I cannot do justice to the rage that Dawn Chapman is feeling right now. So, she's going to do some of the writing this week.
Chapman, her family and many of her Bridgeton neighbors are victims of the federal government right here in St. Louis. They live in close proximity to the West Lake Landfill, which continues to house substantial amounts of some of the most toxic radioactive waste in human history.
The Chapmans — including their own child — and others like them are sick and justly terrified at the prospect that they don't know how sick they are, or even from what illnesses. They are suffering.
Theirs is a story that makes one wish there was no 24/7 news cycle. It's so easy today for each environmental story or health scare or bureaucratic outrage to seem just like the next. There's so much noise out there. So much hyperbole.
This one is different. It is a horrific legacy of the secret Manhattan Project of the 1940s, under which St. Louis' Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. participated in the manufacture of the atom bomb. They didn't know what to do with the radioactive byproducts then — they were quietly termed "poisons" — and they don't know what to do with them now.
So, they dumped the waste on Latty Road near what became St. Louis Lambert International Airport and — of all places — in Coldwater Creek, which winds like an invisible poisonous snake through 20 miles or more of north county. When they finally realized how stupid that was in the 1970s, the powers that be quietly shuttled lots of the waste to the landfill where it sits today.
What has ensued is nothing short of a crime against the community perpetrated for nearly eight decades by the U.S. government, its military, and its agencies charged with protecting the public. It is arguably the most underestimated and underreported story in St. Louis' history.
At a government hearing a few years back, a contractor from those days of yore recounted how — on his last day of work transporting the poisons in a company dump truck — he was told to leave the keys in the truck and walk away. The last thing he saw was the whole thing being buried in a giant mound of dirt.
The people responsible for this atrocity know what they did. It's a little late for accountability for the original culprits of the 1940s: They've pretty much all passed away. But generations of government bureaucrats have failed to protect the public with anything more than an occasional study. This has been a "whole of government" disaster, made no less unforgivable by the fact that it has been bipartisan.
As recently as last week, the Environmental Protection Agency let on — in direct contradiction to pretty much all previous words uttered for years — that the government keeps finding more toxic waste around the landfill. Apparently, that means more delays and suffering for the residents near the site. It is well known that fires burn ominously in the landfill. The same authorities who say they were blindsided by the latest discovery of waste are some of the same ones who have assured residents that the waste won't catch fire.
Dawn Chapman is the co-founder of Just Moms STL, a group of citizens nobly demanding facts and transparency from their government, while trying to lend support to one another. She was a leader of the effort before the health horrors literally hit home. Her own son has developed extreme health issues that doctors at Children's Hospital are battling to diagnose, so far unsuccessfully. He is not alone: A recent study showed a 300 percent increase in childhood brain cancer in the 63043 ZIP code near the landfill — not unlike all the statistics and anecdotal horrors that have been discovered along Coldwater Creek.
Chapman took her rage to the Post-Dispatch, where she submitted an article for publication. Editor Tod Robberson wrote her that it would work better as a trimmed letter to the editor. But he offered this:
"If you want to go bigger, it needs to be 700 words. I would recommend reducing the emotional content and focusing on why you believe current federal cleanup efforts are not enough." Chapman was not pleased.
Far be it from me to second-guess another publication's policies. But it does seem a metaphor for what's missing from the media coverage — and more importantly, the town square — with respect to the tragedy that continues to unfold in the St. Louis area.
I think we need more emotional content. Like this from Dawn Chapman:
I've been sitting here letting these couple of sentences from the article ["Concerns linger as completion date for Coldwater Creek cleanup pushed to 2038," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 20, 2021] about the delayed cleanup of radioactive wastes in West Lake Landfill and Cold Water Creek float around in my mind and trying to find some peace. Then it hit me while jogging tonight that [peace] is what has been denied to my family and many others who have been exposed and are now facing consequences from decades of neglect and this type of PR gaslighting from the Department of Energy! Buried in the middle of this article is a statement by health physicist Jon Rankins, who works for the Department of Energy, the very Federal Agency who is responsible for all the decades of death and chronic illnesses this region has and will continue to face.
"We need to make progress in cleaning this up, and not falsely alarming people, causing stress on their lives, or causing damage to their property for no reason," Rankins said. "You have to respect those things. There is a gray area."
Are you kidding me? You know what causes stress on my life and the lives of my community members and family? Watching your kid get sicker and sicker after already being diagnosed with one incurable illness! Rejoicing about finally getting an appointment at Children's after months of advocating while knowing that the odds are not in our favor. Preparing to hear the words "extremely rare" be used and then having to hand over the stack of [Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry] and CDC recommendations to the doctor and watch as his/her/their face drop and reality set in! Preparing for more medical bills and tests, which means more times having to tell THIS STORY about how we were all poisoned. But the cherry on the top is knowing that yesterday, today and tomorrow someone else was and will be put at risk! And ALL because this Federal Agency and the people who work for it are more worried about PR and large crowds of people yelling at them than they are saving their lives!
And let's talk about respect for a minute[.] I can think of nothing more disrespectful than withholding information because you or an agency you work for has decided that I can't handle the truth! I assure you we find a way to handle it everyday! We find a way to handle and deal with the stress of paying for the medical bills!
Respectfully Jon Rankins...NO! There is no gray area when it comes to public health and this region's ability to understand the toxic mess your employer, the Department of Energy, KNOWINGLY left behind for us all to be exposed to! You don't get to decide what we can and cannot handle! The Department of Energy has failed at protecting our physical health! What makes you think we would ever trust them to know what is good for our mental health?
Ray Hartmann founded the Riverfront Times in 1977. Contact him at rhartmann1952@gmail.com or catch him on Donnybrook at 7 p.m. on Thursdays on the Nine Network and St. Louis In the Know With Ray Hartmann from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday thru Friday on KTRS (550 AM).
