Billy Winters’ childhood in Florissant in the 1960s sounds enviable.
His parents bought a new house as thousands of other families flocked to the growing St. Louis suburbs. Winters’ neighborhood was full of other kids to play with. He spent almost every day splashing in a creek that ran near his home.
But Winters didn’t know at the time that the creek waters could be dangerous. The creek he was playing in was a small tributary to Coldwater Creek, which unbeknownst to him had been contaminated with radioactive waste left over from World War II. When Coldwater Creek flooded, its waters would back up in the creek near Winters’ family home.
His father worked for McDonnell Douglas, an aerospace manufacturer near the St. Louis airport. A 21-acre parcel on the airport property had become a dumping ground for radioactive waste produced downtown.
Winters, who has lived in Florida since 1983, only found out about the poisonous waste that had been dumped at sites all over St. Louis County a few months ago. But it could explain the myriad chronic illnesses he has developed over the years. His wife, Kathy Winters, said that the first 24 hours after they learned about the contamination felt “almost like a sense of relief.”
“This is it, maybe,” she said. “This is why Billy has all this stuff going on. And then, after the first 24 hours, we got mad.”
The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the first nuclear bomb in the 1940s. Uranium for the Manhattan Project — the name given to the effort to develop the bomb — was refined in downtown St. Louis. The leftover radioactive waste has plagued the metro area ever since.
‘I can’t describe how much pain I would be in’
Winters’ health struggles began in the early 2000s with an inexplicable high fever and headache. Despite a dayslong stay in the intensive care unit, doctors weren’t sure what was wrong. His lab reports seemed to point toward congestive heart failure.
He never found out what caused the fever, but he got better.
Next, his joints started locking up, and a biopsy revealed sarcoidosis, a rare inflammatory disease that can cause fatigue, swollen lymph nodes and joint pain and swelling. At times, he said, he couldn’t walk to the end of his driveway.
“I can’t describe how much pain I would be in,” Winters said.
A couple of years after that, Winters was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer that has been found at higher-than-expected rates in parts of St. Louis County. He also suffers from scleromyxedema and diabetes.
The pain those diseases left Winters in forced him to retire in 2016. He can’t walk half a mile because his joints will start to hurt so badly.
“I had expected in my earlier years that I’d be a whole lot healthier when I retired,” Winters said.
Radiation exposure is a possible risk factor for developing multiple myeloma, but the connection isn’t clear. Even so, programs for workers and residents exposed to Manhattan Project tests include multiple myeloma and diabetes as compensable diseases.
Billy’s illness has limited the Winters in what they can do in retirement. In the spring, they’ll visit Billy’s sister in Virginia and will get a powered wheelchair for the trip. Sometimes Billy feels guilty the two can’t be more active, but Kathy says they will manage, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.”
Proving and environmental exposure was the primary cause of someone’s illness — rather than family history, diet or other risk factors — is difficult. But for years, St. Louis-area residents have pointed to the remnant nuclear waste that contaminated huge swaths of north St. Louis County to explain rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other diseases.
History of contamination
Even before Winters’ family moved into their Florissant house, the radioactive waste from uranium refining operations in downtown St. Louis posed a health risk.
After the war, waste from Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis was trucked to the city’s airport, at times falling out of trucks only to be picked up by a worker with a shovel and broom. For years, the waste was left in the open on the north side of the airport property, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, where wind and rainwater dispersed it.
Winters’ father worked nearby and died in the 1990s from liver cancer.
In 1949, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium for the Manhattan Project, discovered radioactive waste in deteriorating steel drums at the airport risked leaking into Coldwater Creek, according to an internal memo.
Private companies and government agencies with oversight of the radioactive material documented the possible dangers of the radioactive waste repeatedly but made little effort to keep it from spreading as suburbs sprung up around the airport and Coldwater Creek throughout the 1950s and 1960s. An investigation last summer by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press laid bare the way they dismissed the spreading contamination as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”
While at the airport, the waste — a 29-foot-tall mound including almost 200 tons of uranium — produced “some minor contamination to Coldwater Creek,” according to a report by the Atomic Energy Commission that claimed it was “well within permissible and acceptable limits.”
