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The waterway snakes 19 miles through north St. Louis County, from around St. Louis Lambert International Airport to the Missouri River. In 1806, Capt. William Clark mentioned the confluence in journals as a final stop in an epic journey.

The spring-fed creek eventually became drainage to residential and industrial growth starting in the 1950s and 1960s. Even still, there are areas that look wild, and one of those areas is right behind Cole’s house on Chapel View Drive.

That’s why he was surprised one day in 2019 to see a white van and truck parked by the creek, in a low-lying grassy area that he doesn’t own. Five people in bright orange vests had a table set up.

“I thought it was a class or something,� said Cole, 67.

Or a body.

The team told Cole they were doing “some testing.� They gave him a “Dear Neighbor� letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis District that was so specific it didn’t make sense. The letter said the sampling was part of the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, or FUSRAP, “to further characterize Coldwater Creek and associated flood plain properties.�

After he read it, Cole went to his computer. He concluded it had something to do with World War II and an issue of contamination getting into the creek. He wondered what the results of the testing were and eventually forgot about it until a reporter recently knocked on the door.

“From my understanding, the issues were by the airport,â€� Cole said. “But they were testing here. Just to be careful. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ went all out.â€�

In the past 30 years, North County has gone through a significant population shift, with older white residents moving out and African Americans moving in. As the neighborhoods shift, many people don’t know about the ongoing cleanup of Coldwater Creek from radioactive contaminants left from the development of the nation’s first atomic weapons.

In 2021, the Army Corps of Engineers budget for the project was $34.55 million, up from $20 million in 2019. So far, more than 29,000 dirt samples have been taken to pinpoint remediation of the creek that is expected to ramp up in the next couple years.

“It’s been a very long process. It’s just been ridiculous,� said Mary Shaw, 64, who raised a couple of children near the creek in the 200 block of Palm Drive. “They should have bought us all out.�

Though funding has increased, and about 100 people are working on the project each day, the completion date has been pushed back to 2038. Several recommendations from federal public health officials aren’t being followed.

Progress has been made, but Cole still faces the same question that has dogged the region for decades.

“Should we be concerned?� Cole asked. “It’s not really put out there.�

Making a mess

The St. Louis region played an enormous role supplying U.S. forces with firepower during World War II. In St. Charles County, 17,000 acres of farmland were snapped up by eminent domain to make TNT for torpedoes and other bombs. A plant in the 4800 block of Goodfellow Boulevard in St. Louis produced ammunition and artillery projectiles.

And on the Mississippi riverfront, north of Downtown St. Louis, Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. processed massive amounts of uranium ore for the development of atomic weapons from 1942 to 1957. Tons of byproduct with residual radioactive material were shipped to a location on the northern border of the airport, next to Coldwater Creek, to be stored.

For years, the toxic waste sat there, mainly in barrels, in the 100 block of James S. McDonnell Boulevard. By the mid-1960s, Continental Mining and Milling Co. purchased much of the material. They trucked it about a mile away, to an industrial area in the 9200 block of Latty Avenue, which also borders Coldwater Creek. The material was dried there before it was shipped to Canon City, Colorado. Some of it was also eventually buried at West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton.

The main storage sites along Coldwater Creek, and surrounding areas, ended up being heavily contaminated. Those sources of contamination have mainly been remediated. Now, after a lot of concern from residents, the ongoing focus has been testing so the creek can finally be cleaned up.

The creek travels through Hazelwood, Florissant, Black Jack, unincorporated St. Louis County and a sliver of Berkeley — all areas that had postwar population booms. Florissant ballooned from 3,700 people in 1950 to 66,000 in 1970; Hazelwood shot up from 300 to 14,000 people in that timeframe.

Unbeknownst to the new residents, many of them had followed the path of the radioactive waste trucked from north St. Louis to North County, before President Richard Nixon created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The residents were drawn by brand-new homes, in new school districts and neighborhoods, some with views of the countryside.

Coldwater Creek became a real, live jungle gym. A place to catch crawdads.

“We would play in the creek when I was growing up,� said Dan Farrell, 60, of Hazelwood. “No one knew about the Manhattan Project, at least not little kids. We found out when we were older that we should be glowing. I used to swim in it and eat berries out of the trees.�

In 2011, a group of former and current North County residents launched a Facebook group, “Coldwater Creek — Just the Facts Please,� after they noticed a lot of people in their 30s and 40s getting rare cancers.

“We were all over, reconnected through social media,� said Kim Visintine, a nurse practitioner in Detroit who helped found the online group. Her mother still lives in the area.

Two years later, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services Cancer Inquiry Program completed a study of ZIP codes surrounding Coldwater Creek. Facing public pressure, the state broadened the study in 2014 to include two more nearby ZIP codes and lengthened the timeframe of cancer incidence data, but it did not include people who had moved out of the area.

