Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), August 20, 2015
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Officials in charge of cleaning up pollution left over from the country’s early nuclear weapons program say there’s radioactive contamination in several residential yards that back up to Coldwater Creek.
The Army Corps of Engineers confirmed Wednesday that it had discovered what it described as “low-level” radioactive contamination from thorium 230, a uranium decay product. It has likely been on the properties for decades, carried by a creek that flows through several miles of subdivisions in north St. Louis County.
It is the first time in more than 15 years of Corps-directed cleanups in the region that the government has confirmed radioactive contamination on residential properties.
“We’ve spoken with those homeowners and let them know what we’re dealing with and what the risk is,” said Corps spokesman Mike Petersen. “We have discovered it in backyards, which is not too surprising based on what we’ve found along Coldwater Creek. There’s a lot of this contamination that has spread over the years.”
Petersen said he did not have an exact number of properties with confirmed contamination because some samples are still being validated. Where it has been found, it’s several inches under the soil surface and isn’t dangerous unless it is exposed.
“In the near term, it’s low risk,” he said. “We’ve told them don’t dig, we’re going to come out and restore the ground with clean fill soil.”
Most of the affected properties are along Palm Drive, located in a subdivision just northeast of Lindbergh Boulevard and Interstate 270. The Corps is still testing there, Petersen said, and it plans to begin testing properties along Alma Drive, St. Cin Lane and Foxtree Drive nearby.
It could be months before the Corps cleans up the properties because of other contaminated sites and limited federal funds.
Since 2013, the Corps has been remediating Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated with uranium processing waste stored at sites near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. The Corps is also cleaning up a site north of downtown St. Louis where Mallinckrodt, a former chemical company that now makes medical products, used to process uranium for the Manhattan Project and the early nuclear program.
“We have not had confirmation that we actually had radionuclides in people’s backyards,” said Jenell Wright, who lived in the area near the creek for almost 30 years and sits on a panel overseeing the cleanup. “This is massive.”
But she and others who have pushed for more testing along the creek’s floodplain aren’t surprised.
“We were hoping maybe they would prove us wrong,” Wright said. “Unfortunately our worst fears are being confirmed.”
The Corps operates the Formerly Utilized Remedial Action Program, or FUSRAP, to identify and remove radioactive waste from the early nuclear weapons program. It has identified radioactive contamination on private commercial property near the airport, but this is the first time it has found contamination on residential properties.
“It’s alarming for a lot of homeowners,” Petersen said. “We’ve been working on this project since 1997 and a lot of folks don’t know it because it wasn’t literally in their backyard.”
The Corps says it has removed the source of the contamination from a site near the airport, where the government allowed uranium processing waste to be stored. It plans to follow Coldwater Creek all the way to the Missouri River looking for contamination that spread during flooding.
In late June, the Corps told Hazelwood residents it had identified contamination in St. Cin Park, a portion of Duchesne Park and some Archdiocese property adjacent to St. Ferdinand Cemetery.
It is in the process of cleaning up St. Cin Park and Petersen said it will move on to cleaning up residential yards after that. It could be nearly the end of the year before work starts, though Petersen said he wasn’t sure on timing.
Petersen said the Corps understands that “it sounds very alarming” when Corps representatives tell homeowners parts of their yards are radioactively contaminated. But he said “there’s nothing on the surface that we’ve found” that would pose a high risk.
“We’ve taken the homeowners out and shown them where we’ve found it so they know,” he said.
Wright noted that when Coldwater Creek flooded while she was growing up, it would cause sewer backups into people’s basements, and she suspects some contamination could have entered there. She also noted that development in the area may have moved contamination beyond the creek’s floodplain.
She and others have begun tracking cancer rates in former residents, and she said two of her friends recently died. One was in his 40s.
All of this work was not in the original FUSRAP cleanup budget, Wright said. As the Corps continues to test more property along the creek and follow the trail of radiation, she said Congress needs to step up with more funding. The Corps is doing a good job, she said, but a backlog of cleanup projects could continue to grow without the budget.
“We have a huge problem,” she said. “They understand they’re at the tip of the iceberg.”
The Corps will host a meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Hazelwood Civic Center East at 8969 Dunn Road to discuss the cleanup. St. Louis County Health Department Director Faisal Khan is also expected to update residents on a cancer survey his department is conducting.
Editor’s note: The story has been updated to clarify that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began testing and remediating radioactive contamination along Coldwater Creek in 2013. They have been cleaning other sites in the region for over 15 years.