After a few years, the waste was sold to a private company to be further processed to extract valuable metals — such as copper, nickel or cobalt — and moved up the road to Latty Avenue in Hazelwood. It once again sat exposed to the elements and adjacent to Coldwater Creek.
Despite the move, soil and drainage ditches at the airport remained contaminated for decades until crews excavated more than 600,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and scrap material. Remediation at the site wrapped up in 2007.
The Atomic Energy Commission initially planned to allow whatever was left after processing at Latty Avenue to be dumped in a quarry in Weldon Spring but reversed course after the U.S. Geological Survey warned it would likely contaminate the Missouri River just above the intakes for St. Louis County and St. Louis City’s drinking water.
The Cotter Corp., which owned the waste at Latty Avenue, eventually dumped it in 1973 at the West Lake Landfill, where it remains to this day.
The Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of planning an excavation and cleanup at the landfill but didn’t discover the true extent of the waste until earlier this year.
For almost 50 years, federal agencies relied on a reading taken from a helicopter to determine where in the landfill the radioactive material had been dumped.
But in May, the EPA announced the waste was spread throughout the landfill, not confined to two specific portions, as officials had long maintained. In some areas of the property, the waste was at the surface. In other locations, it was found deep underground.
The agency said the health risk “remains unchanged” and that the site doesn’t pose a threat to nearby residents at this time.
Still no compensation
After the investigation was published this summer, lawmakers quickly pledged to take action to support people who have been exposed to nuclear waste.
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, joined senators from the Southwest and sponsored an expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which currently covers only some residents who were exposed to atomic bomb testing from 1945 to 1962 and developed any of a list of serious illnesses.
Expanding the program would open up coverage to more “downwinders,” a term for people exposed to airborne radiation from atomic bombs detonated as tests, in Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana and Guam and expand coverage to more regions in Arizona, Nevada and Utah. Missouri residents exposed to waste from the Manhattan Project would also be eligible.
Of particular significance, it would extend coverage to the Navajo Nation, one of the tribal areas most affected from the first atomic bomb testing in 1945.
Since the radiation program first was created in the 1990s, more than 54,000 claims totaling about $2.6 billion have been approved. The program does not require claimants to prove their illnesses were caused by radiation, which is difficult to do, but rather presumes a connection if a sickened individual lived in a covered area at a time they could have been exposed.
In Missouri, the expansion would have covered individuals who lived in one of 20 ZIP codes for at least two years after 1949.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the RECA expansion would cost $147.1 billion over 10 years. Missouri’s portion would be $3.7 billion of that.
The proposal was attached in the Senate to the National Defense Authorization Act with bipartisan support, and President Joe Biden signaled his support for it.
But the legislation was stripped from the NDAA in a conference committee where members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate met to work out differences in their versions of the bill.
Hawley decried that decision, calling it an “injustice,” but he said “the fight is not over.”
“I will come to this floor as long as it takes,” Hawley said on the Senate floor last month. “I will introduce this bill as long as it takes. I will force amendment votes as long as it takes until we compensate the people of this nation who have sacrificed for this nation.”
Winters’ illnesses would have entitled him to compensation under the expansion.
Multiple myeloma is one of the diseases covered by the bill, and he grew up in one of the affected ZIP codes.
For uranium miners, millers and transporters, RECA currently provides a one-time lump sum of $100,000. People who were onsite at weapons tests can get $75,000, and those who lived downwind of a test site in Nevada can get $50,000. Under the proposed expansion, onsite participants and downwinders would have received $150,000.
Billy and Kathy Winters are still hopeful the compensation program might come to fruition. Kathy said they would use the money if her husband’s illness progressed to the point he needed to go to an assisted living home.
With his medical conditions, Billy doesn’t qualify for long-term care insurance policies, Kathy said, so they’d be fully responsible for the cost.
“That money won’t go far,” Kathy said, “but every little bit would help.”
The Radius series is a collaboration between MuckRock and States Newsroom outlets, including The Missouri Independent, Source New Mexico, Colorado Newsline, Utah News Dispatch, Arizona Mirror, Idaho Capital Sun and The Daily Montanan.
