Rediscovering 4 Forgotten Sites Government lost track of nuclear operations here and nationwide
Tom Green described Kay Drey, a local environmental activist, how he worked for 12 years as a truck driver hauling radioactive material in the St. Louis area.
Green, who had been a smoker, blamed the cancer on radiation exposure from his job.
As they talked in 1979, Green had no way of knowing that nearly a decade later his comments would lead to the discovery and testing of a potentially contaminated site long forgotten by federal officials.
Green, then 63, told how he had driven truckloads of heavy uranium ingots across the McKinley Bridge to a plant in Madison during the latter half of the 1950s.
He described how the barrel-shaped ingots, 18 inches in diameter and height, were heated and reshaped at the plant at College and Weaver streets then operated by Dow Chemical Co.
Three months after his conversation with Drey in the hospital at 915 North Grand Boulevard, Green died of the cancer that had spread through his spine and intestines.
Now his account is prompting federal officials to take a new look into whether the former Dow plant may be contaminated.
The Madison plant is one of four ”forgotten” sites the Post-Dispatch has discovered in the St. Louis area – sites where radioactive material was processed or stored in virtual secrecy after World War II.
Department of Energy officials say there is no reason to believe that any of the four St. Louis-area sites poses a serious health threat. In at least one case – the former Tyson Valley powder plant in far west St. Louis County – there appears to be no threat at all.
But the agency plans to conduct tests within the next several months at the old Dow plant and at another Illinois site, the old General Casting plant in Granite City. The tests would determine whether buildings or equipment in those two places are contaminated by radioactivity.
What follows is a discussion of the four area sites that were lost in the shuffle:
https://www.torhoermanlaw.com/news/rediscovering-4-forgotten-sites/
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