The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will soon increase its activity on the property of the shuttered Jana Elementary School in Florissant, where radioactivity with links to the nation’s nuclear weapons program was detected last year.
The Corps announced Friday that work will ramp up “in the next few weeks†as it prepares to clean up the banks of Coldwater Creek, adjacent to the school.
The work was planned prior to recently heightened questions about the site’s safety, raised after a private testing firm last year found high levels of radioactivity in the building and around its playground.
The radioactive waste affecting the Coldwater Creek watershed traces its origins to the World War II era, when Mallinckrodt Chemical processed uranium in the 1940s and ’50s for the country’s earliest atomic weapons. The resulting waste was first stored at the airport, near the creek, and later moved to an industrial area on Latty Avenue, which also sits along the waterway.
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While the Corps says it has now taken care of the “source material†behind the contamination, it is still tasked with cleaning up its radioactive legacy downstream. At Jana, the actual excavation of contaminants will begin in early summer after different preparatory work takes place, such as the clearing of trees and brush.
The remediation of the site is scheduled to be finished late in the fall, the Corps said.
The work at Jana, in the Hazelwood School District, is part of ongoing cleanup efforts along Coldwater Creek. The Corps says it has collected more than 34,000 samples from about 14 miles of the creek and its floodplain, while removing more than 1.3 million cubic yards of contaminated material.
The targeted, creekside spot on Jana’s grounds had not yet been excavated “because it’s in the wooded area†and harder to access, said Janet Meredith, a spokeswoman for the Corps. She added that that is the only part of the property where any excavation is planned in the immediate future.
Conclusions from the private testing firm’s report last year port conflict with others that have separately examined the issue. Despite “comparable†findings, on whether the results “represent a real risk to human health,†Corps officials have said.
The Corps, for instance, maintains that the school is safe, based on its own sampling efforts — stating that radioactivity at the site does not exceed “the expected range of background levels.â€
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