MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. — If it were any other morning after six inches of overnight snow in St. Louis, Dawn Chapman probably would have been sledding with her three kids.
But one phone call from a distressed neighbor at 6 a.m. changed that. A 21-year-old who lives nearby — their friend’s daughter — got the biopsy results from her ruptured appendix. The tests confirmed everyone’s fears: appendix cancer.
Chapman lives near the West Lake Landfill, a site located in the heart of metropolitan St. Louis that increasingly appears to have a much more ominous past than many thought. Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services data from 2014 has also shown increased rates of rare cancers near the site.
In 1973, radioactive waste a private company had bought from the government was illegally dumped at the landfill. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended the waste be removed in 1988, but the company that now owns the land has — with EPA approval — opted for containment as opposed to removal, maintaining that the waste there is low-level when it comes to radioactivity, and not a threat to public health.
But it may not be that simple. Government documents unearthed by residents suggest that the extent of the contamination may be far worse — perhaps at an unprecedented level, some experts say. Following a largely broken or incomplete paper trail, residents and activists have found evidence that there may be soil laced with uranium, thorium and radium buried there.
And there is another problem: the fire. It smolders underneath an adjacent landfill, burning at some 300 degrees and slowly moving toward where the waste is thought to be.
Nobody is quite sure what will happen if the two meet, but locals and the county are preparing for the worst: a nuclear emergency in the middle of St. Louis.
The truth is that nobody is really sure what is buried at the West Lake Landfill, or where — and that’s the problem. The historical record regarding the site is broken, inconsistent, and largely based on hearsay. What is known for certain is that the radioactive waste was disposed of illegally. The private company that bought much of the government’s waste in St. Louis violated its license in 1973 by dumping it there.
Arizona-based Republic Services, which now owns the site through a subsidiary company, maintains that the waste is mostly 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate (which the company calls a low-level radioactive material) mixed with tens-of-thousands of tons of soil, then dumped at the landfill. What has come into question is what was in the tens-of-thousands of tons of soil, sometimes referred to as “clean fill” in government documents.
Documents obtained from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and Nuclear Regulatory Commission show that the “clean fill” may have also been contaminated, and researchers have concluded that there has never been an accurate analysis of what exactly was dumped at the West Lake Landfill.
The soil came from another radioactive waste storage site in St. Louis, currently being cleaned up by the Army Corps of Engineers. A 2013 report by a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies found that the “clean fill” dumped at West Lake was composed of 12-18 inches of topsoil scraped from this other site.
The remaining soil at that storage site — the soil left behind after the “clean fill” was removed and dumped at West Lake — was found to be highly contaminated with thorium and uranium. If what was left behind was highly contaminated, residents and activists ask, what was in the soil moved off the top — the “clean fill?”
“You can only imagine what was in that top 15 to 18 inches,” said Lucas Hixson, a Chicago-based nuclear researcher who has been doing research around West Lake for three years. “There’s never been an accurate characterization of [contamination at] the landfill.”
Hixson was part of a team that analyzed archived Nuclear Regulatory Commission data from samples taken at the West Lake Landfill in the 1980s. Their analysis of the data found dangerous levels of thorium, uranium, and radium at the landfill, which, due to the nature of radioactive decay, will only become more radioactive over time. Its radioactivity has already increased four-fold since it was dumped there, according to Hixson.
“None of the data that has been released is indicative of the 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate,” Hixson said.
When asked about the potential misidentification of radioactive materials at the landfill, Republic Services spokesperson Russ Knocke referred questions to the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Since that time [of initial characterization,] analysis of the additional data collected has demonstrated the need for further characterization of the radiologically impacted material,” EPA District Seven spokesman Benjamin Washburn said in an emailed statement to Al Jazeera. “In response, EPA has directed the responsible parties to perform an additional round of site characterization to identify locations of [radiologically impacted material]. EPA is overseeing this additional work.”
Locals aren’t satisfied with that answers they’re getting, and are increasingly angered by what they see as a lack of accountability and action.
“Where are the responsible parties?” Chapman said, banging her hand on her coffee table. She lives less than two miles from the site. “Where is the guy who authorized the waste to be dumped at West Lake? I want to know where he is.”
Did the DOE avoid responsibility?
As part of its initial report on West Lake, the EPA determined that the Department of Energy was one of the parties responsible for the contamination, since one of its predecessor organizations — the Atomic Energy Commission — had produced and sold the waste to the company that dumped it. But when pushed to incorporate the landfill into the DOE’s cleanup program — the Former Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) — officials resisted, according to documents residents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
In files dated to 1992, the DOE pushed back after an unnamed Missouri official suggested that the site be incorporated into the department’s cleanup program. The DOE official claimed that because the government’s radioactive waste had been sold to a private company for its commercial value before it was dumped at the landfill, the department retained no legal responsibility over the contamination of West Lake.
West Lake Landfill was never incorporated into the DOE’s program — now under the operations of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — and it remains under the jurisdictions of the EPA’s Superfund program, having been added to the National Priority List in 1989.
“It was an arbitrary judgment,” said Ed Smith of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. “Not only are we concerned about the overall Superfund program and that concern as it relates to the West Lake landfill, but we’re also dissatisfied with how the EPA’s handling of West Lake has gone over the past couple decades.”
The documents also suggest that the DOE knew of the severity of the site’s contamination.
In one 1992 file, an official from the DOE’s Office of Environmental Restoration wrote, “the West Lake Landfill is likely to have significant contamination from a wide range of sources and that it is not in the best interest of DOE to be the deep pocket for cleanup of sites at which it has no legal responsibility or authority,” then suggested that the EPA seek funding from the owners between whom the property had passed since contamination.
In a letter to a St. Louis environmental activist dated 1995, that same official wrote, “budgetary issues have never played any role in the designation of [FUSRAP] sites, nor have I ever heard anyone suggest that budgetary issues should be a factor in the designation of sites.”
But locals aren’t buying it, citing the first letter, and many of them want the West Lake Landfill to be transferred to the Army Corps by way of the FUSRAP program, saying the EPA is too bogged down by bureaucracy and politics to effectively monitor the site. It would take an act of Congress to transfer the site to FUSRAP.
