Radium in groundwater near West Lake Landfill in St. Louis County. Louis wants more testing

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. Crews working to clean up the West Lake Landfill in St. Louis County.

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

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

Originally, the EPA had projected that all the necessary groundwater wells would be installed by August 2022, West Lake groundwater remediation project manager Snehal Bhagat said at a conference in December.

But discoveries abroad required a significant expansion of the network in order to determine exactly where the impacts were, Bhagat said, so many more wells were put in place. We were still setting them up as we followed the edges of the influences.

The West Lake Landfill, once a municipal landfill, is one of several sites in the St. Louis area.

St. Louis was crucial to the development of the world’s first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium refined 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 the downtown uranium plants was trucked to the St. Louis airport. The creek, which runs through the now bustling suburbs, was contaminated for miles, increasing the risk of cancer for generations of children who played on its banks and in its waters.

The wreckage 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 valuable metals were extracted from the waste, it was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and dumped illegally. It remains there even today.

Now, the landfill is a Superfund site subject to EPA cleanup, and in recent years, the agency has found that contamination is more widespread than previously thought. Despite community outcry, the EPA, for years, relied on a decades-old radiation reading taken from a helicopter to determine where the waste was.

Now, it is working to determine the size and mobility of the plume.

To date, no conclusions have been made about the source(s) of radium in groundwater outside the area because data collection is ongoing, Kellen Ashford, a spokesman for the EPA regional office, said in an email.

Dawn Chapman, a co-founder of Just Moms STL, a nonprofit that was created to protect communities near contaminated sites around St. Louis. Louis, said she was concerned that the EPA had not yet identified the edges of the contamination.

Given both the radioactive waste and other chemical pollutants found in the landfill, she feared it could be a terrible feather.

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

I really would have hoped, said Chapman, that by now they would have found the edge.

This story from the Missouri Independent is published on KSDK.com under the Creative Commons license. The Missouri Independent is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization covering state government, politics and policy.