrodt plant was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago, a significant breakthrough.

By the end of the 1940s, there was already a risk of contamination, the new records show.

An internal Mallinckrodt memo from 1949 shows the company was storing highly radioactive residue called K-65 in deteriorating steel drums at the St. Louis airport near Coldwater Creek. The material was so dangerous, the memo said, that Mallinckrodt couldn’t simply put it in new containers because “the hazards to the workers involved in such an occupation would be considerable.”

Mallinckrodt, which still exists as Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, declined to comment for this article. By 1960, the company had more than 1,000 employees at its uranium processing facility in St. Louis. It took some measures to protect its workers, such as putting them on timed shifts to limit exposure, but it determined possible pollution of Coldwater Creek was far less “serious and immediate” than the threat handling the waste posed to workers.

As the nation’s oldest radioactive waste of the atomic age, many details about Mallinckrodt and other private companies’ storage and maintenance of nuclear waste have been well documented, first as part of a grassroots civic effort in the 1970s by environmental activist Kay Drey and then as part of a seven-part series published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989.

More recently, the issue was the focus of a 2017 documentary called “Atomic Homefront” and a 2022 book, “Nuked,” by Linda Morice, who grew up near Coldwater Creek.

But the new documents reveal government agencies were plainly aware of the risks posed by prolonged storage and seepage of waste into soil, groundwater and the creek — and yet dismissed concerns about them.

Following the war, material from Mallinckrodt was trucked to a site next to the airport, which would later become the center of some of the region’s most populated suburbs. At times, waste fell out of trucks and spilled onto public roadways, only to be picked up by a single worker carrying a shovel and broom and loaded back onto the bed of a pickup truck. It was then left for years in the open, without a cover, where wind and rainwater dispersed it.

After a few years, the Atomic Energy Commission, which was later replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, began looking for a buyer for the waste. A private company would purchase the waste, process it to obtain any valuable materials — such as copper, nickel or cobalt — and dispose of the rest.

While the waste awaited purchase, a 1965 government report found drainage from the 20-foot-tall mounds of material — including almost 200 tons of uranium — had produced “some minor contamination in Coldwater Creek.”

The document doesn’t specify the level of radiation in the creek at the time, but it says the levels are “well within permissible and acceptable limits.”
Within a few years, most of the waste was sold and moved just up the road to a site on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood where it, again, sat exposed to the elements and adjacent to Coldwater Creek.

But despite the move, the airport would remain contaminated for years to come.

Between 50 and 60 truck loads remained buried there, and in the late 1970s, uranium, radium and thorium were found in the drainage ditches along a public road next to the site.

According to a draft report uncovered as part of the document release, four members of the health and safety research division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee tested the airport site in 1976 at the request of the Energy Research and Development Administration, which would become the Department of Energy.

The results showed onsite radiation sources were as high as 8.8 millisievert per year, five times the typical dose of radiation humans receive in a year, and nine times the EPA’s limit for water pathways, according to an expert who calculated the annual dose for the Independent and MuckRock. The reading was 220 times higher than the EPA’s limit for drinking water pathways.

Though the federal government knew about the contamination, the public wouldn’t find out until 1990.
“These site doses are deadly because there is no safe dose of radiation,” said Kristin Shrader-Frechette, professor and PhD with the University of Notre Dame’s Biological Sciences Department and Environmental Sciences Program, who reviewed the 1976 study’s findings.

The runoff sources next to Coldwater Creek, Shrader-Frechette said, are “far higher than what is allowed. The only question is whether any scientific studies have documented these health problems.”

In 1979, the Department of Energy acknowledged the site was eroding, carrying contamination into the drainage ditch and Coldwater Creek. But a planned meeting that November, with representatives of multiple federal agencies and local elected officials, was abruptly canceled after then-U.S. Rep. Robert Young openly fought with the federal agencies over a lack of funding for the cleanup.

In a description of a meeting between Young and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official, the congressman railed against the federal government, saying St. Louis and its airport had been “hoodwinked” into taking ownership of the radioactive waste, which he described as a “Pandora’s Box.”

