News, Australia - In 2011, residents across an American community in St Louis began to notice a chain of inexplicably high incidents of cancer and disease across its population.
For decades, both former and current residents from approximately 90 municipalities in the Missouri city were diagnosed with a long list of life-threatening illnesses, including leukaemia, lupus, brain tumours, appendix cancer, multiple sclerosis, birth defects and many more. People died. Babies died. And they’re still dying to this day, dubbed “the poison children of Coldwater Creek.”
But no one ever connected the dots as to what was really making these innocent people sick.
In 1942, during the height of World War II, a corporation by the name of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works was hired by the US government to process uranium for the development of the world’s first nuclear weapons. The operation was dubbed ‘The Manhattan Project.’
Based in St Louis, it was here that the atomic bomb was born...
By the mid 1940s, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works had run out of space to store the radioactive waste left behind, so in 1946 they began to ship the leftovers to a relatively underpopulated area north of St Louis, next to a creek by the name of Coldwater. It was here that approximately 250,000 barrels of radioactive material were dumped in shallow pits and exposed to the elements.
“It was in wartime, everything was secretive. In the ‘40s it’s not like we had social media, nobody knew,” former resident Kim Visintine told news.com.au.
“The uranium was owned by the US government and the Department of Energy — this is their mess.”
In some areas where waste spilled from the trucks, the Energy Department found radiation levels exceeded seven times the normal amount.
According to a 1990 article in the New York Times, the toxic waste was dumped secretly with the approval of the federal government.
2 comments:
thankyou for posting this today
it is hard to get any solid information about this problem or proposed solutions.
Meanwhile, the debate du jour is about publicly funding a 1 billion dollar stadium for a football team that is probably leaving town anyway.
And here we have lived under the mistaken notion that only the former Soviet Union did these kinds of things (i.e. dump radioactive waste without any concern for their people)! But more importantly, we ought to be asking ourselves what kinds of actions are the federal government covering up or ignore right now? You don't think the leopards running the show have changed their spots, do you? If you do, I have a bridge to sell you.
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