Earlier this year, the Army Corps of Engineers reached an agreement with Cotter Corporation and Norfolk Southern Railway Company wherein those two companies and the federal government would pay a combined $163 million to compensate the corps for the work it did cleaning up nuclear waste mishandled by the two companies decades ago in North County.
Though the parties entered into that consent decree with little public fanfare in January, Dawn Chapman, co-founder of the activist group Just Moms STL, tells SLM that the decree was a big deal—one that could have big implications for the clean up of West Lake Landfill.
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The story of World War II-era nuclear waste being mishandled in St. Louis is long and winding, but a very short version goes something like this: St. Louis played a key role in the Manhattan Project, which created the nuclear bombs that ultimately won the Pacific theater in World War II. The radioactive waste from the St. Louis operations was haphazardly stored, first at a site on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood. The Cotter Corporation, which was responsible for that site, eventually moved much of the waste to Colorado, but not before dumping tons of topsoil contaminated by uranium at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton. That radioactive material is currently perilously close to an unyielding underground fire and—as Chapman and many others have been shouting from the rooftops—if the underground fire meets the radioactive waste, whatever happens won’t be good.
The consent decree entered into in January concerns the Latty Avenue site. The Army Corps sued Cotter Corp. and Norfolk Southern last December, but as part of the decree settling the case, the Department of Energy is putting up the lion’s share of the funds for cleanup—a hair under $92 million.
“It’s the most that the Department of Energy has ever come forward and said, OK, yes, we’re going to accept this percentage of liability,” says Chapman. “The percentage in that consent decree is number one, the most important part of the story.”
Just Moms STL has been the primary driver of pressuring the federal government to clean up radioactive sites in St. Louis. More recently, the group along with Senator Josh Hawley were instrumental in expanding to St. Louis a federal program to financially compensate those who were exposed to radioactive material via the contaminated Coldwater Creek.
Chapman is happy to see serious money put behind the Latty cleanup. But she also wants to see the Department of Energy take the same level of responsibility for the West Lake Landfill, which contains waste near the “subsurface smoldering event” in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill and whose hazards she has been warning about for years.
She hopes the level of responsibility that the Department of Energy took for the Latty site sets a precedent. “Right now, they are working on a similar consent decree at West Lake, it is sitting on the desk right now of Super Fund attorneys,” she says. “Since they did it there, they should do it here.”
If the Department of Energy were to shoulder the lion’s share of West Lake’s costs, that would be a gamechanger, she says. The EPA is currently the agency tasked with supervising West Lake, but they don’t have the resources to completely ameliorate its hazards.
The Department of Energy, however, does.
That’s because the Department of Energy has a judgment fund set up for cleanup at sites where the department was responsible for contamination. That fund automatically replenishes, Chapman says. “When they remove $10 million, they put $10 million in. When they remove $200 million, they put $200 million back in.”
The money from the Latty consent decree has gone to the Army Corps’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, and once the money is there it is specifically designated to clean up nuclear waste. (As Chapman put it, the dollars can’t somehow wind up via the vagaries of the federal government being used to build a levee in Mississippi.)
Chapman says that the EPA is relying on the parties responsible for West Lake’s contamination to pay for the clean up. Without an agreement involving the Department of Energy, there simply wouldn’t be enough funds, in which case, “West Lake will sit and continue to contaminate this entire community forever.”
In a statement, the EPA said that the Latty Avenue consent decree does not have bearing on any future West Lake Landfill consent decree. It also added, however, that the Department of Energy’s “role and financial responsibility” for West Lake Landfill’s “next phase of remedial action is currently the subject of negotiations and EPA cannot provide further details at this time.”
Chapman says that she hopes the Department of Energy will come out and make a relatively simple statement, saying that what they did at Latty they will do at West Lake. “The ball is in their court,” she says. “We need the Department of Energy to come in and commit to at least the same percentage at West Lake. And if they do and they sign this document, then we’re going to get our cleanup and we’re going to be able to stop the exposure.”
