I know a LOT more about this than I want to, but I don’t have a choice. I grew up in Hazelwood Missouri, one block from Coldwater Creek. The infamous St. Cin Park that was featured in the documentary Atomic Homefront was at the end of my street, and I played there regularly including splashing around in the creek. One of the bizarre truths of my life is, “As a child I played in radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project.”
Uranium for the Manhattan Project was processed at Mallinckrodt in St. Louis, and the waste from that was trucked (in open-top trucks) to a location very close to the St. Louis airport, and right at the edge of Coldwater Creek. For many years rain would wash radioactive waste into the creek. There’s a bit more complexity to it, but the simple summary is substantially accurate. This was discovered when locals noticed some really strange cancer clusters and isolated them to the area around Coldwater Creek, and eventually a lot of information was uncovered about how it got that way.
Someone mentioned that Jana has a very high minority population. That is true now, but it was absolutely not true in the years when the creek was originally contaminated by radioactive waste. I attended K-12 in the Hazelwood schools from 1970-1983 and during that time the population was almost entirely of the pasty persuasion-- many of the homes were occupied by white collar McDonnell Douglas workers. In the past 10-20 years the area has become much more racially diverse. Thus, it wasn’t the case that the radiation was dumped on people of color, but rather that they moved into the neighborhoods a few decades after it happened. This is part of larger racial migration patterns in the St. Louis metropolitan area and isn’t significantly related to Coldwater Creek.
