“This is the burning side,” Robbin tells me. “The radwaste is on the other side.” The patchwork is topographical and bureaucratic. The burning side is the southern section of the landfill and falls under the jurisdiction of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources; the radioactive waste is mostly on the northern side and under EPA jurisdiction. On the burning side, workers drive over the tarp on utility carts, wearing hard hats and work clothes. No gloves, no masks, no protection from the destruction buried underneath their feet. Robbin waves her cigarette at them, and we take off down the road, driving the full circumference of the site. It’s bigger than I imagined: two hundred acres in all.
Robbin shows me the pond to the west of the landfill where the leachate is collected, the fence where Franciscan nuns hang ribbons at the prayer vigil they hold every other Wednesday. We drive up to the adjacent property onto which radioactive soil has eroded. There’s a chain-link fence around the entire site. “We call it the magic fence,” Robbin says, laughing in that open-hearted way.
On the way back, Robbin takes a detour through a series of empty streets that used to be a “nice” neighborhood. “Carrollton,” the sign at the entrance still reads. “They demolished it all,” Robbin explains. “The government bought everyone out because of noise pollution from the airport.” She shakes her head, gives a little cough, tightens her grip on the steering wheel. “Noise pollution!”
It seems like we are driving past countless streets and intersections and cul-de-sacs, all the infrastructure without any of the houses—without streetlights or driveways or gardens or people. “Mike and I used to come out here and dig up bulbs and plants from the yards,” she says, slowing down and looking out the window. “It was too sad to leave them. When they built this neighborhood, it was like a magazine. The American Dream. Look at it now.”
We drive past a parking lot marking the former site of a community center, where children once swam in the pool, spending whole days in the water without sunscreen, riding their bikes home without helmets as the streetlights flickered on.
“Do you think your neighborhood will end up like this someday?” I ask, goose bumps forming on my arms and legs.
“I sure as hell hope so,” she says, tossing her cigarette butt out the window.
* * *
“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” President Obama’s speech in Hiroshima begins. It’s May and he’s standing next to Prime Minister Shinzō Abe at a podium in front of the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima. His choice of words is interesting, as if death arrived in Japan that morning of its own volition. As if the US government didn’t have everything to do with it.
“A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city,” he continues, “and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.” But at that point, in August 1945, there was only one government in the world that had succeeded in generating a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, only one military with an atomic weapon, only one aircraft that opened its bay doors on the morning of August 6 over Hiroshima and dropped a fission bomb containing 141 pounds of uranium, which fell for forty-three seconds before incinerating several square miles of a city and every person, animal, and structure in it.
At first, the Manhattan Project didn’t have a name; it consisted of a loose affiliation of military personnel, politicians, and scientists linked together by special government committees. Arthur Holly Compton, the Nobel-winning physicist leading the team working on fission at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, was on one of these special committees. At that time, the idea of a self-sustaining uranium fission chain reaction was still purely theoretical. To prove it was possible, his team needed forty tons of uranium, and they needed it urgently. Rumors had been circulating that the Germans were two years ahead of the Allies in the race for the bomb. This brought Compton to St. Louis, to Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, where he convinced his old friend Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. to enlist his chemists in the secret government project over a gentlemen’s lunch.
The uranium ore, several thousand pounds of it, arrived at Mallinckrodt in hundreds of containers of various shapes and sizes ranging from large wooden crates to one-gallon paint cans. The twenty-four workers in the new uranium division at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works labored around the clock to process the uranium. Within a month of that gentlemen’s lunch, they began sending the purified uranium back to Compton’s lab in Chicago. Within three months, they were sending a ton of it a day.
* * *
Three days after Hiroshima, after the Japanese refused to surrender sovereignty to the US government, a plutonium bomb exploded over a small community in the Urakami River Valley. A ring of fire spreading outward for miles from the hypocenter became a ball of fire, and then a pillar of fire rising forty-five thousand feet into the air.
When Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, Life magazine reported that people across the United States celebrated without reservation, “as if joy had been rationed and saved up for the three years, eight months and seven days” since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Two million people from all over the New York City area flocked to Times Square, where they kissed and drank and danced in conga lines through the streets. Scraps of cloth snowed down from windows in the garment district onto people parading below. In Chicago, enormous crowds flocked to the Loop and celebrated with wild abandon.
In St. Louis, the news came over the radio at 2:30 a.m. Bar owners rushed to reopen, and the parents of deployed soldiers tapped kegs in their front yards, pouring beer for their neighbors into pails and buckets. Those who bothered to go to work the next morning threw reams of paper out the windows of office buildings and then descended the stairs to dance through the piles of paper in the street. Impromptu parades sprang up all over the city.
At the Mallinckrodt plant in downtown St. Louis, workers were given the day off. For many of them, it was only the second or third day off since they’d begun purifying uranium for a project with a strange name and a secret purpose. Only as they joined the celebrations did they understand what that purpose had been.
