By Wayne Barber
The Environmental Protection Agency continues to believe that people living and working near the West Lake Landfill Superfund Site in Missouri are not being exposed to radiological contaminant levels that pose health concerns.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this week that a stormwater sample, collected April 30 following a period of heavy rain by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources near the West Lake Landfill complex, found levels of alpha particles higher than allowed for drinking water.
However, an EPA site status update last month on the West Lake Landfill, located in Bridgeton, Mo., found no off-site exposure to area residents. A significant amount of environmental sampling has been performed on and around the site, including the nearby residential community of Spanish Village, EPA said on its West Lake Landfill Web page.
“Based on available data, EPA has determined that conditions at the site do not warrant temporary or permanent relocation of residents at this time,” according to the June update. “EPA bases its understanding of site conditions on current and historical site investigations and sampling done by PRPs [potentially responsible parties], EPA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (MDNR).“
“Our evaluation of the off-site health risk has not changed,” an EPA official told RadWaste Monitor on Thursday.
West Lake, which contains waste from the former uranium production facility at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis, is adjacent to the Bridgeton Landfill, where an underground fire has been smoldering since 2010. Both are encompassed within the Superfund Site.
The official said the federal agency is continuing to monitor the situation around the West Lake Landfill. Additional analysis on the recent stormwater samples is being done by various entities, including the potentially responsible parties for the radiologically contaminated Operable Unit 1: DOE; Bridgeton Landfill LLC, a subsidiary of property owner Republic Services; Rock Road Industries; and Cotter Corp.
In general, it’s also not uncommon for heavy rainfall to result in increased level of radionuclides in stormwater, the official added.
On another issue, EPA still does not have a target date set for submitting the long-awaited final soil cleanup remedy for West Lake, which was originally anticipated at the end of 2016. The agency continues to review various technical documents in connection with that process, the EPA official said.
Local residents, lawmakers, and environmentalists have grown increasingly critical of the EPA’s quarter-century cleanup effort at West Lake, with some calling for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) to take over.
Legislation that would have transferred remediation authority and control of the cleanup to FUSRAP has failed to become law. The position of the Army Corps has been that it could not clean up the Superfund site any faster than EPA.
Originally used for agriculture, the land became a limestone quarrying and crushing operation in 1939. In the early 1950s, portions of the quarried location and adjacent areas were used to dispose of municipal refuse, industrial solid wastes, and construction and demolition debris.
In 1973, roughly 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate from the Manhattan Project, a World War II nuclear bomb development program, was mixed with approximately 38,000 tons of contaminated soil and used to cover trash being dumped during daily operations.