ST. LOUIS -- Marie Farr and her family spent years fishing along the banks of rivers and creeks in North County. All the kids relished the days out on the Missouri River and its meandering tributaries, including one called Coldwater Creek. Farr's youngest child, Aryn, loved it the most.
It's why Farr kept fishing with her daughter even after her husband, Anthony, died of colon cancer in 2013. He was 52.
"Metastatic, no cure," she said, recalling how a stage four diagnosis at his first colonoscopy was a shock. "He had no symptoms."
It wasn't until a decade later, when Aryn received her own cancer diagnosis, that Farr thought the family's fishing spots may be to blame.
When one of Aryn's doctors learned that she had stage three cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer that develops in the inner lining of blood vessels, he asked where the family lived. A cancer this rare, which accounts for only 25 of the about 1.7 million new cancer cases each year, does not just happen.
The doctor mentioned Coldwater Creek. Farr learned the area where her family spent years on the water was contaminated with nuclear waste and that other local residents believed their health challenges were connected to this contamination, a byproduct of World War II-era nuclear weapon production in St. Louis.
"This is not like just five, 10 people, right? This is a slew of people," she said. "We all can't have the same story. We all can't be diagnosed with some form of cancer and be located in the same area."
Farr wanted answers.
Contractors with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conduct a gamma walkover survey along the floodplain near Coldwater Creek to identify areas where there may be elevated areas of radiation. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
For years, local advocates have pushed for better acknowledgement and support in dealing with the decades of fallout from the 1940s U.S. government effort to build the first atomic bomb , known as the Manhattan Project. They've helped host town halls and traveled frequently to Washington, D.C.. The group Just Moms STL said they've met with at least 30 lawmakers in the nation's capital in the last few years.
The danger of this waste to local communities has been well-documented in other government reports and through meetings with elected officials. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report last year that detailed how the hazardous waste from the government's past atomic pursuits posed risks to health and the environment in Missouri and other parts of the country. Despite several plans put in place to remove this waste over the years -- first by the Department of Energy and then by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' program to clean up contaminated sites, which is under the Department of Defense -- local families, advocates and elected officials told PBS News they feel there has been little progress in remediating hazardous materials or assisting people with decades of health complications and medical bills.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently in charge of remediation of the site, as part of its Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Phil Moser, chief of the FUSRAP Environmental Branch, told PBS News that the creek's water is no longer contaminated, but the soil is. The Corps took over clean up efforts from the Department of Energy more than 25 years ago in a 1997 act of Congress. Moser said it will take another 14 years to finish cleaning up what's left of the contamination, largely around the former city airport site.
"The conditions on the ground back in the day were not the same as they are now," he said.
The agency has taken periodic water samples from its excavations of contaminated soil to make sure none of that contamination is migrating, he added.
"We're really trying to communicate that to the public, not downplaying anything that had been here in the past", said Col. Andy Pannier, district commander of the St. Louis District.
Contractors use a heavy auger to collect soil samples along Coldwater Creek. Photo courtesy of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Democrat Rep. Cori Bush have pushed to include the state in the latest version of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, known as RECA . The bill, which first passed in 1990, created a compensation program to process claims from people exposed to radiation leftover from nuclear testing done by the U.S. government.
A 2022 expansion of the program expired this summer. While an updated version, introduced by Hawley, to include Missouri and other states, has twice passed the Senate, House Speaker Mike Johnson has not brought the bill up for a vote on the House floor, despite it having bipartisan support.
In early December, as a government funding deadline loomed, Hawley took to the Senate floor to express his frustration with the lack of movement and he vowed to squash any new versions of the bill that didn't include Missouri and other states that have been pushing to be recognized.
Video by Sen. Josh Hawley's office
The draft of the short-term spending bill released this week did not include any funding for RECA.
In a post on X, Hawley called the legislation an "incredible embarrassment" and stated that it should be referred to as "Make America Sick Again."
He accused Johnson of killing the expansion of RECA "in favor of more money for Big Pharma & other special interests."
Johnson's office did not respond to questions from PBS News about why Hawley's legislation has not gotten a vote in the House, or to provide details about a possible alternate deal.
