IN 2011, residents across an American community in St Louis began to notice a chain of inexplicably high incidents of cancer and disease across its population. For decades, both former and current residents from approximately 90 municipalities in the Missouri city were diagnosed with a long list of life-threatening illnesses, including leukaemia, lupus, brain tumours, appendix cancer, multiple sclerosis, birth defects and many more. People died. Babies died. And they’re still dying to this day, dubbed “the poison children of Coldwater Creek.”
But no one ever connected the dots as to what was really making these innocent people sick.
“You’ll never forget the moment they tell you, ‘We found lesions on your lung and your liver,’” Mary Oscko, who has stage 4 lung cancer, told CBS News.
“My husband and I had to sit down at night and discuss whether I want to be cremated or buried. I don’t want to be buried in North County, that’s the one thing I told him — I do not want to be buried where this soil is.”
In 1942, during the height of World War II, a corporation by the name of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works was hired by the US government to process uranium for the development of the world’s first nuclear weapons. The operation was dubbed ‘The Manhattan Project.’
Based in St Louis, it was here that the atomic bomb was born. That same bomb would be responsible for destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, at the end of the Second World War. Those two bombs killed at least 150,000 people by the end of that year (without taking into account long term radiation damage). It was powerful, deadly stuff.
A 1945 article in Life estimated that during the development of these atomic bombs, “probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.”
By the mid 1940s, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works had run out of space to store the radioactive waste left behind, so in 1946 they began to ship the leftovers to a relatively underpopulated area north of St Louis, next to a creek by the name of Coldwater. It was here that approximately 250,000 barrels of radioactive material were dumped in shallow pits and exposed to the elements.
“It was in wartime, everything was secretive. In the ‘40s it’s not like we had social media, nobody knew,” former resident Kim Visintine told news.com.au.
“The uranium was owned by the US government and the Department of Energy — this is their mess.”
In some areas where waste spilled from the trucks, the Energy Department found radiation levels exceeded seven times the normal amount.
According to a 1990 article in the New York Times, the toxic waste was dumped secretly with the approval of the federal government.
“Reporters here asked questions about the trucks that were hauling dirt from the plant to land bordering the airport,” the article reads.
“The concerns disappeared after the Government and Mallinckrodt said the wastes were ‘not radioactive or otherwise dangerous’.”
Cancer linked to radioactive exposure
But in the 1950s and ‘60s, a residential boom hit the area and the city began to expand, so a decision was made to reroute Coldwater Creek to make it more aesthetic. Little did residents know at the time that by dredging and disturbing the creek, it gave the contaminated sediment a mode of transportation, and soon it began to spread throughout the area. Unknowingly, people began ingesting and eating the leftover carcinogens.
“The analogy we always use is like spreading icing on a birthday cake,” Ms Visintine explained.
“They spread the contamination across the entire region, it’s been this comedy of errors. Nobody knew, we didn’t know until we began investigating because we were all showing up with cancer. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it and you can’t taste it.
“If you have really low doses of radiation and you ingest it, over time it builds in your body. Once it gets in your body it never leaves, it’s like arsenic poisoning. It’s not one ingestion, it’s over and over, then it mutates and you end up with these cancers.
“We’re showing up with these really rare cancers, and really high rates at really young ages.”
