Several moms in suburban St. Louis have been working to get toxic sites in the area cleaned up, a major undertaking to fix widespread contamination that some government officials apparently covered up for decades.
“This was the best kept secret of St. Louis. The Manhattan Project wasn’t well known here, and it’s still a pretty good secret here,” Just Moms STL co-founder Karen Nickel said.
Nickel formed her group alongside her neighbor, Dawn Chapman, in 2013.
“Over the years, we had heard bits and pieces of the story and what we thought was the story,” Nickel said.
The two moms spent several years going through thousands of documents that revealed those in charge of disposing of toxic waste in Missouri likely knew that crew had mishandled those chemicals.
“Right away, we were going, ‘Oh my God. This is so different than what we thought,”’ Chapman said.
