screengrab via trailer
The First Secret City screens at the St. Louis International Film Festival Sunday, November 15.
The West Lake Landfill has been in the news a lot lately—and not just in Missouri. Newspapers in Japan, Russia, and the U.K. have written about the "underground smoldering event" that is moving towards a cache of illegally dumped Manhattan Project-era nuclear waste.
Out-of-town reporters have asked: how did it come to this? How did this happen? But questions like these have dogged people in St. Louis as well.
The First Secret City, co-directed by Alison Carrick and C.D. Stelzer, tells that story from the beginning—how St. Louis helped build the bombs that were dropped on Japan, then scattered the resulting waste all over the region, often in astonishingly reckless and dangerous ways. The title refers to Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, "secret cities," where scientists worked during the Manhattan Project. But it's also a nod toward the fact that St. Louis' Manhattan Project history has been buried and ignored, much like the nuclear waste that was generated. When Carrick began collaborating with Stelzer on the project, she says she began with very simple questions, but they were ones that were hard to find answers to.
"Why was it stored at the airport? Why is this not in the historical memory of St. Louis as a city? That to me is the fascinating question," she says. "We all know about the World's Fair, we all know about the Cardinal wins and things that are part of our history, but this is off the radar. This is not part of the cultural memory of the city."
Stelzer has been covering these issues for years, beginning in the early 1990s for The Riverfront Times, and Carrick works in an archive. The film shows off both their talents, combining old-school investigative reporting and a poetic touch with historic footage, including 1950s animated sequences, a clip of Robert Oppenheimer, and an old public access TV show featuring interviews with AEC scientists that manages to be both hilarious and disturbing. It also dispenses with the narrative voiceover and allows its subjects—including longtime nuclear activist Kay Drey, Washington University science professor Robert Criss, sickened worker Larry Burgan, and Dawn Chapman of Just Moms STL—to speak for themselves. The effect recalls recent docs that took a similar approach (like the devastating Let the Fire Burn). Using all of these voices to create a choral effect, The First Secret City tells a large story and many smaller stories all at once, though West Lake has a very prominent place in the narrative, something Carrick says they didn't anticipate.
"The way I've been describing it to people is the first hour is the history leading up to the current day," Carrick says. "It's bad enough what happened out at the airport and at Coldwater Creek. But that's contained, and they're still cleaning it up. But a fire, that's like OK, there's a time factor."
That is a fact not lost on the families living near the landfill. In one scene, the crowd at a meeting scheduled by the EPA's Kansas City office finally lose patience with government officials.
"That one big explosion we filmed, the fact that didn't happen at every meeting...that was a shocker," Carrick says. "The [EPA officials] felt like they were being picked on, or that every question challenged their authority. But then rather than attempting to answer the question, they were just sticking to their talking points. At the same time, they don't seem to know everything that's going on with the site. They were sticking to the timeline they had, even though there's so much conflicting information about, even the amount of waste they claim was dumped."
Dawn Chapman, who lives near the West Lake landfill, asks questions on camera that many seem afraid to pose—including questioning whether EPA or government officials even know what exactly is in the landfill, or have the technical know-how to clean it up.
"Dawn's quote is a great one," Carrick says. "It's like if it's no big deal, if it's just what they say it is, then why is everyone so freaked out about it? And of course the fire just complicates things greatly. Two years ago, they were talking about building the barrier. We started really following this in July of 2013, and in September, they said we're going to build this barrier, that'll help the issue," she continues. "You've got the south quarry, and then you have the north quarry, and you have the area where they think the waste originally was, in the neck. They put these interceptor wells there that were supposed to slow the fire down, or stall it. And it did seem to do that for a while. Now they're claiming it's moved higher, so they were going to try to build a barrier, but they couldn't find a clean line without waste."
Another question people continued to circle around to in the onslaught of West Lake coverage: if things are so bad, how did we not know about this before now? The interviewees give several explanations, political corruption included. But of course the biggest factor is simple human psychology.
"We did keep coming back to that," Carrick says. "There's this huge element of denial that's part of it. I moved here when I was 10, and I never learned anything about it till a few years ago...I think the denial is very deep."
The First Secret City screens at the St. Louis International Film Festival Sunday, November 15 at noon at the Tivoli Theater, followed by a Q&A with the directors. Get all the details here.
