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What’s Next For Victims Of Coldwater Creek Contamination?
By Tom Anselm
A few weeks ago, Jill and I were channel-surfing and came across the movie “Erin Brockavich.” If you’ve seen it, you can fast-forward down a few lines. But if you haven’t, it’s a great story about how a rather rough-around-the-edges woman with amazing grit and determination helped secure a financial settlement for people poisoned by the industrial waste of a major corporation in California in the early 1990s.
It stars Julia Roberts, of whom I am not a fan of, since she broke the heart of ‘my boy’, Lyle Lovett. But that being said, she nailed the part. The story got me thinking, which, as you have come to know, is sometimes not always a good thing. And here’s what I thunk: I wonder what is going on with the Coldwater Creek thing?
To recap this briefly, back in the mid-1940s, Mallinkrodt Corporation dumped a whole bunch of waste material from its processing of uranium related to the Manhattan Project (see “Atomic Bomb/Japan/World War II) on vacant lots by Lambert Airport and nearby in what is now Berkeley..
as it runs through large sections of North County.
Over the years, the barrels of toxins leaked, causing the waste to run into the surrounding ground and waterways. A slowly-trickling-sometimes-gushing effluent called Coldwater Creek carried a great deal of this in its water and silt through what would soon become a post-war-boom housing boom in Hazelwood and Florissant before emptying into the Missouri River. This went on unabated from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Today, a citizens group is continuing its work that started almost 20 years ago, trying to help and support the people who lived in these areas. Both they and their kids played in the creek and adjoining parks and back yards and breathed in the dust and ate vegetables grown in the tainted soil, whose homes and basements have flooded from the creek.
These people and their offspring have incurred diagnoses of unusual cancers and immune and auto-immune diseases. And many died, and are dying still, from these illnesses. I don’t propose to do an exhaustive review or analysis of the facts surrounding this story.
In 2011, the citizens’ group started a Facebook page called ‘Coldwater Creek- Just the Facts, Please.’ This page offers links to information about the history of the contamination, the diseases associated with this, how to take action and keep abreast of the remediation of the sites as well as health-related contacts.
The group currently has over 22,000 members, and the administrators are very active in their efforts to advocate for the past and present residents, both those who have been affected and who live in the area now.)
There are many articles and websites that do a very good job of that. Just enter “Coldwater Creek diseases” into your search engine, and go from there. The chronicling of this, and the current status, is fascinating. And scary. And, sad
But in our next issue Dec. 5, I hope to look into what is going on today regarding what has been done and what still can be done, from a personal and a public health perspective.
