Susie Gaffney guides her 2016 Toyota Avalon through the subdivision’s twisting streets. Memories come flooding back to her and to the man next to her, Jim, her husband of 47 years.
It is a cold, damp February morning, and the Gaffneys are on a car tour of Florissant’s Wedgewood subdivision, an enclave of tidy yards and one-story ranch houses. Wedgewood is where Jim grew up. It’s also where, early in their marriage, the Gaffneys bought a house so he could be close to his parents. This is where they began raising their family.
Coldwater Creek snakes through Wedgewood, hugging the subdivision’s contours on its meandering 14-mile journey northeast from St. Louis Lambert International Airport to the Missouri River.
As a child, Jim made great memories in the creek with a pair of neighbor boys, George Csolak and Tom Fischer. In the mid-1960s, the boys spent countless hours splashing around its knee-deep waters, building mud castles, catching crawdads, sliding down its muddy banks in the summer, skating on its frozen surfaces in winter.
Those memories had long ago become a source of anxiety, but it’s only been in recent years that Jim finally came to terms with the creek’s dark legacy — and long history of being dangerously contaminated with radioactive waste.
The waste leaked from thousands of corroding metal drums that the federal government had secretly stored upstream at a pair of landfills outside the airport beginning in the late 1940s. The radioactive materials came from a factory in downtown St. Louis that during World War II had enriched uranium for the first atomic bombs.
While braking for a stop sign, Susie wonders aloud how anyone could sell a house in their old neighborhood.
She glances at a row of ranch-style houses. “They’re scared, I’m sure,” she says.
“But you don’t see any for sale signs, do you?” Jim replies, then adds sarcastically, “Good luck.”
Coldwater Creek lies at the heart of one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, a catastrophe that over three generations likely afflicted many thousands of people across the breadth of the St. Louis region.
Jim Gaffney, 69, is one of them.
He blames the creek’s radioactive waste for his Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer that assaults the body’s lymph system. He was diagnosed at age 24, in 1981, and has suffered a range of ill effects from chemotherapy. Today he also struggles with blood cancer, bladder cancer, bone marrow cancer and squamous cell cancer, plus sarcoidosis, an inflammatory reaction that could explain why it’s hard for him to breathe. He’s also suffered heart failure and damage to his lungs and kidneys.
More than a year ago, his boyhood pal Tom Fischer, 70, a retired pipefitter, was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, a rare cancer that disrupts hormone production and nerve signaling.
And five months ago, his other boyhood friend, George Csolak, 69, a retired sportswriter and corporate communications writer, was diagnosed with bladder cancer.
As a young adult, Csolak moved out of Wedgewood, but he would come back often to visit his parents. During those visits, he’d hear stories of neighbors getting sick from cancer or other illnesses.
The creek’s link to the illnesses “was always in the back of my mind,” he says. “It’s just all kind of like common sense. You start hearing about all these cases.”
* * *
In the 1960s and '70s, the public had zero knowledge of the contamination fouling the creek, which flooded often and spread radioactive particles across parks, playgrounds, parking lots and basements, according to Kim Visintine, co-founder in 2011 of a Facebook page called Coldwater Creek — Just The Facts, which today has more than 23,000 members.
The contamination spread during a time of rapid growth in the region, with many young families moving in, lured by new subdivisions, new schools and the prospect of good jobs at thriving factories run by Emerson Electric, Ford Motor Co. and McDonnell Douglas, which had been awarded major contracts for NASA’s Apollo moonshot program.
“Everything was looking up back then,” Visintine says. “What do you want? Do you want to buy a brand-new home for your family? Do you want to move out of the city? We were the American Dream.”
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, in a report published in 2019, found that people who played in Coldwater Creek — or just lived nearby — may have higher risks for cancers of the lungs, bones or leukemia.
The ATSDR report, however, did not estimate the number of people possibly sickened or killed by exposure to Coldwater Creek’s radioactive waste. A big step toward finding an answer could come if a bill co-sponsored in late January by U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt of Missouri becomes law.
That’s because reauthorization of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act would pay people suffering from certain illnesses and cancers in one of 20 Missouri ZIP codes up to $50,000 apiece if they’re still alive, or $25,000 for their survivors if they aren’t.
Claimants don’t need to prove the radioactive waste caused their illnesses, but they must show they lived in one of the eligible ZIP codes for two years after 1949. If RECA is signed into law, it would provide the first official headcount of people who allege they suffered harm from exposure to Coldwater Creek’s radioactive waste.
