Radioactive waste found at Missouri elementary school

[truthisfreedom]

Source: NPR

The school sits in the flood plain of Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated by nuclear waste from weapons production during World War II. The waste was dumped at sites near the St. Louis Lambert International Airport, next to the creek that flows to the Missouri River. The Corps has been cleaning up the creek for more than 20 years.

The Corps' report also found contamination in the area but at much at lower levels, and it didn't take any samples within 300 feet of the school. The most recent report included samples taken from Jana's library, kitchen, classrooms, fields and playgrounds.

Levels of the radioactive isotope lead-210, polonium, radium and other toxins were "far in excess" of what Boston Chemical had expected. Dust samples taken inside the school were found to be contaminated.

Inhaling or ingesting these radioactive materials can cause significant injury, the report said.

Read more: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129399333/radioactive-waste-found-at-missouri-elementary-school

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What a nightmare.

[irisblue]

1. Oh boy

[secondwind]

2. Omg 😱

[PuraVidaDreamin]

3. Unforgivable

The greed of profits over people.

When will it end?

[sop]

4. Looked up the school district:

The article doesn't mention the school district is "86% minority." The district also ranks in the bottom 50% for pretty much all important categories, with a "1 out of 10 rating" overall. However, the district is ranked in the top 1% for the "most diverse schools" (most minorities?) and the "largest student body" (most overcrowded?).

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/missouri/hazelwood-school-district/2913830-school-district

[rubbersole]

5. Of course.

Thanks, sop.

[TrumanTheTiger]

11. I'm from the area.

If you want to learn more, Google “Coldwater Creek”, and not the retail company.

To summarize: the uranium that was refined for the Manhattan Project and used in the Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and two other bombs was refined at Mallinkrodt (sp?) in North St. Louis, and the waste was stored out in the open on the north side of the airport next to Coldwater Creek. In the 1940s, there wasn’t much but farmland in North St. Louis County (downstream of the airport and the waste site). Enter the baby boom and the growth of the suburbs and Florissant, Hazelwood, Ferguson (you may have heard of it for other reasons), Bridgeton,…. This site was known as SLAPS (for St. Louis AirPort Site).

In the 1970s, they realized “gee, storing nuclear waste out in the open is a pretty bad idea” and loaded it into trucks that were buried at the West Lake Landfill (which had [has?] an underground exothermic chemical reaction [“fire”] a football field or two away from the buried trucks with the waste that was leaking landfill stench and gassed about 10 years ago). In the 80s, they cleaned up SLAPS and another site nearby (Latty Ave. Site).

In the late 00s, kids (mostly white) that grew up in the area in the 70s and 80s that moved off to bigger and better things were attending class reunions and discovered that there were a lot of classmates who had cancer (and classmates who died young of cancer), and some unusual ones like appendix cancer. But all of these 70s/80s kids are spread out across the country and don’t get counted in the official statistics related to Coldwater Creek because they/we don’t live there anymore.

There was a Ford Plant (closed about 15 years ago) maybe a mile downstream of SLAPS, and God only knows how many people that worked there got cancer from being that close to the creek).

Remember the flooding in St. Louis earlier this summer? That was Coldwater Creek (a few miles upstream of Jana ES).

[FakeNoose]

13. Thanks for posting this info

I was actually born in Saint Louis in the 1950's but my family lived southwest of the city - Webster Groves/Kirkwood area. However I've lived in Pittsburgh for so many years that I don't remember much of my childhood in STL.

Welcome to DU!

[brer cat]

14. Thank you for posting this (distressing) information.

Welcome to DU, Truman. Jump right in and join the discussions.

[EYESORE 9001]

6. This would never happen

near the Flufferington Preparatory School.

[Crazyleftie]

7. "after obtaining a copy through a Freedom of Information Act request"

When was the study made?
Why did it take a FOI request to make it public?

[IronLionZion]

8. But the real problems are CRT, saying Gay, and books

If it's from WW2, they must have known about it for some time. They chose to keep it quiet until now.

[Evolve Dammit]

9. I hope they are re-locating to a safe school?? They can't leave them there. Entire school

may have to be razed and the site de-contaminated depending on levels.

[hunter]

10. There was a uranium enrichment plant in the area, built for the Manhattan Project.

This isn't the first time pollution from this plant has caused trouble. In 1973 a contractor took waste from the site to a nearby landfill and dumped it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill

The radioactive wastes here are naturally occurring constituents of uranium ore, mostly thorium-230.

I found a copy of the Boston Data Chemical Corp. report, but no good public link to it.

[Rebl2]

12. The study results

given to the school board this last June according to this article. Yet they let children go back to school this fall to that school! So apparently the board didn’t bother to tell parents whose children go to that school? Pretty disgusting.

[Slammer]

15. scheduling

"Radioactive waste found at Missouri elementary school"

I didn't even know the Trump family was scheduled to visit an elementary school in Missouri....

[LT Barclay]

16. I used to work for the person who is head of the St. Louis regional office of the MO DNR.

When I started having difficulty with her I stopped trying to catch up with the endless overwhelming work and emerged from my office and started talking to some of the other employees. The word they invariably used to describe her was "incompetent".
It was shortly after she transferred to the St. Louis office that reports about the spread of this contamination started emerging. So I'm not surprised that it was not found or not cleaned properly.
So I guess their assessment was correct.