FLORISSANT — After an independent report of radioactive contamination at Jana Elementary, the Hazelwood School District announced Tuesday night that the school will be closed and students will switch to virtual learning for the remainder of the current semester. By January, which coincides with the second semester of the current school year, students will be transferred to different schools in the district, officials said. “To the students, staff and parents of the Jana school community, we recognize that you are dealing with a situation that was not created by anyone in this room and that you have no control over,” said School Board President Betsy Rachel, reading from prepared observations. “This is causing disruption to our students’ learning and school environment, for which we sincerely apologize.” The announcement came at a packed meeting, where many parents expressed concern about the potential impact on students’ health and called for greater transparency from school officials.
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The decision followed calls from elected officials and others for swift action in response to the independent study. In a letter Tuesday to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked the agency to “immediately” review the independent report, conduct further testing of its own and explain what actions of Body and other services are talking. “I emphasize that time is of the essence and delay is not acceptable,” Hawley wrote to Lt. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon. “The residents of this community have had to deal with uncertainty and changing realities for far too long.” U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, called for an “immediate liquidation.” “The federal government is responsible for this waste, and we need answers,” Bush said in a press release. Last week, a report from an ongoing lawsuit was released that found radioactive waste at the school up to 22 times the expected level. Samples taken Aug. 15 from Jana Elementary’s library, kitchen, HVAC system, classrooms, fields and playgrounds were found to have “well above the natural background” of the radioactive isotope lead-210, polonium, of radium and other toxins, according to a Boston Chemical. Data Corp. report, which was created for an ongoing lawsuit. The school, located at 405 Jana Drive and opened in 1972, sits on the Coldwater Creek floodplain, which had been contaminated by waste from atomic weapons development. Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. processed vast quantities of uranium ore on the banks of the Mississippi River, north of downtown St. Louis, from 1942 to 1957. Tons of by-products with residual radioactive material were sent to a site on the northern border of the airport, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, for storage. It was later trucked about a mile away to an industrial area in the 9200 block of Latty Avenue, which also borders Coldwater Creek. Sources of contamination in the main storage areas have mostly been remediated. Now the Army Corps of Engineers’ ongoing multimillion-dollar focus is being tested so Coldwater Creek can finally be cleaned up. Before emptying into the Missouri River, the creek travels through Hazelwood, Florissant, Black Jack, St. Louis that has not been incorporated and a piece of Berkeley. The corps said it found elevated samples along the creek near Jana Elementary, but that this test did not lead them to go any closer or to the school. In an interview Monday, Phillip Moser, director of the St. Louis of the Corps’ Remedial Formerly Utilized Sites Action Program, or FUSRAP, said he stood by the FUSRAP tests in the area and would have no problem sending his children to school there. Moser said he was “shocked” by the Boston Chemical report and disputed its conclusions. “This report could lead us to do things, but we have to do an assessment of the actual report itself,” he said.
Doubts about the findings
Kim Visintine, who has been following the Coldwater Creek story since the U.S. government acknowledged there was radioactive contamination from the Manhattan Project in the waterway, said Tuesday in a phone interview that she also had doubts about the findings. “It should be cleaned up as quickly as possible,” Visintine, a nurse and co-founder of the group “Coldwater Creek — Just the Facts Please,” said of the contamination at Jana Elementary. “Blaming responsible parties when we don’t have the full story doesn’t help anyone. It just delays the cleanup for everyone involved. You need to find out what is causing this. Where did this waste come from?’ She said it’s not clear to her from the report that the contamination came from World War II-era waste, which is specifically funded to restore Coldwater Creek. In a telephone interview Tuesday, Marco Kaltofen, who wrote the report, said he stood by the findings. “By far, most of the contamination we found came from the Manhattan Project waste,” he said. On Tuesday night, more than 100 people showed up to the Hazelwood school board meeting to voice their concerns. Several people thanked the school district for closing Jana, but expressed concern during the public comment session about transparency. “We don’t blame you all, but we want to hear what’s going on because these are our babies,” Patrice Strickland told the board. She and her husband have two children at Jana, who have been doing virtual learning since the district told parents in August that the school was being tested for radioactive contamination. Officials said all Jana classes will be virtual from Monday. They plan to have students in new schools starting Nov. 28 and no later than the start of the second semester. “Right now, it feels like COVID again,” Strickland told the Post-Dispatch. Karen Nickel, of Just Moms STL, Rep. Doug Clemens, D-St. Ann and others told the board there needs to be an emphasis on doing more testing and cleanup throughout north St. Louis County. “They’re dragging their feet to clean it up,” Clemens, chair of the Missouri House Legacy Waste Caucus, told the school board. “In this time of need, we must stand together.”
Recovery attempt
The Jana Elementary property is located at a point along 19 miles of Coldwater Creek. Although federal public health officials previously called for additional testing inside North County homes, the Corps is focusing on testing and remediation within the 10-year flood plain. Corps officials said almost all of the lingering contamination they found is trapped between the banks, a few feet below, but that there are exceptions. Parts of St. Cin in Hazelwood, including some yards along Palm Drive, have already been restored in recent years. So was a high creek bank bordering Duchesne Park in Florissant. There is an ongoing effort to restore former baseball fields across from the airport site along McDonnell Avenue near Boeing where children and adults used to play. Within the year, Moser said a design plan will be drawn up to clean up the rest of the creek based on the hot spots found from their sampling. He said the cleanup of the entire creek would be done by 2038. In 2021, the House budget for the project was $34.55 million, up from $20 million in 2019. By late 2021, the Corps had tested on Old Halls Ferry Road, about 10 miles downstream. Of those 29,000 samples taken, the Corps said less than 5 percent were above the assessment criteria. Typically, each soil sampling location is a minimum of 6 feet deep, with samples collected from the surface and then every 2 feet below. Sample sites exceed 20 feet, for example, to target buried historic drainage. By the end of 2021, the Corps said it had identified at least 12 areas likely to require remediation between Interstate 270 and the Missouri River, which had been discussed with individual property owners. At the time, there were 39 precincts, most of which were still designated, between McDonnell Avenue and Interstate 270. Moser said “hundreds of properties” along the creek have not been contaminated. Others are contaminated, but not quite clear to the public. One of the many issues raised is the lack of signage. “We’re trying to respect the privacy of landowners,” Moser said, adding, “We’re also trying to de-stigmatize Coldwater Creek.”
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