* * *
It’s dark when I spread a stack of government reports out on the hotel bed—each report held inside a binder clip, each hundreds of pages thick. I’ve spent the whole summer wading through thousands of pages of documents like these, all of them full of disturbing concessions and impenetrable jargon. Months ago, a high school friend reached out to me asking that I give my attention to this story. She told me that a company tasked decades ago with disposing of nuclear waste for the federal government had instead dumped thousands of barrels of the waste somewhere in North St. Louis County. The barrels were left exposed to the elements for decades, and the waste leaked into the ground and into the water of a nearby creek.
I did start looking into it, and I haven’t been able to stop. I have learned that although there wasn’t anything especially dangerous about the first ore Mallinckrodt processed in the downtown facility, after the “Pile-1” experiment in Chicago succeeded in generating a self-sustaining chain reaction, the focus of Mallinckrodt’s work for the Manhattan Project shifted from purifying uranium for lab experiments to purifying uranium for use in an atomic bomb. A different kind of ore began arriving in fifty-five-gallon drums marked plainly URANIUM ORE—PRODUCT OF BELGIAN CONGO. The new ore was more concentrated than any other uranium ore on the planet—up to 65 percent pure uranium (versus the 0.3 percent they had previously considered “a good find”). The workers had to handle this new ore differently. It arrived on vented freight cars, and they needed to take care to store it separately from the other ore, the other wastes, and the processing equipment, and to put all the residue back in the barrels after the uranium was extracted and save it. For what they did not know.
By all accounts, the government knew about the dangers of working with this new material but allowed the uranium workers to continue working with it anyway. Weeks after the bombing of Hirosh
ima and Nagasaki, safety officials arrived at Mallinckrodt and demanded that the uranium workers begin wearing badges to monitor their radiation exposure and that they stop using their hands to scoop the uranium salts into bins and pick through the unrefined ore.
The officials also began looking for a place to store the radioactive wastes and settled on a 21.7-acre property just north of Lambert Field—at that time it was a municipal airport and an airplane manufacturing base—far outside the edge of town. The base sat on one side of the property; a small creek ran down the other. Beyond the creek was nothing but sparsely populated farmland. When the federal government filed suit to acquire the property under eminent domain, officials refused to disclose the exact nature of the waste “for security reasons.” They assured the local government that the waste they’d be storing there wasn’t dangerous. They shook hands and signed papers. They looked people squarely in the eye.
During the next twenty years, truckload by truckload, the green patchwork of farm fields by the airfield turned into a foreign world. Mountains of raffinate rose up alongside row after row of rusty black drums, stacked two or three high. But even as those mountains grew taller, the American Dream transformed the fields into subdivisions, brought houses and streets right up to the airport site, right up to the black sand, right up to the borders of the creek. Every time the wind blew, it carried radioactive dust into the brand-new parks and gardens and backyards. Every time it rained, the water flowed between the barrels, into their rusting holes, and all the things that water can carry flowed into that small creek.
* * *
The reports tell only so much, only certain parts of certain versions of the story. The rest I have to piece together using articles in the local newspaper, phone calls with residents, oral histories collected by others, newsletters from various companies celebrating one anniversary or another. I have learned through months of this piecing together that in 1966, the government abruptly canceled the Mallinckrodt contract, but not why. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) advertised a public auction and sold the wastes to the highest bidder, Continental Mining and Milling Company, for a lump-sum payment of $126,550. Things get a little foggy at this point. There isn’t a single unbroken paper trail, a single history, any one person who has nothing to lose, but it appears that after the sale, Continental moved the Mallinckrodt wastes to a private storage site about a mile away on Latty Avenue and then promptly went bankrupt. The radioactive wastes were then repossessed by a bank in Chicago (which did not have the required license to own radioactive waste) and were quickly sold again to another private company, Cotter Corporation of Colorado. Records from this second sale indicate that the inventory included 74,000 tons of the Belgian Congo pitchblende raffinate, containing about 113 tons of uranium; 32,500 tons of Colorado raffinate, containing about 48 tons of uranium; and 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate, containing about 7 tons of uranium. Surprisingly, the sale also included a few hundred barrels filled with contaminated junk—boots and uniforms and bricks from the Mallinckrodt plant downtown that were hot with radiation. Cotter began drying the piles of raffinate in a giant kiln and shipping the dried material in open train cars to its facility in Colorado. After a few months, nothing was left except the barrels and the 8,700-ton pile of leached barium sulfate.
In my pile of reports is a series of letters from Cotter to the AEC in which Cotter tries to convince the government to take these wastes back. Commercial disposal would cost upwards of $2 million (about $12 million today). Cotter couldn’t afford it, but they knew that the AEC was using a quarry at the recently decommissioned second Mallinckrodt facility at Weldon Spring, roughly twenty miles southwest of the airport, as a dump for nuclear waste. It asked the AEC if it could use it, asked for guidance, and for help.
That help never came.