The airport site wasn’t fully cleaned up until 2009.

In 1986, then-St. Louis City Health Commissioner William B. Hope Jr. wrote to a city alderwoman that he had been “quietly” testing Coldwater Creek and city water supplies, to ensure the city’s drinking water wasn’t contaminated. It wasn’t, he found, but he offered a blunt assessment of the federal government’s nuclear waste program in the St. Louis region.

“Sufficient information was known about the radioactive contaminants to have warranted a different type of decision regarding their disposal,” he wrote. “These materials should not have been deposited near populated areas and certainly not in areas where geographically the material could migrate into the water table or into adjacent areas as a result of erosion over time.”

Illegal dumping of radioactive waste

When the Atomic Energy Commission sold the remnant nuclear waste, it anticipated being able to get rid of the more than 100,000 tons of toxic residues without spending any money.

The first company to purchase the waste, Continental Mining and Milling Co. of Chicago, borrowed $2.5 million to buy it in 1966 and then, shortly after, went bankrupt. Continental’s lender, Commercial Discount of Chicago, re-purchased the waste at auction for $800,000 and, after failing to get a bidder at a second auction, sold it to the Cotter Corp. To turn a profit, Cotter would ultimately dry the material and ship it to its uranium mill plant in Cañon City, Colorado.

By 1972, most of the valuable metals in the waste had been identified and shipped. Cotter was now looking to dispose of remaining waste that had little or no monetary value — 8,900 tons of worthless leached barium sulfate and “miscellaneous residues and debris.”

But the cost estimates to properly dispose of the waste were pricey: $150,000 ($1.1 million in 2023 dollars) to bury it onsite at Latty Avenue near Coldwater Creek or about $2 million ($15 million in 2023 dollars) to ship it hundreds of miles away to a commercial site in West Valley, New York, and bury it there.

A third location was proposed: A pit at the Weldon Spring quarry in St. Charles County, which was already a disposal site for other radioactive waste.

The Atomic Energy Commission had initially planned to allow it to be dumped in the Weldon Spring quarry, just outside the banks of the Missouri River, when it was looking for a buyer for the waste in 1960, government records show.

But on the advice of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Atomic Energy Commission reversed course on the quarry plan. Among other issues, the agencies said there was a “high probability of contaminating the Missouri River shortly above the intakes for the St. Louis City and St. Louis County water supplies.”

Cotter asked the government to bury the waste at Weldon Springs multiple times, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but were rebuffed each time, meeting minutes show.

So, over a period of 2 ½ months in the summer and fall of 1973, Cotter took the problem into its own hands, without telling government regulators.

The company mixed the radioactive waste with tens of thousands of tons of contaminated soil from the site and illegally dumped it in a free, public landfill called West Lake, under three feet of soil and other garbage.

Within months, the Atomic Energy Commission discovered what Cotter had done.

Government records show staffers from the commission visited the site as part of a routine inspection in April 1974 and were told about the illegal dumping. Internal memos and letters show AEC staffers believed Cotter’s actions violated agency regulations and were misled about the amount of the waste involved.

Internally, the AEC struggled with how to respond to Cotter’s illegal dumping.

While noting Cotter was “clearly in violation” of a federal law “in that [the company] disposed of licensed material in an unauthorized manner,” “the large numbers involved need to be brought into prospective (sic).”

Cotter had mixed enough topsoil with the radioactive waste to, in theory, render it harmless, the agency concluded.

AEC’s enforcement division found that the waste in the West Lake Landfill was now “virtually unidentifiable and nonrecoverable.” Still, Cotter should provide evidence that the waste “does not constitute an undue hazard to the public or the environment.”

A draft letter by the AEC to Cotter was drawn up, requiring the company to study the potential environmental and health consequences of dumping the waste at the West Lake Landfill and propose solutions.

But that requirement was cut from the final letter, without explanation. The decision to let Cotter off the hook was not revealed to the public.

Cotter subsequently informed the AEC that it had finished processing the waste and decontaminating the property and asked the government to terminate its license and release it from responsibility over the site.

