The US army corps of engineers is testing for radioactivity in the kindergarten play yard, sports fields and classrooms of a Missouri school serving mostly Black students, after an independent report revealed the school may have been contaminated by nuclear bomb-making waste dumped from the second world war’s Manhattan Project.
Children from Jana elementary school in the Northern St Louis area were sent home to do online learning last week, following an independent report that found levels of the radioactive isotype lead-210 as much as 22 times the expected levels in the school’s play yards and some indoor spaces.
For decades nearby areas of North St Louis have been undergoing cleanup for radioactive dumping dating back to the 1940s through 1960s, after the region played an integral role in processing uranium for the development of the atomic bomb.
Radioactive hotspots have been discovered in Coldwater Creek, which runs next to the original disposal sites some four miles from the school and then snakes past the school itself.
The independent study released in October by a radiation testing firm, the Boston Chemical Data Corp, revealed concerning levels of radiation in locations including inside the school and its play yards. This prompted last week’s school shutdown.
The report, which was paid for by a local law firm, also found levels of radium-226 in the school’s soil at double the expected background levels. The report said the level of radioactive lead found on the school grounds was many times higher than the levels allowed by the EPA for Superfund sites, the highly toxic places slated for government cleanups. It said the lead-210 likely resulted from the breakdown of other nuclear waste ingredients.
“Levels of the radioactive isotope lead-210 found on school grounds were entirely unacceptable,” said the report. It noted that the lead emits alpha particles, which are among the most biologically damaging type of radiation.
The US army corps of engineers, which is in charge of the radiation cleanup, has questioned the findings of that report.
A spokesperson told the Guardian that the corps was evaluating the independent study and would release its conclusions, as well as the results of its new sampling, in the next two weeks. It said that in 2018 and 2019 its own experts had “identified an area of low-level radioactive contamination on a densely wooded bank of Coldwater Creek. This area is just inside the edge of the school property and not easily accessible.”
On Wednesday, teams of its workers in yellow and orange vests fanned out around the school grounds to redo the testing. One worker scanned the school lawn with a radiation detection device mounted on the end of a pole, others marked spots on the sports fields with bright orange bags, while a group of workers operating a boring machine collected core samples from the earth as deep as 28ft beneath the school.
“Our team has the right expertise and experience to complete this work,” said Col. Kevin Golinghorst, the Corps’ St Louis District commander in a press release.
Two blocks away from the school in a yellow and white tract home proudly displaying a sign on the porch that reads “Jana Elementary Student of the Month”, parent Rodney Green watched his two daughters studying math and English at his dining room table.
“We already had to do this online learning during the pandemic – now it’s this,” he said. He was considering taking them to a doctor to test them for radiation effects.
Now he worries about his home, which sits only a few houses from the creek.
“What if we can’t live out here? Do I have to sell?” he said. “This is a whole community that’s affected. It’s crazy.”
School PTA President Ashley Bernaugh, who has been asking for answers since the Army Corps first began testing near the school in 2018, said that she believes cleanup would have happened a lot faster if Jana elementary wasn’t in a mostly Black area.
“Jana elementary’s radioactive past looks like a lot of other communities where hazardous waste has been allowed to exist in predominantly minority communities and in lower middle income communities, where it never would have been allowed in upper income level communities because of the public outrage,” said Bernaugh.
The history of the radioactive waste in Northern St Louis goes back to 1942, when a company called Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, located along the Mississippi River in the city’s downtown, was contracted by the federal government to process the uranium that was eventually sent to New Mexico to make atomic bombs.
The waste from that operation was stored near what is now the St Louis airport. In the 1960s, the waste was transferred to another company, which sold off valuable ingredients and transferred other portions of the waste to two other dump sites in the area.
Cleanup of the dumps began in the late 1990s. Residents have been concerned about the health effects of lingering radiation for years. A 2013 Missouri health study found that the number of cases of leukemia, and breast, colon, prostrate, kidney and bladder cancers faced by residents in zip codes near the creek were “statistically significantly higher” than the rate for the rest of Missouri, according to reporting by the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
Jared Opsal, executive director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, worried the radiation discovered at the school could pose particular dangers to children.
“People – and especially children – should not still be collateral damage for World War II,” said Opsal, who said he hopes the federal government will expand and speed up its cleanup efforts, now slated to go on until 2038. “This is WWII nuclear weapons waste and people are still being harmed by it.”
