Several mothers in the St. Louis suburbs have been working to clean up toxic sites in the area, an important task to address widespread contamination that some government officials apparently covered up for decades.
“This was St. Louis’ best kept secret. The Manhattan Project wasn’t well known here, and it’s still a pretty good secret here,” said Karen Nickel, co-founder of Just Moms STL.
Nickel formed his group with his neighbor, Dawn Chapman, in 2013.
“Over the years, we had heard bits and pieces of the story and what we thought was the story,” Nickel said.
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The two mothers spent several years reviewing thousands of documents that revealed that those responsible for toxic waste disposal in Missouri probably knew that the crew had mishandled those chemicals.
“We immediately thought, ‘Oh my God. This is so different than we thought,'” Chapman said.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said more details about the Manhattan Project in St. Louis came to light over time.
“As early as the 1960s, the public began to get a sense of this. But it wasn’t really until the 1980s and 1990s that the full extent of this began to become visible,” Hawley said.
“As recently as last year, we received a new set of documents that showed the full extent of the government’s knowledge and what the government knew years ago (30, 40, 50 years ago) that they had poisoned the creek, that their landfill that dumped the waste was going to cause huge problems, environmental and health problems, and they lied about it.
Coldwater Creek in St. Louis, an area where children and family visit, was apparently contaminated by toxic chemicals left behind by the Manhattan Project. The Army Corps of Engineers is sampling the creek for radioactive material. (Army Corps of Engineers/Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection)
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Hawley is pushing to expand and extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which is set to expire this year. The legislation would allow people who may have been sickened by chemicals in St. Louis and other areas to receive compensation from the government.
“We have discovered that St. Louis was a uranium processing site. So was Kentucky. So was Tennessee, and that the extent of testing that was done in the West was much greater than we knew,” Hawley said.
The documents included internal memos from Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a company contracted by the U.S. government to process chemicals for nuclear weapons. The cache also included testing and sampling from government agencies, as well as warnings that sites exposed to those chemicals may not have been safe.
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“The evidence was there, the facts were there and it told the story from beginning to end,” Nickel said.
Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis worked to process uranium that would eventually help create the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. After the plant closed, the company worked to eliminate the chemicals. An internal memo from 1949 revealed that workers discussed health and safety concerns related to where they stored waste.
“Point number 2 refers to the problem of the disintegration of K-65 drums at the airport,” the memo said. “This is recognized as a serious problem.”
Federal officials first stored the waste at a site near the St. Louis airport. The location was near a creek that stretched 14 miles through northern St. Louis County. The barrels were left outdoors and exposed to the elements.
“You could immediately see that the government knew how dangerous this waste was,” Chapman said.
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Barrels of waste were left exposed in Missouri after the closure of a chemical plant linked to the Manhattan Project. (Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection)
Mallinckrodt’s internal memo details concerns among workers that chemicals could have leaked into the creek.”
“The health danger to workers handling K-65 material, especially in broken drums, is much more serious and immediate than the potential danger of contamination of streams,” he said.
“They were so toxic that they were told, ‘Don’t touch them. They’re too dangerous,'” Nickel said.
Flooding and flooding have been additional concerns each year along Coldwater Creek.
“Of course, they wouldn’t put hazardous waste next to a flooding stream,” Chapman said. “They knew it was probably leaking into the creek, but they didn’t know how much.”
Army Corps of Engineers officials said that because of flooding over decades, their cleanup work today has been complex.
Flooding and flooding occurs annually along St. Louis’ potentially contaminated Coldwater Creek. (Karen Nickel)
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“Wind and rain, and also flooding, carried away some of those contaminants, and they were carried by the current in the sediment and then deposited during flooding and also during normal flow,” said the St. Louis District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said program director Phil Moser. “All of this is historical contamination from decades ago, and that is why it is so difficult to find this contamination today.”
The Army Corps of Engineers has been sampling radioactive material along Coldwater Creek, some of which dates back to before St. Louis’ population boom.
“This was before houses were built. Lo and behold, in the late ’50s and ’60s, houses were being built on top of this,” Nickel said.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, crews moved the waste to a different location near the airport and again left it outdoors.
“The controls back then certainly weren’t what they are now. That’s why we’re in the current situation,” Moser said.
Crews stored Manhattan Project chemicals at various sites around St. Louis. (FoxNews)
Advocates and lawmakers, including Hawley, said the cleanup could move faster.
“For years, people in St. Louis were told, ‘Don’t worry. There’s no significant radiation.’ Or they were told, ‘Hey, we’ve cleaned everything up.’ In fact, those things weren’t true,” he said Hawley.
“It took years to do testing and really understand the scope and magnitude of how contaminated North County is,” Chapman said.
Tests conducted nearly 50 years ago found possible contamination in parts of the creek. A 1977 report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee detailed samples from Coldwater Creek. Tests carried out on drainage ditches, which carried runoff water to the stream, showed that average radiation levels were almost five times higher than usual.
“We haven’t seen that level at these sites since I’ve been here,” Moser said.
In the 1970s, workers moved the waste once again, this time to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri.
“It is not possible in the United States of America to buy a house next to a site that has radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project sitting for decades,” Chapman said.
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Chadman, Nickel and thousands of others would eventually call the neighborhoods near the West Lake landfill home.
“The time to act is now. This should have been done 50 years ago, but it hasn’t. So now is the time to do it,” Hawley said.