The AEC released Cotter from its St. Louis permit without immediate sanctions in 1974, but the company is partially responsible for the cleanup costs at the site.

Cotter’s parent company, General Atomics, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By most government accounts, the human health risk at the West Lake Landfill is remote. Lee Sobotka, a chemistry and physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied the radiation levels at West Lake Landfill site and noted that the waste is diluted enough to be considered “low-level.”

Despite the low risk of illness, Sobotka said the government, and by extension the surrounding communities, are left with a never-ending cleanup and maintenance problem. Federal and state agencies will have to be a “custodian in perpetuity” at West Lake.

“Looking back at history, you find a litany of mistakes by companies and contractors and so you can get very upset about that,” he said.

Looking forward, Sobotka said, “it’s not something you seal and forget.”

‘Tip of the iceberg’

In 1999, when Robbin Dailey moved into Spanish Village, a neighborhood of only a few dozen homes with its own park less than a mile from the back side of West Lake Landfill, she had no idea she was living next to a Superfund site.

When the EPA decided initially in 2008 to cap the waste at West Lake and leave it in place, Dailey never heard about the plan. Two years later, in 2010, she was alerted to the radioactive waste when a “subsurface smoldering event” — a type of chemical reaction that consumes landfilled waste like a fire but lacks oxygen — sent a pungent stench into the air around her home.

Dailey and her husband had their house tested and found thorium in the dust at hundreds of times natural levels. They sued the landfill’s owners, Republic Services, as well as the Cotter Corp. and Mallinckrodt.

Dailey said she and the companies had “resolved” their legal issues, but she, like all of the residents in North St. Louis County, was still in the dark about where within the landfill site the waste actually was.

Court records reveal a bevy of lawsuits against the private companies involved, at various times, with the West Lake Landfill. Not only that, but the landfill operators sued Mallinckrodt in an attempt to force the maker of the radioactive waste to pay for part of the cleanup.

Since the late 1970s, federal regulators repeatedly failed to uncover the true extent of contamination at West Lake.

In October 1977, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission used a helicopter to take hour-long passes back and forth over the landfill from an altitude of 200 feet. The goal was to measure gamma radioactivity coming from the site using specialized equipment.

While the effort correctly identified two areas with high levels of radiation, it had serious limitations, experts say. A survey of that type can miss contamination if it’s buried deep underground or if the ground is obstructed by vegetation.

And it did.

Despite the shortcomings of that sort of test, the government’s conclusion that the radioactive waste was confined to two areas of the West Lake Landfill would stand for more than 40 years.

Nathan Anderson, a director of natural resources and environment for the federal Government Accountability Office, said the federal government often fails to compile complete and reliable information in environmental cleanups.

“We’ve done a number of these evaluations where there is contamination that the federal government is on the hook for cleaning up,” Anderson said. “And we’ve found that oftentimes, it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

In May, almost 50 years after the waste was dumped at West Lake, the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged what many residents had long feared: Radiological waste was spread throughout the West Lake Landfill, not confined to two specific portions as officials had long maintained.

Bob Jurgens, the EPA’s superfund and emergency management division director for the region, announced at the community meeting in May that the health risk “remains unchanged.”

The additional radioactive waste is largely underground, he said, so “we believe that is protective at this time to the folks that are outside.”

EPA officials said the contamination was found all over the property — in some areas at the surface and, in other areas, at great depths.

The agency looked at the dates on newspapers above and below the radioactive waste in two areas of the site previously thought to be uncontaminated to approximate when it was dumped, said Chris Jump, the EPA’s lead remedial project manager for the site.

It’s likely been there the whole time.

In one area where contamination was at the surface, the EPA moved quickly to add gravel and rocks to cover it. The waste had migrated outside the fence line in some areas, the EPA said.

Readings showed contamination in a drainage ditch along a public road bordering the landfill. It migrated right under the EPA’s nose.

While the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry did not find any causal link between the West Lake Landfill and illnesses in and around Bridgeton, it said in a 2015 report that radon concentrations appeared higher than typical. It encouraged further testing using long-term monitoring devices.

