Screengrab from the trailer of "The First Secret City"
Last fall, we spoke to Alison Carrick, one of the filmmakers behind the new documentary The First Secret City. (You can read our conversation with her here.) The title of the film refers to the Manhattan Project's "secret cities," including Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, where the first nuclear bombs were assembled and tested, unbeknownst to the public. Carrick and her co-director, investigative journalist C.D. Stelzer, set out to tell the story of St. Louis' past as a secret city: it was Mallinckrodt that refined the uranium for Fat Man and Little Boy. They discovered that this city is still holding its secrets close, often to the detriment of public health. The highest-profile example, of course, is the burning West Lake Landfill. No one—not the EPA, not St. Louis County—really knows what's in there, though it has been established that it likely includes remnants of the Cotter Concentrates, which is some of the most toxic nuclear waste in the world.
"Why is this not in the historical memory of St. Louis as a city? That to me is the fascinating question," Carrick 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."
If you didn't have a chance to see the film when it premiered at the St. Louis International Film Festival last November, or have missed the handful of screenings that have happened since then, there's an opportunity to see the film for free this Saturday. Just Moms STL, the grassroots organization that has been pushing for cleanup at West Lake for years, and the citizen's group Missouri Accountability Project (MAP), are co-presenting the screening at St. Matthew's Church (2613 Potomac) from 3 to 6 p.m. The screening will be followed by a Q&A; you can RSVP at MAP's website, here. (Also of note: Kellie Everett of the Southwest Watson Sweethearts will be there to play the Bridgeton Fire Song before the movie.) You can find more information on the Facebook Event Page. If you've been following the news about small nuke waste cleanups around North County, the lasting health effects from the contamination of Goldwater Creek, or just the events of the past week—including the federal government's resistance to forcing the EPA to turn the Bridgeton site over to the Army Corps of Engineers, or Chris Koster's lashing out at the EPA over their foot-dragging—The First Secret City not only provides the backstory to put each individual problem in context, but also shows how all of these seemingly disconnected events are part of one big problem—and warns that St. Louis has hardly begun to scratch the surface as far as coping with it.
