Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) accused the federal government of “lying for years” about radioactive waste contaminating Coldwater Creek in St. Louis, Missouri, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News last Sunday.
Documents obtained by a parent group and shared with media outlets revealed that Coldwater Creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II. As the Associated Press reported, the federal government and companies responsible for nuclear bomb production “were aware of health risks, spills, improperly stored contaminants and other problems but often ignored them.” Federal health investigators have since found “an increased cancer risk for some people who, as children, played in a creek contaminated with uranium waste,” the report states.
Newly public documents are showing how America’s push for the atomic bomb helped saddle St. Louis with an enduring radioactive waste problem. https://t.co/NMfS3bNxot
— AP Climate (@AP_Climate) July 18, 2023
“[The government] got away with it just by lying for years. They were the only ones, the federal government, that had the studies. This dates back to the Manhattan Project. St. Louis was a major uranium processing center,” Sen. Hawley said during an interview in West Palm Beach, Florida, at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference.
“But what the government did after that was they just essentially dumped the uranium and the waste material into the creek, into the ground soil, and then they lied about it for years,” he added. “They knew from at least the 70s that they had a major contamination issue, and they’ve lied about it and kept it under wraps. But now, thanks to a group of brave mothers, who got 15,000 documents in FOIA requests, what [the government] has done is coming to light.”
Hawley, who has been drawing attention to the contamination disaster in Coldwater Creek since at least last year, announced this month that he plans to introduce a bill to make the federal government pay for the medical bills of people who have become sick in connection with the contamination.
“It’s a very simple concept. The federal government has poisoned the air and water of so many people in the St. Louis region: they need to pay for the people who are sick because of it,” Hawley told Breitbart News. “This is… basic — if the government has created this disaster, and they have, the government needs to clean it up and then take care of it.”
“We do this for our veterans all the time,” he added. “When we ask our veterans to go fight wars, if they are hurt, if they are sick because of that, we stand by them. The government needs to do the same thing for the people of St. Louis.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Twitter @thekat_hamilton.
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