By Allison Kite | Missouri Independent
Removing radioactive waste from the West Lake Landfill will cost nearly $400 million after federal officials discovered the contamination was far more widespread than previously known, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday.
In a press release, EPA officials announced they had significantly expanded the portions of the suburban St. Louis landfill that will require cleanup. Crews will need to dig up another 20,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris -- more than three football fields piled one yard high with material -- and expand the cap it plans to place on other portions of the site.
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The excavation portion of the project, previously expected to cost about $229 million, will now cost $392 million, the agency said in a report released as part of the announcement. That jump represents a $113.5 million increase in costs because of the expanded excavation and about $50 million in cost increases due to inflation.
While the announcement was a welcome step forward to Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, which has been advocating for a more thorough cleanup of the site, she said it serves as a reminder that the EPA "botched" the original investigation.
"Our site was way more dangerous and we were at, in my opinion, way more risk than this agency ever thought," Chapman said in an interview Friday.
"We told them this," she said.
The St. Louis area has struggled for decades with remnant radioactive waste from the World War II-era effort to build the world's first nuclear bomb. Uranium for the Manhattan Project, the secret effort to develop the weapon, was refined in downtown St. Louis.
After World War II ended, waste was trucked from downtown St. Louis to sites in St. Louis County and dumped in the open where it leaked into Coldwater Creek, and exposed generations of residents to radioactive material.
In 1973, thousands of tons of waste was dumped illegally into the West Lake Landfill, where it remains today.
Over the decades that followed, federal officials failed to uncover the true extent of the contamination.
In the late 1970s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission used a helicopter to measure gamma radioactivity coming from the site.
While it correctly identified two contaminated areas, it missed others. But the conclusion that the contamination was confined to two parts of the landfill stood for more than 40 years even into the 2010s as Chapman and other advocates urged the EPA to do more thorough testing.
In 2023, the EPA announced that as it tested the landfill to prepare for cleanup, it discovered contamination was more widespread than it previously knew.
According to the EPA's new report, the parts of the landfill that will be excavated or capped will increase by 40 acres. The EPA also discovered contamination had moved offsite into a drainage ditch at the northern end of the site.
Kellen Ashford, a spokesman for the EPA, said the agency could not say when excavation might begin at the site but called Friday's update a "very crucial step in advancing the site towards cleanup."
Chapman said she was thankful for the work the EPA has done in recent years but questioned why the site wasn't more thoroughly investigated decades ago.
"The cost of it not happening when it should have decades ago is people have died," she said. "'People have been exposed. This community has been made very ill."
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