You may be eligible to file a Tylenol Autism ADHD Lawsuit / Acetaminophen Autism ADHD Claim if you or a loved one used Tylenol and/ or Acetaminophen during pregnancy, and your child was subsequently diagnosed with ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Legal action is being strategized by our attorneys for Horizon Therapeutics’ failure to properly warn patients of potential hearing loss side effects.
You may be eligible to file a Tepezza Lawsuit if you or a loved one took Tepezza and subsequently suffered permanent hearing loss or tinnitus.
If you or a loved one took Elmiron and subsequently suffered vision loss, blindness, or any other eye injury linked to the prescription drug.
Contact the Elmiron Lawyers from TorHoerman Law.
Get a free online case evaluation and find out if you qualify for compensation instanly.
You may qualify to participate in a 3M Combat Arms Earplugs Lawsuit if:
Over 140,000 Exactech hip, knee and ankle implants have been recalled due to packaging errors that can lead to the breakdown of parts vital to the device’s function.
If you or a loved one suffered injuries from an Exactech implant device, you may be entitled to financial compensation.
You may be eligible to file a Hair Straightener Cancer Lawsuit if you or a loved one used chemical hair straighteners, hair relaxers, or other similar hair products, and subsequently were diagnosed with:
Get a free online case evaluation and find out if you qualify for compensation instanly.
Over one million people, who were present at Camp Lejeune (North Carolina) between 1953 and 1987, may have been exposed to toxic substances in the water.
The Camp Lejeune Contaminated Water Lawsuit can apply to you, a family member, or a loved one who lived at Camp Lejeune (North Carolina) and suffered health effects from the decades of water contamination that occurred.
Toxic chemicals in Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF Firefighting Foam) have been linked to numerous types of cancer, including:
AFFF Firefighting Foam lawsuits aim to hold manufacturers accountable for putting peoples’ health at risk.
If you have been exposed to Paraquat and diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease may be eligible to pursue compensation, and entitled to participate in the paraquat lawsuit.
Contact us today to see if you qualify for the Paraquat Parkinson’s Disease Lawsuit!
Get a free online case evaluation and find out if you qualify for compensation instanly.
Our firm is about people. That is our motto and that will always be our reality.
We do our best to get to know our clients, understand their situations, and get them the compensation they deserve.
At TorHoerman Law, we believe that if we continue to focus on the people that we represent, and continue to be true to the people that we are – justice will always be served.
Without our team, we would’nt be able to provide our clients with anything close to the level of service they receive when they work with us.
The THL Team commits to the sincere belief that those injured by the misconduct of others, especially large corporate profit mongers, deserve justice for their injuries.
Our team is what has made TorHoerman Law a very special place since 2009.
Get a free online case evaluation and find out if you qualify for compensation instanly.
Like an abandoned set from a science-fiction movie, the Weldon Spring complex sits behind a 6-foot wire fence off Missouri Highway 94, two miles southwest of Highway 40.
Rusting steel buildings rise from farmland taken by the government before World War II began for the production of high explosives and later used to process uranium for the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Viewed up close, the 68 buildings show their age.
Miles of pipe drip rotting insulation.
Steel drums, fork lifts, trucks and other equipment lie rusting in the factory yard.
The buildings, equipment, thousands of drums and tons of soil are contaminated with radium, uranium, thorium, nitrates and myriad other chemicals.
It is so contaminated that federal officials require visitors to check in with a guard and, for the most part, stay in federal vehicles while at the site.
No one is allowed to walk in certain areas without latex rubber boots and protective clothing.
Bright yellow and purple signs warn of radioactive contamination in and around the buildings.
Several years ago, the Army sprayed thick orange polyurethane foam on some particularly hot equipment in one of the buildings to prevent the spread of contamination.
When the Atomic Energy Commission opened the plant in 1957 to process uranium, the agency proclaimed it a showplace of technology.
The complex employed about 1,000 people and attracted visitors from several countries.
One-fourth of the $57 million construction cost went for measures to protect workers from radiation.
Workers called the plant ”The Clean One.”
It eliminated many of the processes at the old Mallinckrodt buildings in St. Louis that involved handling uranium by hand.
”The new plant was all automated,” said Paul P. Englert, a resident of St. Charles, who was an operator in the uranium refinery.
”With a dial, you could speed up production.”
Hoppers, each holding between 5 and 10 tons of uranium, would dump their contents automatically into 10,000-gallon tanks containing acid as part of the new, improved process of purifying uranium.
From the start, the plant produced beyond its capacity in order to meet the government’s demands.
Designed to process 5,000 tons of yellow uranium ore a year, the plant actually averaged 16,000 tons a year from 1958 to 1964.
Englert and other workers remember conserving every precious gram of uranium.
If the material got too hot, the lids on large pots used in one stage of the refining process would blow off, spewing puffs of orange uranium trioxide all over.
The workers would wash down the spilled powder and pump the liquid back for further processing.