Dawn Chapman, who left her job and co-founded Just Moms STL to advocate for the community around the landfill, said the EPA used to treat her and other activists like their fears were hysterical.

“We spent more time fighting them as an agency than we did the g—–n polluters,” Chapman said.

EPA officials, in an interview last month, acknowledged the flyover and previous testing missed considerable areas containing radioactive waste. But they said they did not need to test soil over the whole site before deciding on a partial excavation strategy.

“It doesn’t change anything about the remedy itself. It doesn’t change anything about the risks that the site poses,” said Tom Mahler, a remedial project manager for the EPA. However, Mahler said finding all of the contamination was important for the next step of the work at the site: designing and executing the excavation.

State pleads for help

By the time the EPA listed the landfill on the National Priorities List in 1990, state officials had already been sounding the alarm for years.

A staffer with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources wrote in 1980 that contamination at the landfill was more severe and widespread than previously thought. In 1986 and 1990, onsite sampling showed possible radiological contamination in the groundwater in areas outside the sections of the landfill thought to be radioactive.

In 1987, the state classified the landfill as a hazardous waste site. The radioactive waste was in direct contact with the groundwater, the agency said in its annual report.

“Based on available information, a health threat exists due to the toxic effects of chemicals and low-level uranium wastes buried at the site and the possibility that off-site migration of these materials might occur,” the agency wrote.

The next year, Missouri began lobbying the EPA to designate the landfill as a Superfund site, contending that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knew the site needed to be cleaned up but had no intention of taking action and the Department of Energy said the site didn’t qualify for its cleanup program.

Yet there was little movement from the federal agencies – despite growing evidence.

A 1982 study commissioned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission showed that, as the waste in the landfill decays, radium activity will increase by nine times over 200 years.

Despite that finding, as of 1984, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission believed stabilizing the waste and leaving it onsite was the best solution, in part, because of the high cost of alternative solutions, such as excavating the site or new construction to control groundwater.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission report from 1988 shows radioactivity in the groundwater on site anywhere from two to 30 times levels it would occur naturally.

“Based on monitoring-well sample analyses, some low-level contamination of the groundwater is occurring,” the report says, “indicating that the groundwater in the vicinity is not adequately protected by the present disposition of the wastes.”

Even after the Superfund declarations, Missouri and the EPA sparred over how the contamination was quantified.

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources told the EPA in 1997 that it feared the extent of the contamination was underestimated. Until disagreements around how to calculate the severity of the contamination and whether sampling showed false positives were resolved, the agency said, “we cannot concur with the conclusion that the…extent of the contamination has been defined.”

Ryan Seabaugh, project manager for the West Lake site for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, said in an interview that the state agency asked the EPA to do more testing or provide information to confirm the boundaries of the contamination.

“We just had concerns that there might be a little bit more,” said Seabaugh, who has overseen the site for the state for eight years. “We were pretty surprised at the relatively large extent that we did find.”

It wasn’t until around the time the EPA settled on a plan to excavate parts of the site in 2018, Seabaugh said, that the federal agency started “listening” to its Missouri counterpart.

After several studies, the EPA designated the groundwater at West Lake as its own “operable unit” to be investigated and, potentially, remediated. That work is ongoing.

Still, even by the EPA’s admittedly slow process for classifying and cleaning up toxic sites, the West Lake Landfill timeline was glacial. For Superfund sites listed in 1996, it took an average of more than 9 years from discovering the site to placing it on the National Priorities List. Cleanup took an average of 10 ½ years, a Government Accountability Office review found.

The West Lake Landfill contamination was discovered in 1974. It was designated a Superfund site in 1990, and there is still no date certain for when the cleanup will begin.

John Madras, who worked for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources at the time it was asking the EPA to classify West Lake as a Superfund site, said that, even among slow-moving government cleanup projects, West Lake stands out: “They’ve given us a new understanding of what a really long time is.”

Back to the drawing board

EPA’s first plan for the site would not have included moving the radioactive waste at all.