The refusal to bring an expanded version of RECA to the House floor or include it in the annual National Defense Authorization Act "signals this government's continued disregard for the lives of the impacted communities who are suffering and oftentimes communities of color," said Bush, whose own basement has "routinely flooded with water carrying potentially radioactive sediment."
Johnson has shown "flagrant disregard" for those sick and dying from the contamination, she added.
"This is a moral failure."
Families affected by the decadeslong creek contamination and experts who have worked on the issue say they are exhausted and feel betrayed by the inaction. Farr and five other families interviewed by PBS News say they feel they've been left to fight and survive disease on their own.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been criticized, including in the GAO report, for poor communication with local residents over the years. Pannier said the goal right now is to keep the door open and communicate with the community.
"We do get stories from the public. We get a lot of questions. Health concern questions come up often. We try to redirect them to resources that can help. We're not the health experts on the ground. We're here to remove the material and so trying to just help them find those resources and get some of those answers. But I think [we're] just being open to listening and trying to communicate with them," he said.
This fall, members of the Navajo Nation, Laguna Pueblo, Acoma Pueblo and Hopi tribe began driving from New Mexico to Washington, D.C., to demand that the House speaker act on RECA.
"So many in my family have suffered from radiation-related cancers," Maggie Billiman, one of the trip's organizers, said in a statement emailed to PBS News.
To people who have long worked on this issue, Bilman is known as a "downwinder," someone exposed to radiation from U.S. nuclear testing. Her father, a Navajo Code Talker in World War II and another downwinder, died from stomach cancer.
"As he was dying, he asked me to research cancer care, to try and help him, because it was so hard to get care," she said. "I couldn't deliver that to my father, I couldn't save him. But I want to try and deliver that help to my family, to my people, to the Navajo Nation. That's what I'm fighting for."
'No one could figure out what was going on'
A caution sign is posted as contractors with the Army Corps of Engineers use an excavator to dig up contaminated soil. That material is then loaded into a dump truck and later disposed of. The Corps says they are constantly testing the air quality and use several mitigation tactics, such as wetting the soil, to make sure it doesn't become airborne. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS News
Nuclear weapon production and research took place in the area near St. Louis Lambert International Airport from the 1940s to the 1970s. By 1960, the site was home to roughly 50,000 empty drums and 3,500 tons of contaminated steel and scrap metal, according to the GAO report. Runoff from this area contaminated the nearby Coldwater Creek, which eventually flows into the Missouri River, where Farr's family used to fish.
Federal documents and old newspaper clippings over decades detail how this waste contaminated the soil, water and buildings, "posing potential risks to human health and the environment," the GAO noted in a 2023 report, commissioned by Bush and Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
Some of those risks are still outstanding, and have not been managed according to best practices and standards, the report found.
Moser said, initially, contamination "migrated with the sediment that was in that water into areas along the creek. That doesn't happen now."
The agency maintains that the contaminant concentration that is left is "very, very low" but the work continues to make sure there is none at all.
The Corps said in a release from early December that "the low-level radioactive material in these areas do not present a risk if the ground is left undisturbed." PBS News asked the agency whether it was reasonable to believe that the soil in some of these areas had not been disturbed.
Moser said "absolutely not."
"There's been a lot of development in North Saint Louis County over the years and historical features that were there at one point in time that may be moved or covered up nowadays ... we're making sure that we're finding those and investigating," he said.
A sign reading "FUSRAP," which stands for Formally Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, is posted on the front of a trailer where contractors are working to remove residual waste. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS News
The Army Corps' Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) monitors 19 active sites across the country. Four of these sites with large amounts of contamination, including one in St. Louis, require "complicated cleanup remedies," the report said.
Eight of these 19 sites also include underserved communities, which because of race, income or other factors already face challenges in getting access to services.
GAO director Nathan Anderson said investigators looked not only at the environmental liabilities from the waste and the total cost of the FUSRAP, but also "the views of those who live in those communities about the effectiveness of the program."
In several interviews cited in the GAO's audit, community members in St. Louis and other parts of the country shared feelings of not being heard and not having enough information. One Missouri resident "raised concerns regarding the clarity and transparency of communications from the Corps to property owners," the report said.