Considering 1996 to 2011, the state found cases of leukemia were “statistically significantly higher� than the rate for the rest of Missouri, as were cases of breast, colon, prostrate, kidney and bladder cancers, according to the . Among children, 17 and younger, cases of brain and other nervous system cancers were “significantly� higher than expected in the 63043 ZIP code. Oddly, thyroid cancer, which is more easily linked to ionizing radiation exposure, was significantly lower in the region.

There was enough concern in 2019 that the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, weighed in with a .

ATSDR, which addresses community public health concerns nationwide, concluded that people like Farrell who lived or played “in and around� Coldwater Creek between the 1960s and 1990s could have increased risk of getting lung cancer, bone cancer or leukemia from radiological contamination that was around prior to remediation of the original storage areas beside the airport and on Latty Avenue.

ATSDR said there was “only slightly� increased risk of developing lung cancer from daily residential exposure since 2000.

The federal agency made recommendations. Reporting shows that several of them aren’t being followed.

The recommendations

There should be signage along Coldwater Creek to “inform� people of potential exposure risks in areas not yet investigated or cleaned up, ATSDR recommended in its report. Spot checks by the Post-Dispatch didn’t reveal any signs warning about the possibility of toxic waste of this nature, though there are occasional caution signs for steep embankments and sewer water, as well as signs warning owners to clean up after their dogs.

The Army Corps of Engineers said its role was not to put up signs where there is residual radioactive material that lasts billions of years, especially on private property. Regardless, the agency said the levels it is finding so far along Coldwater Creek are at a low level and below ground surface.

ATSDR recommended that Missouri consider updating analyses of cancer incidence, cancer mortality, and birth defects “as feasible� among residents in the ZIP codes around the creek. That update hasn’t happened yet.

Lisa Cox, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Senior Services, told the Post-Dispatch by email that they hadn’t received a request to conduct another analysis of cancer in the area since the 2013 study and 2014 follow-up that explored diseases between 1996 and 2011.

ATSDR recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers continue investigating and cleaning up creek sediments and flood plain soils to meet regulatory goals. Indeed, the Army Corps of Engineers St. Louis FUSRAP program has ramped up its testing of the creek, as reflected by its annual budget, but not in tributaries or other areas where fill dirt was taken from the bottomlands to build new subdivisions.

“We have found spotty areas of contamination as we sample down the creek, and it’s all been below ground surface,� said Phillip Moser, FUSRAP program manager in St. Louis. “Everything we have found up to this point doesn’t pose an immediate risk … people aren’t being exposed during normal activities.�

Since 2012, Moser said, the Army Corps of Engineers and its contractors have scanned the surface of the entire creek area within the 10-year flood plain. He said they’ve taken more than 29,000 dirt samples from 9.6 miles of the creek, mainly between the northern edge of the airport and the intersection of Old Halls Ferry Road in unincorporated St. Louis County. Four more miles of creek are left to reach the confluence with the Missouri River.

Moser said they continue to study historical flow patterns of the creek for targeted testing. He said they also do “systematic� sampling roughly every 30 feet of the creek and every 115 feet of the flood plain. Soil samples are collected at the surface, then at least every 2 feet down, typically to 6 feet deep. He said if contamination is found, more sampling is done to find the limit. Some locations of testing extend to 20 feet deep or more, to subsurface features, like buried historic drainage.

Residual radioactive material much smaller than a grain of sugar apparently can be detected. Less than 5% of samples taken detected contamination above remediation goals.

“As we are going further, we are seeing less and less,� Moser said of contamination, which he said was mainly found high on the creek bank, 2 to 6 feet below surface.

He said preliminary testing of soil samples taken north of Interstate 270 identified 12 areas that “require further action.� He said the areas won’t be disclosed to the public until it’s time to bring heavy equipment in to clean up.

“Right now that is between us and the property owner,� Moser said. “We want to respect their privacy.�

Jon Rankins, a health physicist for the Army Corps of Engineers, said putting the information out early could have unintended consequences.

“We need to make progress in cleaning this up, and not falsely alarming people, causing stress on their lives, or causing damage to their property for no reason,� Rankins said. “You have to respect those things. There is a gray area.�

Inside the I-270 loop, which isn’t residential, Moser said, there are 39 areas and properties that will require remediation, most of which “are still being defined.�

Parts of St. Cin Park in Hazelwood, including a few backyards along Palm Drive, were already remediated in recent years. So was a high bank of the creek bordering Duchesne Park in Florissant. There’s an ongoing effort to remediate former baseball fields across from the airport site along McDonnell Boulevard near Boeing where children and adults used to play.