In 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency approved a plan for the landfill’s “primarily responsible parties” — the government and private contractors responsible for the site — to place a cap over the landfill and leave the waste in place.

Following criticism from the surrounding communities, EPA asked the Department of Energy, the Cotter Corp. and the landfill’s owner, Republic Services, to test the site again.

In the meantime, an underground fire brought a new level of scrutiny.

Starting in 2010, the Bridgeton Landfill, which sits adjacent to the West Lake Landfill, has been experiencing a subsurface smoldering event.

The smell from the heated trash got the attention of the Bridgeton community when it worsened in 2013. The situation also caught the attention of then-Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, who sued the landfill’s owner, Republic Services, for its track record at the Bridgeton Landfill.

And as Koster’s office investigated the site, it too became concerned the EPA was underestimating the risk. Testing performed in preparation for a fire barrier to keep the reaction from reaching the radiological contamination, Koster wrote, appeared to demonstrate that the waste was not confined just to where the EPA thought.

Koster’s office would release additional findings as part of its investigation for the lawsuit against Republic Services, including reports in 2015 that radioactive waste had been found in vegetation offsite and the fire was moving closer to the onsite contamination, which the EPA dismissed as “unhelpful” at the time and continues to dispute.

In the midst of strife over the stench and studies conducted in search of a new plan, the owners of the landfill decided to fence off one of the two areas then thought to contain the radioactive waste.

But as it turned out, they were digging in close proximity to radioactive waste.

After construction of the fence began, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources visited the site in June 2013 with a portable radiation reader. State officials found radiation at levels 35 to 50 times what is normal in the tire ruts leaving the site and just a short distance from the post holes dug along the planned fence line.

The department flagged the finding for the EPA, the documents show.

“Elevated readings indicated an area of radiologically contaminated soils located within close proximity to the new fence installation and also in close proximity to the exit route from the landfill,” Shawn Muenks, then the project manager for West Lake for DNR, wrote in an email.

Muenks warned the contaminated soil could be spread by trucks leaving the site. A consultant for the government and private companies wrote back, saying crews realigned the fence so the contamination would be contained within the boundaries. The consultant’s email said testing along the new fence line showed no elevated levels of radiation.

“Therefore no ‘track out’ or erosional transport had occurred,” the email said.

But since then, testing in preparation for the remediation at the site has uncovered radioactive contamination all along that fence.

“Knowing what we know now based on the new EPA findings, I don’t see how they couldn’t have been digging in it,” said Christen Commuso, a spokesperson for the nonprofit advocacy organization, the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

The EPA has said the additional contamination found along that fenceline is below the surface.

The depth and severity of the new contamination the EPA found is not yet clear. The agency is preparing to release a report that will include the readings, a spokesperson said. A remedial design portion of the project is underway, the last step before the excavation begins.

But EPA doesn’t have a date certain as to when work on the project might start.

Curtis Carey, a spokesperson for the EPA, said despite decades of delays, the agency is planning next steps for the landfill “with a great deal more information because of our purposeful approach than was available 10, 15, 20 years ago.”

The following people contributed reporting, writing, editing, document review, research, interviews, photography, illustrations, analysis and project management. Chris Amico, Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Derek Kravitz of MuckRock; Jason Hancock, Allison Kite and Rebecca Rivas of The Missouri Independent; Michael Phillis and Jim Salter of The Associated Press; Sarah Fenske, Theo Welling, Tyler Gross and Evan Sult of the Riverfront Times; EJ Haas, Madelyn Orr, Sydney Poppe, Mark Horvit and Virginia Young of the University of Missouri; Katherine Reed of the Association of Health Care Journalists; Liliana Frankel, Erik Galicia, Laura Gómez, Lauren Hubbard, Sophie Hurwitz and Steve Vockrodt; and Gerry Everding and Carolyn Bower of the original St. Louis Post-Dispatch team that published the seven-part “Legacy of the Bomb” series in 1989.

A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

The Missouri Independent and MuckRock spent months scouring thousands of pages of government records about St. Louis’ involvement in the race to build an atomic bomb during World War II and decades of environmental contamination that followed.

