While Oppenheimer has made Los Alamos a household name, Missouri moms are struggling to add another, better-known city to the map: St. Louis.
The Manhattan Project sourced its uranium from Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, who processed a majority of it right on the iconic Mississippi River, north of downtown St. Louis. At the end of the war, the federal government moved the resulting waste from Mallinckrodt's processing facilities to an unused bit of land near the local airport, leaving the drums of waste entirely unprotected from the elements. This was a known pollution and contamination hazard as early as 1949, but various parties including Mallinckrodt shrugged and left it.
When the Cotter Corporation bought the hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the federal government in the 1960s they moved it to a location on Latty Avenue called the Hazelwood Interim Storage Site (HISS), and continued to leave the barrels exposed to the elements. Both sites border Coldwater Creek, a prominent feature of St. Louis' large suburban neighborhoods. Over the decades of open-air exposure, runoff from the storage sites contaminated the creek for miles downstream.
Now, residents of St. Louis are seeing the consequences.
Federal and Corporate Responsibility
I would like to say that part of the difficulty in addressing the situation in St. Louis is a back-and-forth about who is ultimately economically responsible for the damages caused by environmental negligence. The answer, though, appears to be pretty simple: the federal government.
The Manhattan Project was conducted under the United States Army Corps of Engineers, a branch of the Army. The U.S. government contracted Mallinckrodt to do the processing and purchased the land near the airport where the waste was first stored. The Department of Energy is responsible for any cleanup and guardianship of radioactive contamination related to developing nuclear weapons. The Superfund program, run by the Environmental protection Agency, was established in 1980 just for situations like these — specifically, to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances.
In 1990, following a seven-part series by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the radioactive contamination in the area the year before, the Department of Energy initiated a plan to clean up the original downtown Mallinckrodt site, as well as the airport site and Latty Avenue along Coldwater Creek. The DOE passed it back to the Army Corps of Engineers, through the FUSRAP program, which claims that the areas under their jurisdiction have been remediated since the 2000s.
The ongoing issue of the West Lake Landfill feels exemplary somehow, but of what, I’m not sure. The DOE purposefully excluded it from their list of sites to be cleaned in 1990, even though the material kept there came from the Latty Avenue site, so the Superfund program took over jurisdiction. In 2008, they made a decision: they decided to put a “cap” on it and leave it alone. They’ve taken no further action, essentially because no catastrophic events have happened yet.
“Oh yeah? Prove it.”
Missouri state representative Tricia Byrnes has voiced her support for Just Moms, and sponsored legislation intended to help them. Unfortunately, this is probably because of her own close experience with the contamination.
In 2016, Byrnes’ young son was diagnosed with a thymoma, a rare form of cancer usually caused by radiation therapy treating different cancer. When she reached out to the people responsible for the radioactive contamination in her neighborhood, they asked her to prove that the cancer was related.
Her response: “How dare they ask a mother of a child where her medical study is to prove the atomic bomb kills people.”
Karen Nickel, one of the cofounders of Just Moms STL, lives with several autoimmune disorders simultaneously. Her sister had ovarian cysts as a child. Her five-year old granddaughter was born with them.
Lowering or eliminating the burden of proof and guaranteeing health screenings and medical care for at-risk St. Louis residents is not only the responsibility of the government to its people, but potentially the only way to keep people out of bankruptcy. In the United States, medical bills from chronic illness or cancer treatments are ruinous. 41% of U.S. citizens are currently under medical debt, and it’s one of the leading causes of bankruptcy.
Dr. Kim Visintine’s son was three weeks old during his first chemotherapy treatment. A year later, the Visintine family had accrued $100,000 in medical debt. Six years later, they lost their young son to glioblastoma, a very aggressive brain cancer.
While Just Moms advocates for a buyout of the most contaminated neighborhoods, Dr. Visintine opposes the idea. She cites how most families bought their homes before real estate prices plummeted due to knowledge of the radioactivity, and the government would almost certainly remunerate according to the new property values, leaving many people worse off than before. Dawn Chapman, whose young daughter developed a tumor on her salivary gland, says a buyout is an incomplete answer, since “this poison would still be inside us.” Still, it’s hard to imagine that any solution involves allowing people to continue living in such unhealthy areas.
St. Louis Standing Alone
Whether as a political maneuver to see their demands met or as an honest reflection of their inner emotional lives, Just Moms STL aligns itself with the same forces that have poisoned their neighborhood creek and led to the deaths of their family members. Rather than as one of many communities who have been impacted by nuclear weapons usage and testing (or “bomb-affected persons,” the literal meaning of hibakusha), participants have identified themselves as “victims of friendly fire” and 'a “national sacrifice zone” that paid the price for “saving our country” through contributions to the nuclear program.’
It’s difficult to say if this aspect has been assumed or played up to better speak the language of the politicians who have the power to grant their demands. If this were the case, Just Moms would be stuck in a kind of limbo, unable to grieve with similarly affected communities without paying a dear price, at least somewhat literally.
Conclusions
While the United States seems no closer to coming to terms with its crimes against civilians during and after World War II, I hope the many affected communities of St. Louis will be able to draw greater national attention. To find out more about their organizing, I redirect you to the community website, which features information about donations and local events, as well as historical documents and other information about the case of St. Louis.
Major sources for this post came from AP News, Muckrock.com, the Missouri Independent (2), STL Today, and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, as well as Lacy M. Johnson’s 2017 article for Guernica.