This story is part one of a two-part series that examines the effects of nuclear waste contamination in Coldwater Creek on the surrounding community in St. Louis, Missouri. Part two airs Wednesday, April 23 on “CBS Evening News.”
When Linda Morice and her family first moved to St. Louis in 1957, they had no idea they had anything to fear. Then, people started getting sick.
“It was a slow, insidious process,” Morice said.
After the death of Morice’s mother, her physician uncle took her aside and gave her a stark warning: “Linda, I don’t believe St. Louis is a very healthy place to live. Everyone on this street has a tumor.”
Their neighborhood was bordered by Coldwater Creek, a 19-mile tributary of the Missouri River. It wound through their backyards, near baseball fields, schools and cemeteries — and past lots where leaking barrels and open-air dumps of nuclear waste leeched into its waters.
“It was shocking that this creek was likely making people sick,” Morice said.
Starting in 1942, roughly one ton of pure uranium was produced per day in downtown St. Louis. It was then shipped to labs across the country for the top secret Manhattan Project that created the first nuclear bomb.
The leftover waste was dumped around the city.
“That material was in 82 different spots throughout St. Louis County. It spilled. Children played in it. It seemed to me that there wasn’t an attempt to absolutely get to the bottom of it,” Morice said.
In Morice’s family alone, her mother, father and brother died of cancer, leaving her to think differently about her childhood.
“All that time, all those fun things were happening, but that whole time we, and the rest of the community were being exposed to some pretty dangerous stuff,” Morice said.
Now her husband, who also lived in the area, is fighting cancer. He’s being treated by urologic oncologist Dr. Gautum Agarwal. For the last several years, Agarwal has been tracking which of his patients lived near Coldwater Creek.
“I was seeing patients who are young, who had developed pretty significant cancers from areas that there’s been some contamination with nuclear waste,” Agarwal said.
While radiation is known to cause cancer, experts say they can’t pin down the specific cause of the disease in a given patient.
But a 2019 study from the Department of Health and Human Services found that people who lived and played near Coldwater Creek from the 1960s to 1990s “could be at an increased risk of developing lung cancer, bone cancer or leukemia.”
“The people there deserve for us to look at this much closer than we have,” Agarwal said.