This wasn't news to Karen Nickel, who has lived in North St. Louis County nearly her whole life. Her childhood home was about 10 houses from Coldwater Creek.
"I lived outside," she said.
She remembers seeing canoes and boats make their way down her block when the creek flooded. With those memories in mind, it was "no shock" to her brain when she found out about the contamination.
Still, "to my heart, that was just gut wrenching," she said.
Nickel founded Just Moms STL alongside longtime North County resident Dawn Chapman. The two met in 2013 and have worked together since to put together a "catastrophic picture of what had really already happened."
In the early years of the nonprofit, they thought they'd do some digging and then pass what they found off to the right agency.
"At that point, we could step back and let the experts do what they were good at," Nickel said.
The problem, co-founder Chapman said, was that it began to feel like the more they learned, the more they became the experts on their own communities. Chapman recalled all of the data requests that they'd submitted in the beginning. As those documents started coming in, they'd sit on the floor and comb over what they were learning.
"We were the ones who had the complete story," she said.
Christen Commuso said starting in 2012, she experienced a "downward spiral" of health challenges that didn't add up.
Doctors discovered masses on both of her ovaries. She had a total hysterectomy. Her gallbladder was removed. A tumor was spotted on her left adrenal gland. Within a month of that, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. A year after that, doctors found a tumor on her remaining right adrenal gland and a lesion in her liver.
She remembers recovering in a hospital bed after a surgery and seeing Nickel on the news, talking about the contamination in Coldwater Creek.
"I started to go, 'Oh my gosh, this is where I grew up. This is where my family's from,'" she recalled.
No one could figure out what was going on, she said. But seeing Nickel on TV, she felt she had a clue.
Several yards away where contractors are excavating the remaining contamination at the St. Louis site, sits a lab where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says they test samples of soil every day. A sign is pictured, warning those who enter that they are entering a "restricted area." Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS News
Different government entities have offered their conclusions regarding what kinds of cancers could be connected to the contamination and how prevalent they are among affected communities.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, released a public health assessment for the creek and surrounding areas in 2019. In its evaluation, the agency stated that people who lived or played near Coldwater Creek may be at a higher risk for developing certain types of cancer. It also recommended that people share their potential exposure with their doctors to monitor if any "unusual symptoms develop."
That exposure, whether recreational or residential, could have increased risks for lung cancer, bone cancer or leukemia between the 1960s and 1990s, the report said. More recent recreational exposures, after 2000, did not result in an elevated cancer risk, but residential exposures could have resulted in an elevated risk of lung cancer.
In its next steps, the ATSDR recommended that FUSRAP continue investigating and cleaning up several areas along the Coldwater Creek floodplain, including further soil sampling.
"To the best of our knowledge, no sampling data are available now or at the time of the consultation that would allow ATSDR to estimate exposures from other pathways, including inhaling dust blown from historical radiological waste storage piles," the agency said in an emailed statement.
A community coming together
Beyond the Corps' handling of waste sites, federal investigators also considered what affected communities experienced firsthand and how government outreach touched them, if at all, said GAO director Nathan Anderson.
He said it's vital to acknowledge and understand the distrust between communities affected by the Manhattan Project and the government's Cold War activities. It's important to listen to what affected communities share and view those details "as credible from the perspective of the audience, not necessarily from the perspective of the entity that is pushing the information out," he said.
Last October, dozens of people in North County met at a church for a town hall on the contamination. During the meeting, a collaboration between Just Moms STL, Missouri Coalition for the Environment and state Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark, people rose from the pews one by one and shared their stories. Through tears, many described the heaviness of fighting different kinds of cancers for years and years.
Nickson-Clark is a two-time breast cancer survivor. She was first diagnosed at 31.
She thought that Coldwater Creek, where she, her grandmother and grandparents all grew up, "could be a contributing factor to what my family was going through," she told PBS News.
Nickson-Clark's family has struggled with different types of cancers, spanning generations. Her mother had breast cancer, her grandfather had pancreatic cancer, and her two daughters are breast cancer survivors. There's also a history of immunodeficiencies among the men in the family. To those, she lost a brother and a cousin.
More than 170 people showed up to the town hall she hosted.
