BRIDGETON, Mo. — The fight to clean up radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project in Bridgeton has reached a milestone.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) set a start date to clean up the site for March 2024.
"We're not done fighting until we have an absolute solution to this site, and it's finished," Dawn Chapman with Just Moms STL said. "Frankly until they come back and address the other sites that they missed."
For the past decade, Chapman has been advocating for the City of Bridgeton after she learned the unusual smell by her house was burning waste next to a radioactive dump site.
"It was mind-blowing, I just couldn't wrap my mind around it," Chapman said. "I thought...'is this chemotherapy?' Then when I learned it was Manhattan project waste, I was like 'why would that be here?'"
So why Bridgeton?
"Well I think what happened was the material was developed down in the City of St. Louis and it was shipped to the airport area," Mayor Terry Briggs said.
The creek by the airport posed a problem, it could flood and spread the uncovered radioactive waste.
"So, then it was shipped over here to the West Lake Landfill in the late 70s, put it underground and piled all the dirt on top of it," Briggs also said.
Improperly burning radioactive waste can lead to it leaching through the soil. That's a problem.
Now add in an underground fire at the landfill next door and you could have a crisis with dangerous gasses escaping into the atmosphere. This predicament is why the USEPA set a date for cleanup.
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"I'm optimistic that it will happen, one of my concerns is the EPA is not supposed to pay for all this" Briggs said. "It's the potentially responsible parties, the PRPs they call them, so these companies still have to sign off on the actual remediation work that has to be done and the cost is pretty expensive, we're talking over a half a billion dollars."
Christen Commuso of Missouri Coalition for the Environment shared this statement Friday afternoon:
"It's good to hear the responsible parties have completed the Design Investigation and have a better understanding of where the radioactive waste is located in and around the landfill complex. Fully characterizing the site is something the community has been requesting for many years. Seeing a timeline emerge gives me hope that we are one step closer to finally getting a shovel in the ground. Having said that, however, it is quite disheartening, albeit not surprising, to learn about the offsite contamination. This means citizens may have been unwittingly exposed to this deadly waste for decades."
To track the status of the West Lake Landfill, click here.
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