Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
They screamed. They chanted. They cried. They made themselves heard.
But they were not listened to.
More than 500 residents packed Pattonville High School Auditorium on Tuesday night for a meeting with federal and state environmental officials about the crisis at the West Lake Landfill on St. Charles Rock Road, where horrific odors and underground fires within 1,200 feet of a nuclear-waste site somehow have people up in arms.
Check that. It’s a crisis only to the residents and those who work near the landfill. To the government, it’s just a situation—expressly not an urgent one—that’s only of concern because of the annoyance of odors that officials say are diminishing.
I was there for the 2 ½-hour meeting, at the urging of some of the residents who had read my commentary on the tragic situation at Coldwater Creek, where people are suffering dearly from exposure to some of the same Cold War-era radioactive waste that was dumped as a byproduct of the Manhattan Project.
At least in the case of Coldwater Creek, the federal government has belatedly moved to remove much of the waste (albeit of no comfort to the people whose lives were already destroyed by it). That’s because it’s part of the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, under which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is charged with removing it.
The West Lake Landfill hosts the same toxic waste, but because of how it got there (among other factors), it is classified only as a Superfund site of the Environmental Protection Agency, meaning that the Army Corps of Engineers isn’t involved. Long story short, there are no plans in place to remove the waste, only to cover it up.
This is no solace to the people who aren’t buying the idea that their crisis is nothing more than an inconvenience, and a non-urgent one at that. They showed up angry at Tuesday’s meeting, in sharp contrast to the government officials, who showed up with a Zen-like sense of calm.
Funny thing, how irrational folks can become when they get it in their heads that odors smelling like a cross between rotten eggs and decaying bodies might pose a health risk. Or that underground fires less than one-quarter mile from a nuclear-waste dump are a big deal.
From the government’s standpoint, the purpose of Tuesday’s meeting was to calm everyone down. No less a high-ranking official than EPA Region 7 Administrator Karl Brooks took the lead role, assuring everyone from the outset that the landfill posed no health risks whatsoever, provided one didn’t come in direct contact with it by trespassing through the chain-link fence that cordons it off.
This, of course, brought howls of protest from angry crowd members, who were not comforted at the notion that a chain-link fence could protect them from radioactive waste that officials just admitted would be dangerous to contact directly. But Brooks and five officials he brought with him—two from his agency and three from the state—stuck firmly to the position that the landfill waste and the fires below the ground posed no health risk to the public.
And that wasn’t all. Brooks' most-repeated point was that “the weight of the evidence shows that there’s adequate time to consider the alternatives.” Translated: The EPA is in absolutely no hurry to correct a situation that so many in the audience consider intolerable.
None of the passion in the room—not the shouts of “What's wrong with you?” and “What about our children?”—would change that. The officials promised to continue testing and continue monitoring the situation, but they would not concede that there was any need to take any other actions at the moment. Nor would they discuss timetables.
There was a total disconnect with the audience. The very first questioner was a man who said he has asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cannot open the windows of his house, four blocks from the landfill. He also claims that he has suffered from pneumonia for each of the five years since he moved to the area, after never having it before.
True, his claims couldn’t be verified at the meeting. Nor could those of the women who spoke through tears about battling cancer that they believe may have been caused by exposure to the waste. Or those who talked about the children showing signs of allergy and respiratory problems that had never surfaced before.
Every time one of them would raise concerns, one of the EPA or state officials would calmly ignore the specifics of the claims and restate the position that nothing in the data collected by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources or the EPA found levels of dangerous toxins or other emissions that would even approach a public-health concern.
For example, Jonathan Garoutte, an official with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, tried to assuage the audience by explaining that the odor-causing chemicals emitting the rotten smells were actually low-toxicity chemicals that don’t have long-term health implications. He said that getting rid of the rotten-egg smell was a high priority and progress was being made, but that people needn’t worry that these things were a danger to their health or their children's.
Would you buy that argument if it were you and your kids inhaling these “non-toxic” chemicals? I wouldn’t.
And I especially wouldn’t after listening to a nurse from the audience assail Garoutte’s department for using data from a few nearby hospital emergency rooms as evidence that there was no spike in respiratory illnesses reported in connection with the hazardous waste. She pointed out that people (especially ones with private insurance) would have gone to their own physicians or other hospitals, thus rendering the health department’s data meaningless.
There’s a pattern here. Regarding Coldwater Creek, the health department’s response to the horrific evidence of cancers, birth defects, and other serious illnesses was to take a snapshot of the most current cancer rates that it could find, utterly ignoring the small detail that something like 90 percent of those affected had moved from the area being studied or died.
The most galling part is that when the department conducts these partial and obviously flawed studies, it doesn’t bother to acknowledge the fatal limitations, and it presents its data to the public as fact. It is indecent for an agency charged with protecting the public's health to act so irresponsibly.
So count me among the skeptics. I don’t believe the current crop of government experts is any more to be trusted than those who have allowed this horrific toxic waste to be stored in a major metropolitan area for decades.
I don’t question anyone’s motives. I offer no conspiracy theories. I’m just like the vast majority of the audience at Pattonville: I’m not buying what the officials are selling. And I’m not even directly affected.
The biggest impression that this meeting left with me had more to do with style than substance, but I think it was most revealing. It was this: Through 2 ½ hours of raw emotion, of people crying, of people plaintively asking for their fears to be assuaged, of people begging—literally, begging—for help, not one of the six government officials on stage ever expressed a syllable of sympathy, empathy, or human concern to a single person speaking from the audience.
Not once did Brooks or any of the others onstage even begin to show any concern for the obvious misery of those in the audience. They stuck to the talking points, which meant no acknowledgment of any public-health concern, but they also maintained poker faces no matter what the questioner said.
This is not normal human behavior. If some poor lady is crying about having cancer while asking you a question, how hard is it to at least say you’re sorry for her suffering? But that lady might as well have been asking for an explanation of “picocuries per liter,” based on the emotionless reactions from the men and women who presumably were there in her service.
By the end of the night, it was pretty clear that the EPA and state officials were there for the purpose of meeting their statutory obligation to receive input from the public. That’s a very different thing than listening to the people.
Like the landfill itself, that stinks.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