Moser said they are designing the plan to remediate the rest of the creek. If there aren’t delays from other road and bridge projects, he said, they want to start cleaning up the creek within the next two years. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ will begin near the airport, work their way downstream toward the confluence, removing contamination identified by testing. The original storage location beside the airport will continue to be used as a load-out facility for shipping the contaminated dirt out of the area by covered rail cars. It’s currently being sent to a waste management company in Idaho.

Though they’ve speeded up testing, the completion date for the overall project has been pushed back to 2038. A “handful� of property owners haven’t yet allowed testing, but Moser said that hasn’t slowed them down.

“ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ were supposed to be done in 2022,â€� Visintine said. “They found much more extensive contamination than originally thought.â€�

Rich topsoil: $40

Though ATSDR recommends it, the testing doesn’t include indoor dust in homes where yards have been cleaned up or require clean up, nor basements that have been directly flooded by the creek in the past. Moser said “it’s something we could consider� if somebody has “specific evidence� of flooding.

Another notable omission is the testing of fill dirt. An extensive amount of top soil was taken out of the Coldwater Creek bottomlands to level off and build new subdivisions in North County and other areas.

“That contamination could have been easily moved from the creek to somebody’s front yard and across the street,� said Mark Behlmann, 63, a former member of the Hazelwood School Board who has volunteered with Visintine to bring awareness to the creek. “There have been a whole litany of builders in North County.�

His family, of Marcal General Contractors, was one of them. He said they built 1,000 homes, mainly in North County, and often bought “rich black dirt� from Coldwater Creek. He said farmers and small businessmen dug the dirt out with tractors and sold it for $40 a dump truck load.

“There were no records,� said Behlmann. “Nobody talked about or knew about any kind of contamination at that time.�

One supplier he named has since died. In hindsight, Behlmann said, nobody is going to put an ad in the paper that says: “Anybody who has bought topsoil from North County since 1960, please notify us.�

“People get skittish about liability,� he said.

For his part, Behlmann, who ran unsuccessfully for St. Louis County Council in 2020, said he showed some of the areas to the Army Corps of Engineers a few years ago. He said he didn’t hear anything back.

Moser said the approved cleanup project took years to develop and doesn’t include tracking down fill dirt outside of the 10-year flood plain.

“If ATSDR wants to sample, go ahead,� he said.

New growth

The Army Corps of Engineers has taken soil samples from 10 miles of Coldwater Creek, down to around Old Halls Ferry Road, where Jerome Nasalroad has lived for about 30 years. The retired janitor supervisor enjoys the country feel. He doesn’t want to move anywhere else.

“We like it out here,� Nasalroad, 66, said from his backyard. “I’d have to pay a lot of money to get this kind of view.�

There used to be a sod farm in the bottomlands between his house and the creek that dated to the 1960s. St. Louis County acquired the 15-acre area in 2014, turned it into Schaefer Bend Park. He said extensive testing of the soil was done last summer. He hasn’t heard anything about the results.

The Army Corps of Engineers told the Post-Dispatch last week that they detected contamination below the top of the bank of the creek beside the park that may need to be removed after more thorough study.

In 2016, Nasalroad said he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He’d awakened one morning with a knot on his neck. Within a week, he said, it had grown to the size of an orange. The growth and half his thyroid were removed. He continues to monitor it.

He said he didn’t tell his doctor that he lived next to Coldwater Creek, though ATSDR recommends doing so. Nasalroad, who said he also grew up playing in the creek, doesn’t think the location of his home puts him at risk for cancer. As far as he understood it, the main contamination was way up stream, by the airport.

Many other people in his neighborhood have left or are new. A man two houses down quickly shut the door when asked about Coldwater Creek.

“I just moved here yesterday,� he said. “I don’t know nothing about it.�

Christi Oster Evans grew up on the other side of the creek, surrounded by what is now Florissant Golf Club. As a kid, she said, she would hop over the creek to see friends who lived on the other side, sometimes to get to school. Now she’s 58 and lives in Eureka. She’s a vegan. Until recently, she said, she was walking 3 to 5 miles a day, and managing a salon. Then a large mass popped up on her abdomen. She was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and is undergoing chemotherapy.

She said she told her doctor about spending much of her childhood near Coldwater Creek, from 1965 to 1983. The main storage sites of radioactive waste beside the airport and around Latty Avenue hadn’t been remediated by then. Contamination in and around the creek could have been on the surface. She said her doctor was not familiar with the environmental saga.

Because she has moved out of the Coldwater Creek area, she wouldn’t show up on any update to the state’s cancer study, if the original guidelines from 2013 and 2014 reports are followed.

She recognizes that many people get cancer. She said her family doesn’t have a history of it.

“I didn’t think in a million years that this was going to happen to me,� she said. “In the last 45 days, my life is like somebody took the rug out from underneath me and shook it.