"Now people can see that they're not alone and now their stories are being heard and people have known for years about the Coldwater Creek issue but nobody admitted to it," she said.
Several North St. Louis County residents told PBS News that the topic of contamination in the area felt like a stigma, something you knew about but didn't bring much attention to.
"To see people, to hear them give them the opportunity to share their stories, was really what we all wanted to do," Nickson-Clark said.
'People are still suffering'
The effort to expand RECA is at a standstill as this Congress ends.
Nickel and others don't feel heard. While members of Just Moms STL have met with Johnson's staff, the speaker has not met directly with Nickel and others during their trips to D.C, she said. To Nickel, this felt like a punch in the gut after she and others have been traveling to the nation's capital sometimes twice a month to meet with lawmakers.
"To make those trips and to sit in front of people that have the authority to make decisions, to give these people what they need with just a simple yes vote, put it on the floor ... to have to sit in front of them time after time after time and still just continue to be shut down. That's abuse," she said.
Dawn Chapman (left), Karen Nickel, and Christen Commuso stand outside of House Speaker Mike Johnson's office in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Just Moms STL
Hawley criticized the speaker for not sitting down with Missourians who've been advocating for the state to be included in RECA.
"For the House speaker to allow this program to expire and not even sit down with the survivors and look them in the eye, I think is absolutely inexplicable. He needs to meet with them and listen to them and tell them what his plan is," he said.
Johnson's staff did not respond to a request for comment on his interactions with Just Moms STL or any future plans on the issue.
In Missouri, the Corps is installing warning signage along Coldwater Creek for the first time, something Bush had been pushing for years. In a statement on Dec. 4, it said the signs would be placed 50 to 75 feet apart, only in places where property owners have granted permission.
"Finally our community will at least be aware of the risk that surrounds the radioactive waste in Coldwater Creek. This achievement is not only about raising awareness but also about reaffirming our commitment to fully cleaning up and remediating the toxic legacy of the Manhattan Project," she said in a statement.
Pannier said the signs were a result of feedback from both lawmakers and the community.
"It was a joint effort from everybody to say, this will help us communicate better. It will send the message in the right way with the right information and hopefully that prevents people from disturbing new areas or reaching out and contacting the team here if they need information," he said.
The GAO's five formal recommendations to the Corps have a variety of complexities and a range of target completion dates. The report suggests that the Corps take several steps, including developing a roadmap on best practices and a create risk register. So far, each one is still listed as "open," or the actions have not been met yet. Under each one is a response from the Department of Defense, which oversees the Corps, with descriptions on how it plans to meet the guidance.
An emailed statement from the agency's headquarters noted that it was dedicated to cleaning up FUSRAP sites and that the Corps had been working with the Department of the Army to implement the suggestions program-wide and that "these actions are currently working their way through this process," the statement reads.
Members of the agency working in St. Louis told PBS News that it will take another 14 years to finish the remediation process. At any given time, Moser said 120 people are working on the FUSRAP team in St. Louis and soil is being sampled every day.
For people like Commuso, there is just more waiting.
"People are still suffering. People are still getting sick. People are dying," Commuso said. "People, like myself, are rationing care. I mean, it's ridiculous to one: let it expire at all. And then two: to ignore the advocates that have been on the Hill for months now, over and over and over again advocating for this."
In February, Aryn had surgery to remove the cancer. Afterward, her mother described the operation a "total success." About seven months later, Aryn took her last breath. She died Sept. 16.
She was 19 years old.
Aryn Marie Farr was 19 years old when she died on Sept. 26. Her family remembers her as fearless and kind. Photos courtesy of Marie Farr
More than 300 people gathered at McClendon Mortuary in Florissant, Missouri, to say goodbye.
The crowd -- many dressed in purple -- was so big that the funeral home had to open up an overflow room. She is survived by her mother, a brother, four sisters, two nieces, and two nephews. Her obituary described her as fearless and kind.
"As the bravest among five siblings, she never wavered in her resolve, standing firmly in her truth. Her laughter was loud and infectious, her sense of humor bold and sometimes dark, yet always uplifting," it read.
"Weeping may endure for a night," the pastor said during her service, "but joy comes in the morning."
Together, the crowd said, "Amen."