ST. LOUIS — The Army Corps of Engineers revealed new signs that will be going up at property where low-level radioactive materials are known to exist. They say the signs will go up with property owner’s permission. They will start to go up in November.
Nuclear waste contamination from World War II and Cold War-era activities has affected 19 locations across the United States, with several sites concentrated in the St. Louis area. Between 1942 and 1957, Mallinckrodt, a company in St. Louis, produced uranium for the Manhattan Project under a government contract. The resulting nuclear waste was initially stored in hundreds of thousands of drums and buried near St. Louis Lambert International Airport on a 21.7-acre site.
The waste was eventually relocated. Some was transported to Colorado, while the remainder was distributed between the West Lake Landfill and another landfill on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood. A portion of this waste leaked from both the Latty Avenue sites and the airport location, contaminating Coldwater Creek.
In July 2023, newly released government documents revealed that officials were aware of the risks posed by radioactive waste to residents near Coldwater Creek as early as 1949. Despite this knowledge, federal authorities consistently minimized the potential dangers, often describing the risks as “minimal” or “low-level.”