Journalists sought to lay bare the degree to which government officials knew of the spreading contamination and the danger it posed to St. Louis County residents.

While the contamination at the West Lake Landfill and in Coldwater Creek has been covered extensively for decades, documents obtained by the newsrooms revealed the way federal officials failed to take stronger measures to protect the health of St. Louis-area residents.

You can read the full investigation here.

Here are five key takeaways:

A company that refined uranium for the Manhattan Project knew as early as 1949 that radioactive residue could pollute Coldwater Creek

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium in downtown St. Louis, stored barrels of K-65, a radioactive residue, at the St. Louis airport in deteriorating steel drums. In 1949, a Mallinckrodt memo shows, the company was aware the broken drums could result in runoff pollution to Coldwater Creek. But it determined the threat to workers from attempting to move the drums would be worse.

A draft survey commissioned by federal government in 1976 showed dangerous levels of contamination running off into Coldwater Creek

A report from a 1976 site visit and survey found rainwater run-off had eroded the soil and formed a large ditch at the edge of the St. Louis airport storage site, carrying contamination into Coldwater Creek. Tests showed elevated concentrations of radionuclides in the creek sediment, though the creek water was within permissible levels.

An expert who reviewed the document for The Missouri Independent and MuckRock said the 1976 dose readings at the site were “far higher than what is allowed.”

The Cotter Corp. pushed the Atomic Energy Commission to let it dump radioactive waste at a quarry in Weldon Spring before illegally dumping it in the West Lake Landfill

After World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission sought a buyer for radioactive waste. It planned to let a company extract valuable metals from the residue and dump the rest in a quarry in Weldon Spring just outside the banks of the Missouri River.

The U.S. Geological Survey discouraged the dumping plan because it would likely contaminate the river just upstream from where residents’ drinking water was drawn. When the AEC backtracked on the plan, the Cotter Corp., which had dried and shipped valuable materials to its uranium mill in Colorado, was left struggling with how to dispose of the leftover residue and asked to dump it in the quarry or bury it at a site in Hazelwood. The company ended up taking it to the free West Lake Landfill and illegally dumping it there in 1973.

Despite warnings that further testing was needed, federal officials believed the contamination at the West Lake Landfill was confined to two areas because of a 1977 flyover test

In the late 1970s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which replaced the AEC, flew a helicopter over the West Lake Landfill. It used gamma readings in an attempt to determine what parts of the landfill were contaminated with the radioactive waste the Cotter Corp. dumped there.

The test correctly identified two contaminated areas but missed huge areas of the landfill.

Despite warnings from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and activists that the contamination was likely more widespread, the NRC’s conclusion stood for more than 40 years.

This spring, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the contamination at the site was more widespread than previously thought.

Radium activity at the West Lake Landfill is expected to increase in the coming years

Testing performed in the 1980s and a more recent analysis by a former Washington University researcher concluded that radium activity is expected to worsen over time because the radionuclide is out of balance with thorium and uranium at the site.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote that this means the health and environmental hazards from radium at the site will get exponentially worse over the ensuing 200 years.

A sign directs residents to a meeting with the Environmental Protection Agency about the West Lake Landfill. The EPA says radioactive material at the landfill has been found in places it wasn't previously thought to be (Rebecca Rivas/Missouri Independent).

BRIDGETON — Radioactive waste in the West Lake Landfill is more widespread than previously thought, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

The finding is based on two years of testing at the St. Louis County site, which has held thousands of tons of radioactive waste for decades. An underground “fire” in another area of the landfill threatens to exacerbate the issue, which residents believe is responsible for a host of mysterious illnesses.

Chris Jump, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, said the findings don’t change the agency’s planned cleanup strategy or the level of risk the site poses to the surrounding residents. The radioactive waste is still within the footprint of the landfill, she said.

“The site boundaries themselves aren’t expanding, but the area that will need the radioactive protective cover is larger than previously known,” Jump said to a crowd of about 50 Tuesday night at the District 9 Machinists hall in Bridgeton.