In 1974, a government inspector arrived at the storage site on Latty Avenue and casually asked where the barrels and the leached barium sulfate had gone. Someone working at the site—a driver or a security guard, maybe—mentioned he thought they had been put in a landfill. A lengthy investigation discovered that from August to October 1973, a private construction firm drove truckloads of the leached barium sulfate, along with roughly forty thousand tons of soil removed from the top eighteen inches of the Latty Avenue site, to West Lake Landfill, around the clock. To the landfill operator, it looked like dirt, so he waved the trucks in and charged them nothing, using it as landfill cover for the municipal refuse.
* * *
I keep hoping I’ll find something in these reports—a graph, a chart, a single sentence or letter or memo—that will make all of this make sense. But the reports express the detection of this contamination in charts, as numbers and statistics. They’ve found contamination at the airport, in the drainage ditches leading away from the airport, and all along the creek—along the trucking routes, in ballfields and in parks and gardens and backyards, in driveways, in people’s basements and under their kitchen cabinets. Even now, as I write this, they are still trying to figure out just how far it has spread.
The reports measure the health risk of exposure to this contamination as an equation, with a threshold of acceptable risk. But what the reports don’t say is that the contamination has already done so much damage that cannot be measured or undone. The Mallinckrodt uranium workers are some of the most contaminated in the history of the atomic age—so contaminated, in fact, that in 2009, all former Mallinckrodt uranium workers were added as a “special exposure cohort” to the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. The act provides compensation and lifetime medical benefits to employees who became ill with any of twenty-two named cancers as a result of working in the nuclear weapons industry. Because of this special cohort status, if a former Mallinckrodt worker develops any of these named illnesses, exposure to the uranium is assumed. But the people who live near the creek never worked for Mallinckrodt, which means that according to the government, they aren’t entitled to compensation or medical benefits.
A woman named Mary Oscko, for instance, has lived her whole life in North St. Louis County, most of it near that small creek. Now she is dying of stage 4 lung cancer, though she has never smoked a day in her life. Shari Riley, a nurse who lived near the creek, died recently of appendix cancer. My friend, the one who contacted me about this story, never lived in St. Louis, but her mother grew up two houses away from that creek. My friend suspects that her mother’s exposure to the contamination as a child changed her DNA in ways she passed on to her children, which would explain why my friend was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer a few years ago at the age of thirty-five. Could it also explain why my friend’s mother once gave birth to a set of conjoined twins? Conjoined twins are an anomaly in the general population, but these were the fourth set born to women who grew up near that creek. And those are just the ones we know about.
* * *
The reports don’t acknowledge these stories, these illnesses, those who are dying or dead. Most residents of St. Louis—including and especially the residents of predominantly African American neighborhoods—don’t even know the contamination is there. It creates an impossible situation for health professionals in St. Louis, like Dr. Faisal Khan, director of the St. Louis County Health Department. “In community meetings people have narrated heartrending stories to me,” he says, “stories about their own cancers or their loved ones or their children. I’ve had people walk up to me and hand me pictures of their children who have died of cancer. They’ve given me hair and teeth and nail-clipping samples and say, ‘Could you please have these tested?’ ”
They’re looking for a cause, looking for someone to blame, looking for a location toward which to direct their rage and bewilderment and grief. More than anything else, they want to know why.
Dr. Khan told me he often finds himself saying, “I just don’t know.”
* * *
I don’t recognize the woman who answers the door at Kay Drey’s house. I’ve never
met Kay Drey but I’ve seen her photo countless times: her silver hair cut in a short wavy bob, her tall, slender frame standing slightly slouched. She’s in her eighties, I think, but this woman answering her door is my age, my height. She flashes a broad smile and leads me to the dining room, where the table is piled with papers sorted into the lids of cardboard boxes, then into the kitchen, where Kay is writing something at her desk. Kay stands to greet me; we shake hands, and I follow her to the dining room table, where we sit. A paraplegic dog comes over to my leg and demands to be scratched. “Moxie,” Kay tells me, introducing the dog. “You might as well go ahead and scratch her because she won’t leave you alone until you do.”
Kay Drey lives in University City, another suburb of St. Louis, but one where the homes are older and larger and set farther back from the streets. Kay’s husband, Leo Drey, was a conservationist, a forester, and Missouri’s largest private landowner before he donated most of the land to charity. He passed away in 2015 of complications from a stroke. Kay’s health is also failing now, a fact that becomes apparent as she tells me multiple times that her memory is not what it used to be. She relies on sticky notes, she says, which she sticks to the shelves above her desk in the kitchen. On one orange note she’s copied a quote from Hugh Hammond Bennett, the first director of the US Soil Conservation Service: “It takes nature,” she has written in the erratic scrawl of someone who cannot hold a pen without difficulty, “under the most favorable conditions, including a good cover of trees, grass, or other protective vegetation, anywhere from 300 to 1,000 years or more to build a single inch of topsoil.” She pokes this note, hard, with the bent tip of her finger and tells me, “The topsoil around that landfill is ninety feet deep. Some of the richest soil in the world, and it is ruined forever.”
The Reckonings Page 13