Even rainwater became a source of uranium.
Workers recount how they would capture rain that fell on roofs where uranium dust may have collected.
The water was funneled inside the plant so the uranium could be separated out.
Radioactive residue and acids were disposed of by pumping them into several outdoor ponds at the plant, called raffinate pits.
Today the ponds cover 25 acres.
The mucky residue is 15 feet deep in places.
Pipes were run from the pits to a sewer line.
If it rained and the pits filled, any overflow would drain southeast from the plant toward the Missouri River. Robert J. Toomey, a retired Mallinckrodt employee, remembers when strange-looking frogs began appearing on the banks of the pits.
The frogs had bumps on them where bumps shouldn’t have been, Toomey said, adding: ”We didn’t know if it was from the acid or what.”
Many workers didn’t worry about radiation. Richard F. Schroeder, a retired Mallinckrodt worker, explained their feelings: ”It’s all invisible, right? It’s like standing somewhere and the wind’s blowing.
You can feel the wind, but you cannot feel radiation.
You don’t know what it’s doing.
”I don’t think any of us at the time worried about it,” said Schroeder, now 63.
”It was just another job,” Englert remembers when a conveyor belt carrying a 55-gallon drum of uranium ore got jammed.
When a worker reached up to get the drum loose, it tipped, spilling its contents on him.
The worker’s superiors wanted to send the man to Oak Ridge, Tenn., for tests and medical treatment, but he refused.
For many workers, the risks of accidents involving sulphuric, hydrofluoric and nitric acids used at the plant caused more anxiety than the threat of radiation.
Hydrofluoric acid was a special concern.
Some described it as ”fast-acting leprosy.”
Special cards were issued to workers to alert doctors about the acids used at the plant.
Employees tell how friends who got acid on their fingers at work later would wake up during the night to find their hands swollen to twice their usual size.
The late Mont Mason, a health physicist at the plant, recalled in an interview last year: ”I had some people who took knives in the middle of the night and split their hands open, they hurt so bad.”
By 1963, the plant started receiving enriched uranium from Oak Ridge, and workers were warned that passing the enriched material over other enriched material could set off an explosion.
The Weldon Spring plant also worked on recovering uranium from waste material shipped from Oak Ridge.
”It came on boxcars in drums,” Englert said.
”It looked like mud. They’d dump it in tanks.
It looked like someone had cleaned up a plant and sent us the old sludge.”
Empty drums that once contained uranium residue were collected near the Weldon Spring plant.
Workers remember a man coming to inspect the drums.
They say he took thousands of them to another site, where he had them pressed into blocks for sale to a junk dealer.
”The drums were supposed to be washed out, but you could see stuff stuck there in them,” said Bruno Bevolo, a retired Mallinckrodt worker.
Late in the summer of 1966, Mallinckrodt officials took workers aside and told them that the Weldon Spring plant was going to close.
The AEC contract for processing uranium was being shifted to National Lead Co. in Fernald, Ohio.
It was a bitter blow; Mallinckrodt people had designed the process and had even helped train the people at Fernald.
Workers at Weldon Spring were incensed or heartbroken.
Some of the men say they cried when they heard the news.
The workers had become a family.
Now some of them would be without jobs.
Company officials say Mallinckrodt got out of the uranium business because the demand for purified uranium had decreased and the government shifted production to the newer plant at Fernald.
But most of the workers insist it was ”politics,” arguing that Ohio’s congressional delegation outmaneuvered the Missouri delegation.
The Atomic Energy Commission ordered Mallinckrodt to place the plant on standby.
Mallinckrodt fulfilled its contract and ceased production by the end of 1966.
One of the last 35 men to work in the refinery at Weldon Spring was Paul Englert.
”They cleaned up real good,” he said.
”They washed down the place and wiped it with rags and everything.”
Other parts of the plant looked more like people had left in a hurry.
Some environmentalists in St. Charles County suggest an atomic accident might have closed the plant.
But workers and company officials say that isn’t the case, and there is no indication of an atomic accident in government records.
Today, the plant is a spooky place.
The roofs are falling in, and clumps of mold grow on the floor and walls.
But otherwise, it is as if the workers would return tomorrow.
Coffee cups sit on tables in the cafeteria.
China and the glasses are piled in dishwashers in the kitchen.
Hundreds of unused beakers, flasks and test tubes sit in drawers and cabinets in the laboratories.
Aspirin, bandages, tongue depressors, blood pressure cups, and other medical supplies sit in the infirmary, ready for use.
For 20 years after the 1966 closing, every contractor and every government agency that entered the plant was surprised at the amount of radioactive material that remained.
In 1967 and 1968, representatives of the National Lead of Ohio went to the Weldon Spring plant to see what they could salvage for the plant at Fernald.
National Lead was given its pick of contaminated stainless steel pipe, valves, vessels, spare parts, and other equipment.
A total of 20 rail cars and one truckload of material were shipped to Fernald.
