Radium in groundwater near West Lake landfill in St. Louis County prompts more testing • Missouri Independent

Crews working to clean up the West Lake landfill in St. Louis County have detected contamination in nearby groundwater, prompting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether radium may have leaked from the site.

In a periodic update to nearby communities last month, the EPA said it would add groundwater monitoring wells around the site, which is in Bridgeton, about a mile from the banks of the Missouri River.

The expansion, which came after contamination was detected near the landfill, will help determine whether the contamination could migrate from the site and reach the river. Radium has been detected near the site, slightly above drinking water limits, the EPA said in a statement, but the radioactive element also occurs naturally in rock formations and aquifers.

Initially, the EPA had planned that all necessary groundwater wells would be installed by August 2022, West Lake Groundwater Remediation Project Manager Snehal Bhagat said during a briefing in December.

“But the offsite detections required a significant expansion of the network to delineate exactly where the impacts are,” Bhagat said, “so many more wells were installed. We continue to install them as we pursue the boundaries of the impacts.”

EPA: Radioactive contamination at West Lake landfill more widespread

The West Lake Landfill, formerly a municipal landfill, is one of several sites in the St. Louis area contaminated by decades-old nuclear waste.

St. Louis played a central role in the development of the world's first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium refined in the city's downtown was used in experiments in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II-era nuclear weapons program.

After the war, radioactive waste from downtown uranium mills was trucked to the St. Louis airport, often dumping on the ground next to Coldwater Creek. The creek, which runs through what is now a bustling suburb, was contaminated for miles, increasing the risk of cancer for generations of children who played on its banks and in its waters.

The waste sat at the airport for years before being sold and moved to a property in nearby Hazlewood, also adjacent to the creek. In the early 1970s, after extracting precious metals from the waste, they were trucked to the West Lake Landfill and illegally dumped. They are still there today.

Today, the landfill is a Superfund site subject to EPA cleanup, and in recent years the agency has discovered that the contamination was more extensive than it thought. Despite community protests, the EPA for years relied on a decades-old measurement of radioactivity, taken by a helicopter, to determine where the waste was located.

The objective now is to determine “the size and mobility of the plume”.

“At this time, no conclusions have been made about the source(s) of radium in off-site groundwater as data collection is ongoing,” Kellen Ashford, a spokeswoman for the EPA's regional office, said in an email.

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, a nonprofit created to advocate for communities near contaminated sites around St. Louis, said she is concerned that the EPA has not yet identified the limits of the contamination.

Given the radioactive waste and other chemical contaminants in the dump, she fears it could be a “plume of hellish violence.”

Chapman noted that the parties responsible for the site — the landfill owner, the company that dumped the waste and the U.S. Department of Energy — are nearing the end of the planning process for the West Lake cleanup.

“I would have really hoped,” Chapman said, “that by now they would have found the advantage.”