Several mothers in suburban St. Louis are working to clean up toxic sites in the area, a major undertaking to fix widespread contamination that some government officials apparently covered up for decades.
Karen Nickell, co-founder of Just Moms STL, said, “It was St. Louis’s best-kept secret. The Manhattan Project was not well known here, and it’s still a pretty good secret here.”
Nickell formed his group in 2013 with his neighbor, Don Chapman.
“Over the years, we’ve heard bits and pieces of the story and what we thought was the story,” Nickell said.
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The two mothers spent years reading thousands of documents revealing the people in charge of toxic waste disposal in missouri Possibly knew that the crew had misused those chemicals.
Chapman said, “Immediately, we were like, ‘Oh my God. This is so different from what we thought.'”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, said, over time, more information came to light about the Manhattan Project in St. Louis.
Hawley said, “In the early 1960s, the public started to get some sense of it. But really, the full scope of it didn’t start to come out until the ’80s and ’90s.”
“As recently as last year, we got a new trove of documents that shows the full extent of the government’s knowledge and what the government knew years ago – 30, 40, 50 years ago – that they poisoned the bay. Had given, that their landfill they put garbage in it which was going to create big problems, environmental problems and health problems. And they lied about it.”
Coldwater Creek in St. Louis, an area frequented by children and families, was apparently contaminated by toxic chemicals released by the Manhattan Project. The bay is now being sampled for radioactive material by the Army Corps of Engineers. (Dre Mallinckrodt Collection of the Army Corps of Engineers)
Hawley is pushing to extend and extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which expires this year. The legislation would make it so that people sickened by chemicals in St. Louis and other areas could receive compensation from the government.
Hawley said, “We learned that St. Louis was a uranium processing site. Kentucky was too. Tennessee was too, the extent of testing done in the West was much greater than we knew.”
The documents included internal memos from Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a company hired by the US government to process the chemicals. nuclear weapon, The cache included tests and samples from government agencies as well as warnings that sites exposed to those chemicals may not be safe.
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Nickell said, “The evidence was there, the facts were there, and it told the story from beginning to end.”
Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis worked to process uranium that would eventually help create the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. After the closure of the plant, the company took up the disposal of the chemicals. An internal memo from 1949 revealed that workers discussed health and safety concerns over where the waste was stored.
“Point No. 2 concerns the problem of dismantled K-65 drums at the airport,” the memo said. “This has been recognized as a serious problem.”
Federal officials first stored the waste at a site near the St. Louis Airport. The location was near a bay that extended 14 miles from northern St. Louis County. The barrels were left in the open and exposed to the elements.
“Immediately, you could see that the government knew how dangerous this waste was,” Chapman said.
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Barrels of waste remain in the open in Missouri following the closure of a chemical plant associated with the Manhattan Project. (Dre Mallinckrodt Collection)
Mallinckrodt’s internal memo details concerns among workers chemicals “There could have been a leak in the bay.”
The health hazard to workers handling K-65 material, particularly in broken drums, is far more serious and immediate than the potential threat of stream pollution,” it said.
“They were so toxic that they were told, ‘Don’t touch them. They’re too dangerous,'” Nickell said.
High water and flooding have been additional annual concerns in Coldwater Creek.
“Of course they wouldn’t dump hazardous waste next to a flooded drain,” Chapman said. “They knew it was possibly leaking into the bay, but they didn’t know how much.”
Army Corps of Engineers officials said that flood Over the decades, their cleaning job has been complicated today.
Flooding and high water occur annually in St. Louis’s potentially polluted Coldwater Creek. (Karen Nickel)
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“Wind and rain, and flood events also carry some of those pollutants with them, and they are carried down stream in sediments and then deposited during flood events and also during normal flow,” the U.S. said Phil Moser, Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis District program manager. “This is historical contamination from all decades ago, and that’s why this contamination is so difficult to detect today.”
The Army Corps of Engineers is taking samples of radioactive material around Coldwater Creek, some of which predates the surge in the St. Louis population.
“This was before houses were built. And look, in the late ’50s and ’60s, houses were being built on top of it,” Nickell said.
During the 1960s and 1970s, employees would take the waste to a different location near the airport and release it again in the open.
“The controls at the time certainly weren’t what they are now. That’s why we’re in the current situation,” Moser said.
Employees stored Manhattan Project chemicals at several locations around St. Louis. (Fox News)
Advocates and lawmakers, including Hawley, said the cleanup could move faster.
“For years, the people of St. Louis were told, ‘Don’t worry. There is no significant radiation.’ Or they were told, ‘Oh, we have cleared everything up.’ In fact, those things were not true,” Hawley said.
“It took years to test and really know the scope and magnitude of how polluted North County is,” Chapman said.
Testing nearly 50 years ago found possible contamination in parts of the bay. Detailed specimens are given in a 1977 report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee Coldwater Creek, Tests in the drainage drains that carried runoff water into the bay revealed that the average radiation level was about five times higher than normal.
“We haven’t seen that level at these sites since I’ve been here, certainly,” Moser said.
In the 1970s, workers moved the waste once again, this time to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri.
Chapman said, “It is not possible in the United States to buy a home next to a site where radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project lay for decades.”
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Chadman, Nickel and thousands of others would eventually call the areas near the West Lake Landfill home.
Hawley said, “Now is the time to act. This should have been done 50 years ago, but it wasn’t. So, now is the time to do it.”