The amount of uranium oxide found after the plant closed defied all previous expectations.
When a worker removed a ventilation pipe, uranium dust began to pour out.
He got a broom and a shovel, and he alternately swept and scooped and poured the dust into barrels.
Twenty barrels of the oxide sweepings were sent to Fernald.
Eventually, National Lead recovered $75,000 worth of uranium oxide from the barrels and other steel pipe and equipment.
For several months, workers for the Daniel Hamm Co., a St. Louis subcontractor that helped to load the material for National Lead, lacked protection on the job.
They had no badges to measure radiation exposure, no rubber shoes, no gloves, and no respirators.
In 1968, during an ill-fated Weldon Spring cleanup attempt conducted by the Army, seven truckloads and 81 rail cars of contaminated material were shipped to David Witherspoon Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn.
The Witherspoon firm planned to decontaminate the equipment to conform with the standards of the day and then reuse it.
One of the laborers collecting materials for shipment to Witherspoon was Roger L. Pryor, now the business manager of Laborers Local 660 in St. Charles.
”We put pipes, electric motors, stainless steel tanks in the cars,” Pryor said.
”They weren’t clean. Some of that stuff had that yellow cake in it. All that stuff was hot. Most of it was contaminated.”
During the 1968 cleanup, the government dumped 900 truckloads of radioactively contaminated material into an old quarry, four miles south of the plant.
The quarry already contained rubble from the Army’s manufacture of high explosives – TNT and DNT – in the 1940s.
It also contained tons of radioactively contaminated rubble from Mallinckrodt’s Destrehan Street plant in St. Louis.
That material included toilets, mahogany stairs, thousands of drums of thorium and residue from the uranium processed for the first atomic reaction.
During the 1960s, teenagers had dared each other to swim in the quarry.
Over the decades, warning signs were removed from the quarry area and a chain-link fence surrounding it was torn.
People had little idea of how contaminated the Weldon Spring plant was.
The federal government routinely received proposals for its use. St. Charles County wanted to use part of the plant for a home for low-income elderly people.
The University of Missouri and Francis Howell High School each wanted the complex for classroom space. Fred T. Wilkinson, then Missouri corrections director, wanted to put a maximum-security prison there.
The groups all lost interest when they learned the extent of the contamination.
Army Corps of Engineers security guards frequently caught curious teenagers trespassing at the plant or stealing Army gas masks and other equipment.
In 1986, employees of the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors arrived at the plant in 1986 to start a 12-year, $400 million cleanups.
Even they were surprised at the condition of the plant.
About 100 pounds of pure uranium metal were found scattered around the plant grounds and 1 ton of thorium was found in an abandoned building.
An estimated 214 tons of uranium and 129 tons of thorium remained in the pits. Water bubbled up from broken water lines at the rate of 200,000 gallons a day.
It carried uranium, thorium, and radium into the August A. Busch Memorial Wildlife Area.
The leaks have since been fixed.
But during heavy rain, contaminants still flow off the site into the streams and lakes of the Army Reserve and the Busch and Weldon Spring wildlife areas.
The U.S. Geologic Survey has found that contamination from the pits has leaked at least 100 feet into the groundwater.
In addition to all the radiological waste, there were large volumes of chemical wastes and acids.
Rodney Nelson, manager of the cleanup, said that the greatest surprise for his team was the discovery of carcinogenic nitrates from the processing of TNT and DNT during World War II.
Said Nelson of the cleanup, now expected to extend past the year 2000, ”We never expected it to be this complex.”
Contamination: How Weldon Springs Went from Model to Mess.
For more information about the Coldwater Creek Contamination Lawsuit, contact TorHoerman Law.
TorHoerman Law was responsible for handling a medical case for our family. I was extremely impressed with their professionalism and ability to react quickly. They also did a nice job keeping us updated with the case throughout the process. This was the first time experiencing a situation like this and Tor Hoerman law did an excellent job from start to finish.
TorHoerman Law is an extraordinary law firm – a firm that truly makes the client’s best interests the primary concern. Their team of personal injury lawyers are experienced, personable, and well versed in a range of litigation areas. They are supported by a dedicated team of staff that are as equally friendly and helpful. I would recommend TorHoerman Law for any personal injury litigation needs.
All of my questions were answered quickly and in a way I could understand. Steve and the entire staff were friendly and professional.
I highly recommend this law firm! The attorneys and staff at THL worked hard, communicated every step of the process, kept me well informed at all times, and exceeded all expectations! The staff is kind, considerate, professional, and very experienced. Look no further, call now!
Top-notch, hardworking attorneys!
A wonderful and professional legal team. They helped me when I needed expert legal representation! Thank you TorHoerman Law!
We're ready to fight for you. We're ready to be your ally. And we're ready to start right now.
Dont' waste time, contact our law offices today.
Edwardsville, IL
Chicago, IL
St. Louis, MO
Powered by Growth Saloon & Maven Marketing Group