St. Louis burning: What killed the babies near Weldon Spring?

“I found myself wondering, why was I in this affluent, well-educated part of St. Louis that seemed to experience a higher level of infant illness and death than I had ever seen in poor neighborhoods?” Kleba said.

“I’d never buried seven infants in 35 years,” he added. “Then I buried seven infants in two years.”

To Kleba, it did not seem like a coincidence that radioactive and chemical waste had seeped into the groundwater near his parish.

In the 1940s, the U.S. military acquired some 17,000 acres of land in St. Charles County, depopulating and demolishing three towns and building an explosives plant that later became a uranium processing plant. The waste was thrown into an old limestone quarry and is known to have contaminated the groundwater, according to U.S. Department of Energy data.

After the site was decommissioned, the 17,000 acres were parceled up — the military retained ownership of some, while some of it became a nature reserve. A few acres even became a high school.

The site was left untouched until 1988, when the Department of Energy began decontamination and cleanup efforts, resulting in nearly 1.5 million cubic yards of waste being stored in a 45-acre, pyramid-like “disposal cell,” now open to the public. Construction of the disposal cell was completed in 2001.

Most of the waste that had been dumped in the quarry — along with the contaminated water in it — was moved to the cell, but groundwater tests show areas are still contaminated.

“I’m concerned about what’s still in the quarry,” said Kay Drey, an anti-nuclear activist in St. Louis who has been vocal against nuclear development since the 1970s. “The quarry is limestone, so that means it’s full of holes.”

“During the course of that investigation, it became obvious to me that there was a serious problem related to the impacted groundwater that had uranium in it,” said Daniel McKeel, a retired Washington University pathologist who was involved in investigating contamination-related health effects in St. Charles County in the early 2000s. “It had thorium in it, and that was particularly prevalent at the quarry site which is about six-tenths of a mile from part of where St. Charles County gets its drinking water.”

He added: “There was definite evidence, no doubt about it.”

The Weldon Spring Site remains under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy, which continues to conduct surface and groundwater tests throughout the area. Some samples at Department of Energy sampling wells continue to test positive for thorium and uranium, in some cases more than 15 times the maximum contamination level for public drinking water set by the EPA.

Thorium and uranium are naturally occurring radioactive metals. Uranium ore was brought from the Belgian Congo to St. Louis during World War Two to be processed in order to develop the first atomic weapons. The waste from that process — forms of thorium and uranium — were discarded throughout the region. Exposure to radioactive materials has been known to cause cancer, among other health effects, including autoimmune diseases, birth defects and infertility.

The site is just over a mile from the well fields that provide the drinking water for the entire county. The water drawn in those wells is routinely tested, but other potential pathways of exposure remained before cleanup began, including stories of young people jumping the fence and swimming in the contaminated quarry.

“I think it’s irresponsible for people to be ignoring this,” Drey said.

It’s not just the studies of St. Charles County sites that have frustrated residents. Similar findings near other sites in St. Louis County have done little to ease the fears of current and former residents such as Jenell Wright and Angela Helbling.

Wright and Helbling used to live in North St. Louis County, where hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear weapons waste contaminated a 20-mile long creek that flowed through residential areas before emptying into the Missouri River. In recent years, residents have come together, pointing to anecdotal evidence that suggests higher rates of cancers, infertility, and autoimmune diseases in areas adjacent to contaminated sites in St. Louis County.

But proving causation isn’t easy — it may not even be possible. Faisal Khan, Director of the St. Louis County Department of Health said the biggest challenge — from a scientific standpoint — is determining whether the higher rates of cancers such as those found in North St. Louis County are a direct result of the contamination, simply a coincidence, or potentially related to other factors.

“Establishing causation or attributing cause is a very, very difficult thing to do,” Khan said. “My message to our staff is to remain true to the science, to remain true to the scientific method, and at the same time share that information [with residents.]”

One in three people is expected to develop cancer in their lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society.

Residents such as Wright and Helbling have criticized the state’s methodologies when conducting health studies near Missouri’s nuclear waste sites, just as Kleba and others criticized those in St. Charles County.

“The studies are completely uninformative,” Wright said. “From a statistical standpoint, they’re worthless.”

Data used to look at cancer rates comes from the Missouri Cancer Registry, which was legally established in 1984 and organizes data based on the ZIP code in which the patient lives at the time of the diagnosis. Many from the generation with the longest exposure to Coldwater Creek — including Wright and Helbling — grew up and moved away. If they were diagnosed elsewhere, their cancers are not included in the data set used to analyze cancer rates near contaminated sites.

“The fundamental issue that’s going on here is the residential movement,” said Diane Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University who is also from North St. Louis County. “In no case have they been able to do a study that accounts for that. I completely understand why — the data aren’t there, they’re going to have to do a whole different design. And you can’t do that with the data that currently exist.”

Data collected from death certificates can also be misleading. For example, Helbling’s mother died due to pneumonia, which was listed as the official cause of death. The brain cancer she also had at the time was not listed, and therefore the cancer may never make it into a data set looking at cancer rates based on cause of death.

Wright said the state’s results never eased residents’ fears, and many were frustrated with what they saw as inaction or denial on the part of the state.

“I think it makes us panic more because it looks like they’re trying to cover it up,” Wright said of the state and its studies.