During a Senate hearing last week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) pressed an Environmental Protection Agency official to prioritize remediation of radioactive contamination at the West Lake Landfill Superfund Site in Bridgeton, Mo.
“It’s probably no coincidence that the folks who live in this area are not big-time donors to political parties, they’re not big-time party activists, these are working people and they have been taken advantage of for years,” Hawley told Bruno Pigott, principal deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Water.
During the Thursday hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Hawley said he understands the West Lake Landfill cleanup was not under Pigott’s direct control.
“I want you to carry back to your colleagues at EPA, my seriousness about this issue,” and related Manhattan Project contamination in the greater St. Louis area, the lawmaker said.
The 200-acre West Lake Landfill site is in the Earth City Industrial Park on the eastern edge of the Missouri River floodplain.
“Some areas of the site became radiologically contaminated in 1973 when soils mixed with uranium ore processing residues were brought to the landfill and presumably used as daily cover in the landfilling operation,” according to an EPA background paper.
Although West Lake has been a Superfund site since 1990, Hawley said he got a letter from EPA in August saying that the agency still lacks a definitive timeline for cleanup.
Over the years, EPA has expected local residents to put up with the contamination and this has to stop, Hawley said during the hearing, which was nominally about carbon capture and storage.
There is even an underground fire at the landfill, Hawley said. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he said.
