The Fires of Silent Hill
This one is personally important to me. You might even say critical. Not too far from St. Louis Missouri there is an underground fire burning, below a landfill. Which is similar to the Silent Hill horror movies, but this is real. Not very far away from the underground fires are mounds of dirt and waste debris containing radioactive isotopes. My mother lives just over 200 miles away from this Superfund. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Russia covered 2600 square Km (1000 square miles).
If the underground fire reaches the radioactive material, there will be a nuclear event. There was a facility near here in which 47,000 tons of uranium, thorium, and radium raw materials were secretly processed for the atomic bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I don’t want my mother to die as a result of that material, which has already taken too many innocent lives.
My mom had told me about a documentary she saw that scared her badly. She didn’t remember the name of it but knew that it was done by Just Moms. That was enough for me to find that it was created for HBO, and the name of it is “Atomic Homefront”. Aside from the fact that it is a true nuclear crisis, it is also terrifying that most people are totally unaware that the problem exists. Maybe it’s because the Missouri governor’s sex scandal is a juicier headline, or maybe it is because Trump’s carnival makes every day a headline day.
The over-simplified explanation of what’s happening is that they took the radioactive waste from the Manhattan project and buried it in the Westlake Landfill. That is located near a trash landfill named Bridgeton. Now the Bridgeton Landfill has an underground fire, which has been burning since 2010. The radioactive waste has seeped into the groundwater and nearby Coldwater Creek. In this tiny community, there have been over 2000 reports of cancer in the past few years. Birth defect and SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) rates are many times the national average. The Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Public Health, and a multitude of other government agencies have been saying radiation levels are at safe levels for years. They write off all the deaths as a “statistical anomaly”. It wasn’t until a local TV station came in and independently tested a house deemed safe by the government, that they started getting some admissions of there being a problem. Rebecca Cammisa’s HBO documentary has done a lot to bring national attention to this problem. There are all sorts of meetings on what to do, but not a lot is really getting done. We need to put more pressure on the EPA to clean up this mess. But with Scott Pruit in charge, that is unlikely. Pruitt is another story altogether.