The last time any sort of comprehensive count of casualty figures from Coldwater Creek radiation was attempted was in 2015. That’s when Visintine and her collaborators devised a map filled with red dots — so many that they merged into red blobs. The dots showed a close correlation between people who came down with serious illnesses and the proximity of their houses to the creek.
Visintine, 55, who grew up in the area, started the Facebook page in 2011 — five years after her son Zach died of an aggressive brain cancer diagnosed at birth. At the time, she and her friends had been struck by how many fellow McCluer North High School alumni were getting sick or dying from rare cancers.
Visintine, an automotive engineer who became a nurse practitioner, notes that the 2015 survey numbers came from voluntary disclosures on the “Coldwater Creek — Just The Facts” Facebook page.
Visintine and her collaborators found more than 2,500 cases of cancer, brain tumors, autoimmune diseases and birth defects. But Visintine believes the true number of people harmed by the radioactive waste “could be a lot bigger” and potentially in the “tens of thousands,” as new illnesses have manifested in the 10 years since the survey.
* * *
Susie Gaffney steers the Avalon into the parking lot of the shuttered Jana Elementary School, whose spacious playing fields lead directly toward Coldwater Creek.
Susie steps briskly out of the Avalon and strides across a muddy field toward the creek. Jim, moving tentatively, hangs back. Lately, he’s been using a portable oxygen machine to help him breathe when he walks more than a few steps.
The Hazelwood School District shut down the school in November 2022 after a private environmental consultant from Boston, hired by plaintiff’s attorneys, announced that the soil around the school contained dangerous levels of radioactive particles.
There had been news stories for years about cancer and other illnesses in the area, dating back to Visintine’s study. But the announcement that Jana was closing was a lightbulb moment for the Gaffneys. It finally provided them with an explanation — radioactive waste in the creek — for Jim’s debilitating illnesses going back four decades.
Jim points to the homes on the creek’s far bank, then toward the empty grade school. “The infamous Jana,” Jim says, waving his hand. “Now these houses were newer back here. And now they’re screwed.”
The Army Corps of Engineers disputed the private consultant’s assessment, but by the late spring of 2024, the corps had completed a remediation project at Jana that included excavating nearly 20,000 cubic yards of dirt, enough to fill eight Olympic-size swimming pools.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which began cleaning up contaminated sites in the St. Louis region in 1997, estimates that remediation of the Coldwater Creek area will cost $400 million, though that figure is likely to climb as new properties are added to the cleanup list.
Susie walks to the edge of the land and spends a few minutes staring into the creek. Then the Gaffneys drive toward their old house a short distance away in the 3100 block of Wintergreen Drive.
Coldwater Creek curls around the neighborhood one street over, then flows along toward nearby Wedgewood Park. Their son Joey often played in the park, beginning at age 7, Susie recalls.
“Joey would come down here, and he’d be all over this park,” she says, “just fricking having fun because it was safe.”
Twenty-seven years ago, at the age of 18, Joey was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a type of cancer closely linked to radiation exposure. A series of surgeries, radioactive iodine therapy and daily medications have helped keep him alive ever since.
Susie, a women’s health nurse practitioner, knows a lot about cancer through her many years of caregiving for her husband and son, making her a resource for friends.
“We had a huge base of friends,” Susie says. “But we also had a huge base of sad news because people would call us all the time because they’d get diagnosed with something and just wanted some good advice from us.”
* * *
By now, the details of how Coldwater Creek became a vector for death and misery have been documented in voluminous detail, thanks to the determined efforts of community activists and journalists.
That includes the revered St. Louis environmental activist Kay Drey, whose staunch opposition to nuclear power over the past 50 years led The Gateway Journalism Review to dub her “The Paul Revere of the Nuclear Age.”
Determined to expose the full truth about Coldwater Creek, Drey spearheaded a dogged seven-year battle using the federal Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Administration and the Environmental Protection Administration, among other agencies.
In 2021, Drey passed a trove of more than 15,000 government documents to Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel, the co-founders of Just Moms STL, the leading advocacy group for the victims of radiation exposure in the St. Louis region.
The two women spent the next year analyzing and organizing the documents. Then they turned them over to journalists.
In July 2023, Missouri Independent, the Associated Press and the news site MuckRock published the most definitive account so far of what really happened around Coldwater Creek. The resulting story showed how private contractors and the federal government knew that highly dangerous radioactive waste had been leaking into the creek for decades before the public was notified.
“Federal agencies knew of the potential human health risks of the creek contamination, the documents show, but repeatedly wrote them off as ‘slight,’ ‘minimal’ or ‘low-level,’" wrote Allison Kite. “One engineering consultant's report from the 1970s incorrectly claimed that human contact with the creek was ‘rare.’”
