Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/18/2014
An individual with property adjacent to the West Lake Landfill near St. Louis has filed a class action lawsuit against the parties associated with contamination at the site, including site operator Bridgeton Landfill, LLC and its parent company Republic Services. John James is alleging that his property has suffered damage from migrating radioactive waste that currently is sitting in the landfill. “Plaintiffs bring this action against the Defendants seeking redress for damage, loss, and loss of use of property in which Plaintiffs hold an interest as a result of Defendants’ acts and omissions, including their negligent acts and omissions, related to the processing, transport, storage, handling, and/or disposal of hazardous, toxic, and radioactive materials in close proximity to residential neighborhoods in and around St. Louis County, Missouri,” the lawsuit says.
Dan Finney, the lead attorney for the suit, said this week that there is no doubt that contamination from the radioactive waste has migrated off-site. “The issue to what extent the surrounding area is contaminated is going to develop quickly,” Finney told RW Monitor. “I don’t know how long it is going to take the Environmental Protection Agency to move on this, but I’m sure that if several more contaminated locations are identified for them, they certainly can’t stay on the sidelines pretending like nothing is happening.” Finney added that a group of concerned citizens has begun testing areas surrounding the site for contamination, and they have found several hot spots. “There is no question in my mind that these tests are legitimate,” he said. “They took hot samples from six different locations, so it’s beyond dispute as far as I am concerned at this point that this stuff has migrated out.”
EPA Says Area Is Safe
Bridgeton Landfill, though, has said the data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that no contamination has migrated out of the site and public health remains safe. “EPA has determined and recently confirmed that nobody can be exposed to radiation from West Lake outside the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the site,” Bridgeton Landfill spokesman Richard Callow said. “We have not seen the off-site testing data Mr. Finney claims to possess, and therefore cannot comment on them. We have now seen the Complaint he filed, and expect to move to dismiss it for failure to state a legally-sufficient claim.” The EPA also responded with a similar statement. “Data collected by EPA and Missouri state agencies show no evidence that radiological material has traveled beyond the boundary of the West Lake Landfill Superfund site,” EPA spokesman Chris Whitley said. “The site remains protective of public health.”
As part of its analysis for constructing an isolation barrier on-site to prevent the spread of a smoldering fire at the Bridgeton Landfill, the EPA, however, said it would be conducting more tests off-site. “As part of its preparations for the future construction of an isolation barrier at the West Lake Landfill Superfund Site, EPA is developing plans and securing locations for air monitoring and radiation screening to be conducted off-site, both before and during the barrier’s construction,” Whitley said. “This upcoming air monitoring activity is part of EPA’s continued efforts to ensure the Superfund site is protective of the public health. The EPA previously monitored for radiation along the corridor around the site in March 2013, when the agency conducted a wide-scale aerial overflight screening of the site, which included screening of areas outside the site boundaries.”
The EPA data has not convinced Finney, though. “If they found it once, it’s there,” Finney said, referring to the private citizen group’s results. “You can have 20 other tests that are negative, but if you have one test that is positive, it’s there. The idea that this hasn’t leached out in the groundwater or picked up in a tornado and various other things is ridiculous. The question is: why hasn’t the EPA used its common sense and tested outside the boundaries of the landfill?” The EPA said that if contamination were to spread from wind or water erosion, its tests would have showed the contamination migration. “If radiologically-impacted materials had spread from the site to adjacent areas off-site because of erosion from wind or water, it was anticipated that the screening would provide indications of that migration,” Whitley said. “However, the results of the overflight screening indicated no detections of radiation above normal background levels were found immediately beyond the site boundaries.”
Urgency Leads to Call For Help
The West Lake Landfill cleanup project has taken on an added sense of urgency after recent reports revealed that the site contains more radioactive waste closer to the smoldering fire than previously thought. The news prompted a letter from Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster in mid-March that asked the EPA to accelerate its surveying and engineering efforts to enable a prompt construction of an isolation barrier to prevent the fire from spreading to the radioactive waste, as well as calling on the EPA to work with the Army Corps of Engineers on the project. “Over six months have passed, yet construction of the barrier still has not begun,” Koster’s March 18 letter said. “Although we acknowledge that essential surveying is still underway, the ongoing site testing need not prevent construction from commencing, at least in part.”
Currently, the West Lake Landfill is under the supervision of the EPA’s Superfund program, which took over responsibility for the site in 1990. The EPA is conducting an engineering survey and groundwater analysis of the site to determine the best location to construct an isolation barrier to prevent the spread of a smoldering fire located near the radioactive part of the landfill. The EPA has reached out to the Corps of Engineers to help in the construction of the isolation barrier, and an announcement about the partnership should come soon, Whitley said.
