Hazardous Waste in Hazelwood
- Lin Ferguson
- Oct 24, 2022
- 2 min read
Radioactive Contamination at Jana Elementary
According to a 2019 CDC report, up to 22-times the acceptable amount of radioactive waste has been found on the Jana Elementary School campus in the Hazelwood district. Saint Louis is no stranger to danger imposed disproportionately on its Black communities, but this finding is one of the most troubling. Potentially, for generations, this community has suffered this poisoning, continuing to send proceeding generations to the same toxic source. Unsurprisingly, Hazelwood is a predominantly Black area of northern St. Louis County, and the school is no exception in that regard. Jana Elementary’s library, kitchen, HVAC system, classrooms, fields and playgrounds are all found to be highly contaminated. According to the A.T.S.D.R. (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry), hazardous waste was improperly stored near Coldwater Creek and the Hazelwood Interim Storage Site, resulting in the contamination of the surrounding areas. This stems from the extraction of radium & uranium by the Mallinckrodt facility of Saint Louis as a part of the Manhattan nuclear project. Despite trying to downplay the findings in their own report, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers raised the alarm after producing these findings. The A.T.S.D.R. also conducted a study & deemed that, "radiological contamination in and around Coldwater Creek, prior to remediation activities, could have increased the risk of some types of cancer in people who played or lived there", dating all the way back to the 1960s.
City officials, including Rep. Cori Bush, D-STL, have demanded an immediate clean-up & further assessment of the extent of damage/harm. Bush even went as far as to claim that this is the responsibility of the federal government and answers are needed.
In the meantime, virtual schooling has begun for the Jana Elementary children and school officials expect them to be fully transferred to different schools within the district no later than the start of the next school semester in January.
Rep. Doug Clemens, D-St. Ann, & other community leaders, feel Saint Louis' northern counties have needed clean-up for a while and that it's been put-off for far too long. Parks/Playgrounds, homes & backyards, baseball fields, and (we now know) even schools have been contaminated, resulting in mass amounts of the Black community being affected physically (and who knows how else, i.e., spiritually; emotionally; mentally) due to being sequestered in these toxic areas, these hoods of Saint Louis.
The clean-up, as indicated by the Corps, is projected to take over a decade & a half, costing tens of millions of dollars.
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