The circled red condominium is where I lived from 6-12 years old.
The blue line is the radioactive creek a few blocks away.
The green line is Pershall Road, currently closed, because they are digging up all the still-radioactive soil, contaminated by the radioactive creek, itself contaminated by radioactive Manhattan Project byproduct that washed into the creek.
Usually I can ignore this. My brother can’t ignore this. He is very resentful.
Happily, last week a surgeon sliced him open for a non-cancer reason and - hurrah - saw no visible cancer in his abdomen. So, Mallinckrodt Chemical, he escaped. Right now I think he’s skeptical. I am sure when he recovers from the surgery he will be pleased.
UH. That's... really something.
Hooray for no cancer, though?
Posted by: KC | July 27, 2020 at 11:40 AM
Augh! What a nagging worry to have to live with. Fingers crossed for continued escapes. Horrible to think how many people around the world are living in human-contaminated environments. Just not fair.
Posted by: Big Dot | July 27, 2020 at 07:27 PM
KC - oh, absolutely. My brother is gobsmacked. He was SURE he had cancer.
Big Dot - well, why worry. you don’t have cancer until you actually have cancer. Better than living in Shanghai - that’s unhealthy and immediate.
Posted by: TheQueen | July 27, 2020 at 10:31 PM
Well, they did sort of tell him he had cancer, so that is not terribly irrational of him!
I wonder what the background-radiation level is for your old condo? It may be far enough away from the stream that it's not much higher than average background-radiation in, say, Denver. Or it may not be.
Posted by: KC | July 28, 2020 at 03:23 PM
In the late nineties I lived in in Los Alamos, N.M.-- home of the Manhattan Project. Once or twice a year, I would see guys walking around with Geiger counters. I'm not sure just why. I do know that debris from the actual bomb test sites is still slightly radioactive today.
So radioactive waste in St. Louis? I guess they were shipping their product to N.M??
Historically, (and still) people are so cavalier about what they put into the environment.
Posted by: Arlene | July 28, 2020 at 07:02 PM
KC - the EPA has determined that currently it is very low. When we were there, 2 years after the waste was going directly into the creek, it would have been at the highest concentration, and they say even that amount would have been so dilute that it wouldn’t have been a problem. All the present-day Moms are justifiably concerned about their children. They’ll probably be okay.
Arlene - I am glad to hear Los Alamos is being watched. I bet someone will have to do that until maybe the year 3000? And there were three places in St. Louis that they dumped waste: in our creek, by a very smelly landfill north of my office, and in a nature preserve a few miles from my house. And now my brother lives by Los Alamos in Albuquerque. We must be drawn to the green glow. (There was also an odd Saint Louis experiment when they sprayed mustard gas or something from the rooftops downtown on the populace.)
Posted by: TheQueen | July 28, 2020 at 09:22 PM
Yikes! Who approved spraying the people? Was it an accident?
Your brother is lucky. I loved living in New Mexico. The hispanic and Indian art and history is grea, if he likes that sort of thing. I have lived in various places around the U.S. and Los Alamos was a strong favorite. All kinds of wild life. I remember watching a coyote stop traffic on the main road out to the labs one morning, as he casually strolled over to the other sides. Rabbits in the parking lot every morning and Elk on the lawn of the library winter mornings. Lots of hummingbirds. (I miss hummingbirds.) And, because it's so dry, when it snows, it melts and evaporates--no ice. I would live there now, but the housing is minimal, old (a lot from the 1940's) and expensive.
Posted by: Arlene | July 29, 2020 at 08:35 PM
Arlene - my brother has asthma and loves the dryness. I could never live someplace that dry.
Posted by: TheQueen | July 29, 2020 at 09:40 PM