The Missouri Independent and MuckRock are partnering to investigate the history of dumping and cleanup efforts of radioactive waste in the St. Louis area.

Has your family been impacted by radioactive waste near St. Louis? We want to hear from you

St. Louis was pivotal to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, and community members say they’re still suffering. Waste from uranium processing in downtown St. Louis — part of the Manhattan Project — contaminated Coldwater Creek, exposing generations of children who played in the creek and most recently forcing the shutdown of an area elementary school.

In 1973, the Cotter Corp., which obtained massive amounts of waste from the Manhattan Project, dumped it illegally at the West Lake Landfill, where it remains now. The site is part of the EPA’s Superfund program.

And though the site was placed on the National Priorities List more than 30 years ago, meaning it is among the most contaminated hazardous waste sites in the country, the EPA wouldn’t commit to a timeline for the cleanup during Tuesday’s meeting.

“I know this is not what people want to hear,” Jump said, adding that federal law requires certain steps for Superfund sites. “I’m sorry. I can’t give you a specific timeframe.”

Jump’s comments came at a meeting held by the EPA to present the results of interviews with area leaders and activists and propose a plan for better communicating with the community around the site. She said the agency is still reviewing the full report about the additional radioactive areas and will return to present that information on May 9.

The findings, Jump said, show that there is radioactive contamination in parts of the landfill that the EPA didn’t think were impacted. Jump said radioactive material was found at the surface of the landfill in a restricted area. It was quickly covered with rock, she said. And a drainage ditch between the West Lake site and the road had contamination between two and 10 feet below the surface.

Karmen King, who provides technical assistance to community members as a contractor for the EPA, and Jessica Evans, the EPA’s community involvement coordinator at the site, committed to listening to the community.

King, who recently replaced a contractor who retired, presented the results of her interviews and research on the community’s needs.

“Some of the top concerns that the interviewees vocalized was starting with rebuilding trust,” she said. “The historic meetings and communication — folks felt like the information wasn’t transparent.”

Jump said she wasn’t surprised by the finding that people didn’t trust the agency.

“We’re glad to know that and we would like to do better,” Jump said.

To activists and community members who have been pushing the EPA to take steps to provide greater protection for residents and listen to their concerns for a decade, the federal agency’s new plan seemed too little too late. Several in the crowd said they had been to meeting after meeting and nothing had changed at the site.

Jim Usry, chief of the Pattonville Fire District, pressed Jump for a timeframe for the cleanup.

“Is it in the next five years? Is it in the next 10 years?” Usry said. 

Usry noted that many in the audience had been to numerous meetings about the EPA’s progress at the site.

“This is probably the fourth team that I’ve seen in front of me telling me the same thing I heard back 10 years ago,” Usry said. He asked Jump to tell him a decade when the site would be cleaned up.

From the back of the room, someone shouted: “A decade would be nice before I hit 92.”

Jump said the amount of time the EPA needs to review plans and documents can vary widely as can back-and-forth questions and comments with parties involved in the cleanup.

“Within a decade, yes, I hope we have a design by then,” Jump said. “I assume we will, but I cannot provide a specific timeframe.”

Jump said part of the reason she couldn’t provide a specific time frame was that the EPA had done so in the past and missed its targets.

One resident of Spanish Village, a neighborhood near West Lake, who declined to give her name questioned how it could take so long to clean up the site. 

“I’ll be dead and gone, but I’d like the place to be cleaned up even after we’re gone for the young people that might buy a house,” she said. 

Karen Nickel, a co-founder of the activist group Just Moms STL, said the EPA’s plan to engage the community felt like a gut punch. She said it was an “insult” that after 10 years of activism by her and others, the EPA wanted to better communicate with residents.

Nickel said the EPA laughed at the activist group and claimed there was not radioactive waste except in the areas it had previously identified. 

“The community’s breakdown in communications is on your end, not ours,” Nickel said.

Christen Commuso, community outreach specialist for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, said activists pushed the EPA to do more testing to see if other parts of the site were radioactive. 