The story documents how the deadly saga began in the early 1940s in downtown St. Louis, where the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed enriched uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project, then stored radioactive waste at sites near the St. Louis airport.
Trucks later hauled the waste to a site at Latty Avenue in suburban Hazelwood. Beginning in the 1970s, hundreds of truckloads of the dirt-like waste were also hauled to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton. The landfill was declared a federal toxic Superfund site in 1990.
No official effort was made during this period of time — a span of more than 60 years — to warn residents who lived near Coldwater Creek of the waterway’s dangers.
The investigative stories about Coldwater Creek’s history made a huge impact on at least one reader. They persuaded Hawley to include, for the first time, the contaminated Missouri sites in a reauthorization of RECA, Chapman says.
* * *
As they await congressional action, Gaffney, Csolak and Fischer remain skeptical the government will ever make them whole.
“I don’t know if it’s possible,” Csolak says. “It’s been such a major blow for so many families.”
Fischer — whose sister died of breast cancer, while a childhood friend who lived across the street from him died of bladder cancer — says it’s probably too late to expect justice. “It’s like they said, ‘Let’s dump this shit and let’s go,’ Fischer says of federal authorities. “They knew how nasty this stuff was, what it did to people.”
For their part, the Gaffneys have given up on the idea of receiving anything close to justice. “I’d like to see an apology,” Jim says. “But it probably won’t be sincere.” He says the $50,000 award per claimant under RECA isn’t even a “thimble in what we paid over our whole life,” but admits, “The money would be nice.”
One of the biggest benefits of the legislation would be funding for community health screenings for people in the affected ZIP codes, Nickel says.
The screenings are key for early detection of cancers, says Nickel. She struggles with the autoimmune disease lupus, which at least one study has linked to exposure to uranium, a highly radioactive metal.
“We hear from people that they ration their care because it’s expensive and they don’t have the money,” Nickel says. “A lot of people won’t get tested because if they do find something, they don’t have the money for treatment. We run across that a lot. And even people who’ve had cancer won’t go back to get those rechecks because they’re not in a position to pay for additional treatment.”
* * *
Coldwater Creek’s legacy continues to unfold in 2025.
In late January, Missouri officials warned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of a “high likelihood” of radioactive contamination in the smoldering West Lake Landfill. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources asked the EPA to assume oversight of the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill, arguing it may also contain nuclear waste.
Also in late January, the Army Corps announced that it would investigate an additional 600 properties covering 750 acres of land east of the bridge at James McDonnell Boulevard that crosses Coldwater Creek and leads to the Missouri River.
And on March 17, Lee Zeldin, the newly appointed EPA administrator, visited the Superfund site at the West Lake Landfill. Then Hawley joined Zeldin for a walk along Coldwater Creek in Hazelwood.
Zeldin said that EPA budget cuts led by Trump adviser Elon Musk have sparked a reorganization, according to Spectrum News, which he hopes will lead to more direct support for communities in need of cleanup.
“My commitment here now is that moving forward we'll have more people working on this than ever before," he said at a meeting at Bridgeton City Hall. “This is about making sure that we have the ability to provide more assistance to this community and not less.”
As Hawley and Zeldin walked along the creek at St. Cin Park in Hazelwood, Spectrum News wrote that Zeldin hinted that the money found through DOGE savings could give Hawley a bargaining chip to pass his bill.
“Music to my ears,” Hawley said.
* * *
Just after Christmas 2024, Csolak underwent a six-week treatment for his bladder cancer. His urologist recently injected an anti-tumor chemical into his bladder.
“And I have three months where I don’t do anything,” he says. “I go back to see him on April 25. And he puts the camera into my bladder to see if anything’s grown back.”
Csolak admits to feeling some bitterness. “I guess you feel kind of angry that this stuff has dragged on for so long,” he says. “That’s a typical ploy by the government to cover their own rear ends and drag it out as much as possible.”
“The bottom line is this should never have happened,” he says. “And the fact that we had to wait 75 years for justice is ridiculous.”
As for Jim Gaffney, he says he wants to make the best of his time by spending his days with Susie, their grown son and daughter, and their six grandkids.
He and his doctors are still trying to figure out why his oxygen levels are so low, a problem that’s affecting his kidneys. “I don’t go around whining about it,” he says. “It’s not going to help.”
He says he let go of bitterness long ago. These days, he says, he’s grateful just to wake up in the morning.
“I’m almost 70 right now,” he says. “I never thought I’d be alive right now.”
Mike Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist who can be reached at msfitzgerald2006@gmail.com. This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund, which seeks to advance local journalism in St. Louis. See rcjf.org for more info.
