BRENTWOOD, Mo. — State officials said the City of Brentwood violated the Missouri Clean Water Act. This comes after the demolition of the Breckenridge Industrial Court Bridge polluted Deer Creek with polystyrene foam.
Brentwood Mayor David Dimmitt said demolishing the bridge was part of a bigger picture.
“It is to address the flood mitigation which has been a public safety issue for decades,” he said.
This was all part of the Brentwood Bound redevelopment project along Manchester Road. This part of the project mitigates flooding along Deer Creek, which is the reason this bridge was first demolished.
But the new bridge brought a new concern.
Local environmental scientist Roy Lohman documented the polystyrene foam, which looks like Styrofoam, polluting Deer Creek, and reported it to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
He said he was observing the beginning of the demolition process out of interest on March 2.
On March 6, he was flying his drone when he noticed the Styrofoam. He took pictures and videos of it and then reported those images.
"If they couldn’t fathom industrial bridges would be filled with Styrofoam, could they have moved the bridge out of the creek and demolished it (somewhere else) not over the creek?" Lohman said.
He said he wants to see more ownership and accountability from the groups responsible.
“They can say that they’ll cooperate, and they won’t do it again, but there’s not another bridge with Styrofoam in it for them to demolish,” Lohman said.
The mayor said the city's contractor’s records didn’t show this was inside the bridge.
Since they had no reason to believe it was in there, he said they took down the bridge which released the material. Once they realized it had been released they began collecting and containing the Styrofoam.
Dimmitt says they’ve been in constant communication with the Department of Natural Resources and have since cleaned up the creek.
Another local environmental expert is looking at the bigger picture.
“It’s a pollutant in the sense that it doesn’t belong in any sort of water body," Peter Goode said.
Goode is an environmental engineer with the Washington University of St. Louis Law School’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Law Clinic.
“Overtime should that Styrofoam stay in the water it can degrade and become harmful to aquatic life and potentially get downstream into sources of drinking water,” he said.
Goode said he worries about where some of the foam could have washed away to. And it shows how even small changes around us, can have lasting impacts.
The other two components of the Brentwood Bound project are to connect Brentwood's Rogers Parkway and the Deer Creek Greenway and to use the Missouri Department of Transportation technique to update the roadway, improve pedestrian access and safety and enhance the overall appearance of Manchester Road from Hanley Road to Bremerton Road.
“It [the Deer Creek flood mitigation] is by far the biggest component of Brentwood Bound," Dimmitt said. “The new bridge is anywhere from 8-10 feet taller than the old bridge.”
He said the flood mitigation phase of this expansion project is set to be done this month.