And now an update from the West Lake Landfill, where radioactive waste sits in the path of underground fires at the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill, posing unknown dangers to people:
• The people are increasingly worried and angry.
• The federal government is worried about preserving the sanctity of its processes and keeping everyone calm—but not about the people.
• The owner of the Bridgeton Landfill, Republic Services (the nation’s No. 2 waster hauler), is worried about its financial liability and keeping the state government off its back—but not about the people.
Silly people. What are they thinking?
Sure, there’s something a little disconcerting about the thought of a fire inching toward a pile of toxic radioactive waste just a mile or two from your house. And it’s not all that comforting to hear that no one can say for sure just how dangerous the situation might be, seeing as how it’s never happened before. Or when Attorney General Chris Koster says “Republic Services does not have this site under control” and that neighbors’ groundwater and vegetation may have been poisoned.
If all that’s not enough, it’s just wonderful to sit on the sidelines and watch so-called experts disagree on the pace at which the fire is moving, on where a barrier should be erected, and so forth. Then there’s the slight inconvenience of waking up and going to sleep to a smell that one resident described as a cross between rotten eggs and decaying bodies.
But in fairness to the powers that be, there have been no confirmed sightings of a single rotten egg or dead body at the site. So give little Johnny back his inhaler—there have been numerous reports of asthma attacks and other respiratory difficulties—and please return to life next to a toxic landfill as usual.
Nice message. But at least give the federal government some credit for consistency. It’s the same message that it has been delivering for years to the people affected by the landfill: Stop acting like the victim here. Have some patience.
Well, they don’t have patience, nor should they. At the end of the day, this complex set of circumstances comes down to the simplest of realities. In Bridgeton, as in a swath of North County along Coldwater Creek, people are suffering because of the gross negligence and malfeasance of their federal government.
Without doubt, people in St. Louis are paying a dear price in 2015 for actions dating back to 1942, when the U.S. Army secretly hired Mallinckrodt Chemical Works to purify the government’s uranium to make nuclear weapons. This was known as the Manhattan Project. Over the ensuing decades, the lethal radioactive byproducts from the uranium processing were secretly dumped at a site near Lambert–St. Louis International Airport and, apparently, at the West Lake Landfill (and who knows where else). Because of the secrecy that shrouded the project, there are many questions that will likely remain unanswered for eternity regarding who knew what and when.
On an individual basis, the vast majority of responsible parties aren’t with us today—those who might be are north of 90 years old. So there’s no one in particular to bring to justice for the cancers and birth defects and other health consequences being faced today as a legacy of the Manhattan Project.
But that doesn’t matter. There’s no time to worry about that now, any more than there’s time for a debate about what the old Atomic Energy Commission knew, and when it knew it, about the dumping of the waste at the site of the current landfill.
That tangled web involves a company named Cotter Corp., which purchased nuclear waste from the federal government, presumably for whatever residual value it had. In a murky series of events, the waste was moved from a storage site in the city to what is now West Lake Landfill. The “who, what, why, where, and when” of that story remain a mystery for historians to unravel.
Recently, Chicago-based power company Exelon, which purchased Cotter and its liabilities, alleged the federal government is the responsible party. I’ll spare you the details—the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did a fine story detailing the mystery—because I don’t think there’s any question that the tragedy of the current situation ultimately can be traced to the Manhattan Project.
The federal government owned the Manhattan Project and even indemnified Mallinckrodt as a condition of its participation. So the same federal government—our government—owns the horrible situation that the Manhattan Project has spawned at the landfill. For those keeping score at home, it also owns the decades-old tragedy that continues to cause death and disease to those who grew up playing in Coldwater Creek during the ’60s and ’70s.
Historians have plenty of time to sort all this out. The courts have plenty of time to resolve conflicting claims and counter-claims over what went down. But let me tell you who does not have time to sit back and contemplate these details: the people whose lives are being compromised—and in some cases, destroyed—by radioactive waste that’s in the 70-somethingth year of its billion-something-year lifetime.
Those would be the people living in proximity to the West Lake Landfill. They need help now, and it’s help that is most definitely provided for in the Superfund legislation under the auspices of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Yes, the EPA has the authority to provide a voluntary buyout to the people within a 1-mile radius of the site, who understandably want to get away from the landfill and want to get away now. But for now, they are in the twilight zone. They are living a nightmare that’s frightening, unhealthy, and could be catastrophic. Economically, they are trapped, because real-estate activity isn’t customarily robust around landfills with underground fires creeping toward radioactive waste.
So the government should use its Superfund authorization to offer a voluntary buyout. And it should do so now.
I can assure you that EPA officials beg to differ. They seem able to match all the passion of the people living near the landfill with a passion of their own for bureaucracy and protocol. In a November 2014 letter to environmental activist Lois Gibbs, EPA administrator Karl Brooks rejected a call for a buyout at West Lake and seemed proud to cite the fact that the EPA has only implemented buyouts in 33 of some 1,600 sites on its National Priorities List.
Brooks is fortunately gone from his post, but there’s no reason to believe the EPA’s commitment to bureaucratic inaction has gone with him. We had a chance to see Brooks in action at a 2013 hearing about West Lake in a packed Pattonville High School gym. I was there and wrote about it:
Through two and a half 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.
I’ll stand by those words today, just as the EPA stands by its commitment to inaction some two and a half years hence.
I also reported this: Brooks’ most-repeated point was that “the weight of the evidence shows that there’s adequate time to consider the alternatives.” The EPA is still saying that as we approach 2016. The people who live near the West Lake Landfill are still frightened, afflicted, and angry. And their government still doesn’t care.
Is a voluntary buyout of homes the ultimate answer? No. Getting rid of the waste is, and that won’t happen until jurisdiction gets transferred from the EPA to another agency of the government, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, which, unlike the EPA, has experience in removing this sort of substance.
Responsibility isn’t the government’s alone, which is why Koster filed a suit against Republic that will go to trial next March. “The people of Missouri can’t afford to wait any longer,” Koster urged. “Republic needs to get this site cleaned up.”
Left to the timetable of bureaucrats, that can be expected to happen roughly around when hell freezes over or part of St. Louis County burns up, whichever comes first. So while the good people living near the West Lake Landfill patiently wait for that to happen, the best we can hope for is that by some miracle or act of Congress, the EPA decides to use the Superfund for its intended purpose and help alleviate some of the suffering that the government has caused.
That would be known as “the right thing to do.” Unfortunately, I’m not sure you’ll find that precise wording in the rules and regulations promulgated for the EPA.
And you definitely won’t find it in the hearts of bureaucrats.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
