nuclear-news

County parks, homes, businesses remain open and untested after decades of exposure to potentially contaminated creek This is part one of a three-part series examining the effects of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project on St. Louis and its suburbs.

HAZELWOOD, Mo. — Karen Nickel had never even heard of lupus before she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease six years ago.

Today she says she takes as many as 18 pills a day — “and that’s just to make me feel OK.”

“Sometimes I can’t even get out of bed,” Nickel said. “Sometimes I can’t even let someone hug or touch me because it hurts so bad.”

Lupus causes a patient’s immune system to turn on its own body, attacking healthy joint and organ tissues. It is most common in middle-aged women such as Nickel, but has recently been linked to exposure to uranium.

That’s what Nickel thinks caused her lupus. She’s since found out that at least three other people from her childhood neighborhood also have the disease. They all grew up in a neighborhood bordered by a suburban St. Louis creek that was contaminated with nuclear weapons waste for decades before any cleanup operations started.

There may still be radioactive waste in the creek, which regularly floods parks, businesses, and neighborhoods — most of which have never been tested for radioactivity and remain open to the public with no notification of the potential risks……..

What many did not know was that they were living downstream from a 22-acre field acquired in 1946 by the long-gone Atomic Energy Commission. Hundreds of thousands of tons of waste — much of it radioactive — were dumped there, including some 60 tons of uranium-laced sand from Nazi Germany’s nuclear program that was captured by the United States en route to Japan near the end of WWII.

Soil samples taken by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1990s show that soils contaminated with forms of uranium, thorium and radium were found as deep as 20 feet in some places. The creek is near the westernmost boundary of the site and then flows nearly 20 miles through St. Louis County municipalities such as Florissant, Hazelwood and Black Jack .

Radioactive materials were carried into Coldwater Creek when it rained, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. In the late 1990s, the Corps found radioactive waste approximately five miles downstream from the storage site during a bridge renovation project.

“I lived my life outside and now I feel like my childhood was a lie,” Nickel said. “All that time I spent outside, I was being poisoned.”

Nickel said her sister was once taken to the hospital where doctors discovered that her ovaries were covered in cysts. She was 11 years old at the time. The same thing happened to the girl next door — she was 9.

Nickel said she knows of at least 15 people from her childhood neighborhood alone that have died of cancer. She estimates that there were approximately 25 houses in the area back then, with about 75 people.

At age 33, former Florissant resident Jennifer Smith was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. In the 1950s, doctors observed unusually high levels of that same rare leukemia among the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Smith said she knows of at least four others from her old neighborhood who also have the disease.

“During the years I lived in Florissant as a teenager, the creek would flood into our backyard and covered our vegetable garden — the garden I ate out of all the time,” Smith said. “My teenage bedroom was downstairs. The creek would leak into my bedroom through the window, and it also had flooded our basement several times. I had [a lot of] exposure, physically, to the creek.”…

Regarding contaminated sites in St. Louis, long-term, low-level exposure to radiation is what poses the greatest threat to human health, said St. Louis County Department of Health Director Faisal Khan. Khan, who is new to the position, has been vocal about this issue, becoming one of the few government officials at any level to call for residents’ concerns about radiation exposure to be addressed.

“The population that grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s — they were very hard hit, and anecdotally at least there seems to be an environmental health concern,” Khan said. “It has been an environmental health disaster that has unfolded over decades, and is only now coming to light with the extent of community concern and angst about what has been done.”…….http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/4/americas-atomic-legacy-haunts-st-louis.html