But in the 1950s and ‘60s, a residential boom hit the area and the city began to expand, so a decision was made to reroute Coldwater Creek to make it more aesthetic.
Little did residents know at the time that by dredging and disturbing the creek, it gave the contaminated sediment a mode of transportation, and soon it began to spread throughout the area. Unknowingly, people began ingesting and eating the leftover carcinogens.
“The analogy we always use is like spreading icing on a birthday cake,” Ms Visintine explained.
“They spread the contamination across the entire region, it’s been this comedy of errors. Nobody knew, we didn’t know until we began investigating because we were all showing up with cancer. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it and you can’t taste it.
“If you have really low doses of radiation and you ingest it, over time it builds in your body. Once it gets in your body it never leaves, it’s like arsenic poisoning. It’s not one ingestion, it’s over and over, then it mutates and you end up with these cancers.
“We’re showing up with these really rare cancers, and really high rates at really young ages.”
In 2011, with the advent of Facebook, residents from the community began to reconnect and after sharing stories, they noticed a strange phenomena — unexplained high incidences of rare cancers.
“It was like this overwhelming response. When we started realising we were all sick we thought, ‘this is statistically not right, there’s an issue’,” said Ms Visintine.
1946: Barrels of waste are dumped on 21.7-acres of land to store residues from uranium processing at the Mallinckrodt facility in St. Louis. Picture: U.S. Army Corps of EngineersSource:Supplied
As more and more residents shared their stories, a man by the name of Jeff Armstead decided to create a group — and map — to pinpoint what was going on.
“We hand wrote the first 750 cases of cancer but we had no idea how big this was. After that we started getting thousands of reports,” Ms Visintine explained.
Soon enough, one little Facebook page grew from simply getting back in touch, to the alarming realisation that more than 2700 residents reported rare incidents of illness. This was becoming a cancer cluster of epic proportions: 45 cases of appendix cancer, 184 cases of brain cancer, 315 cases of thyroid cancer, 448 cases of auto-immune disease, and so on.
“The situation here is one of the most graphic illustrations of the enduring costs paid by an American community for its participation in the cold war,” read the New York Times.
As a kid, Ms Visintine unknowingly ate vegetables full of radiation from her backyard vegetable garden. Kids would go down to the corner dairy mart and eat fresh ice cream from the huge dairy farms in the area, unaware the cows were eating from a contaminated field.
No comments:
Post a Comment