“We begged you to do it,” Commuso said, adding that the EPA would respond that there was no historical information to back up the need for additional testing and aerial photos showed that the waste hadn’t shifted. 

Commuso added: “Imagine, had you listened to us years prior, the lives that you could have potentially saved.”

State Rep. Richard West, R-Wentzville, speaks during Missouri House debate on March 1, 2023. West and Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, are sponsoring resolutions meant to bring relief to victims of radiation exposure in St. Louis stemming from the 1940s Manhattan Project (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications)..

Kim Visintine said her son had his first chemotherapy treatment at three weeks old. A year later, Visintine and her husband had $100,000 in medical debt. 

Six years later, their son died.

But it wasn’t until she found hometown friends on Facebook that Visintine connected her son’s cancer – a rare form of brain tumor called a glioblastoma multiforme — to Coldwater Creek, which runs through north St. Louis County. 

Visintine and other current and former residents started to realize just how many of their loved ones were sick and how many cases of rare cancers could be connected back to the area.

The likely culprit, they came to believe, was radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project. 

“We are the victims of friendly fire from World War II,” Visintine told a Missouri House committee Tuesday evening. 

Visitine and other current and former St. Louis area residents packed a Missouri Capitol committee room to implore lawmakers to pass legislation that would force an investigation into whether residents could qualify for compensation for their radiation exposure. The bill would also urge Missouri’s Congressional delegation to expand an existing program that provides relief to victims.

“My own father was a Pearl Harbor survivor,” Visintine said. “I am very pro-armed services, but it’s not fair for the children to be affected afterward.”

St. Louis played a key role in development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Downtown workers processed uranium that was used in the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in Chicago in 1942, a key breakthrough during the Manhattan Project. 

As a result, radioactive waste contaminated Coldwater Creek. 

The contamination at Coldwater Creek, which still hasn’t been completely remediated, may have resulted in an increased risk of rare cancers, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 2019. 

Coldwater Creek is scheduled to be fully remediated by 2036, more than 90 years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

In the 1970s, leftover radioactive material was dumped at the nearby Westlake landfill. A fire in an adjacent portion of the landfill has been burning for nearly a decade, threatening the thousands of tons of waste. 

Cleanup at Westlake has yet to begin. 

Relief for St. Louis 

State Reps. Tricia Byrnes and Richard West, both Wentzville Republicans, are sponsoring the legislation meant to bring compensation and health monitoring to St. Louis area residents exposed to waste from the bomb. 

Both Byrnes and West have relatives they believe were sickened by the contamination. 

Byrnes’ son was diagnosed with a thymoma in 2016. She said an expert told her that form of cancer was typically caused by radiation or chemotherapy meant to treat a different primary cancer. 

But she said when she reached out for help, she was told she needed to provide a study linking her son’s cancer to the radiation exposure. 

“How dare they ask a mother of a child where her medical study is to prove the atomic bomb kills people,” she said. 

Byrnes said the Missouri residents who suffered exposures should get health screenings and medical care. 

“I’m here to tell you guys World War II hasn’t stopped with victims, and a lot of them are here behind me tonight,” she said. 

West’s mother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Despite having insurance, she had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for medications, he said. 

Shortly after she died, West said he started noticing commercials urging anyone who lived around Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to speak to a lawyer about whether they might qualify to join class action lawsuits over contamination of water there. 

He said one of the major cancers mentioned in the commercial was his mother’s cancer: multiple myeloma. 

“A year later, I am knee-deep in one of the largest atrocities laid on the American people by their government,” West said. 

Over the course of four hours, members of the committee heard testimony from more than 20 St. Louis residents, experts and lawmakers urging them to do something for the victims. 

Danielle Spradley, outreach director for Congresswoman Cori Bush, D-Missouri, delivered testimony for Bush, who was in Washington for U.S. House of Representatives votes. 

Bush and U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers earlier this year to test for radioactive contamination in the Hazelwood School district. 

“The federal government has failed to warn Missourians of not only the presence of this waste,” she said, “but of its dangers.”