Government Contractor Buried Nuclear Waste Near St. Louis Playground

Last month we all heard about the trash fire that threatens to ignite a radioactive waste dump in St. Louis, but apparently that isn’t the only nuclear dump site in the area. There is another site just outside of the city, and this one is located in the worst place imaginable. A cancer cluster has recently been discovered near a playground, where a government contractor dumped tens of thousands of radioactive waste barrels decades ago.

CBS News has interviewed many of the residents that lived and played in the area as kids, and found that a shocking number of them have all come down with cancer. These older residents discovered the pattern after they tried to reconnect with each other on social media, and noticed that many of their peers had cancer, or had been sick in the past. However, it seems that the area is still quite dangerous. One resident told CBS that “Within a six-house radius, I knew four people with brain cancer, one a child, one a young professor, and I just thought, ‘This is really odd.’” She later compiled a list of 2,700 cases of cancer, tumors, and autoimmune diseases in the area.

The park where these adults used to play in as kids has since been gated off, as the Army Corps of Engineers tries to clean up the radioactive waste. The company that dumped the waste is known has Mallinckrodt, who helped the US government process uranium in St. Louis during World War Two. They’ve since issued a statement that places the blame for this disaster on the shoulders of the US government. “The company worked under the direction of the US government…and at no time did Mallinckrodt own any uranium or its byproducts.”