A Suburb's Toxic Nightmare

Karen Nickel and Dawn Chapman are on a mission: cleaning up the radioactive waste near their Missouri neighborhood before more people die

- JOHNNY DODD

The first warning sign was the stench that seemed to fill the air of Dawn Chapman’s suburban St. Louis neighborhood in 2012. “You could smell burning, but there was something different about it, like jet fuel,” she says. Her three children started to wake in the night with irritated eyes or bloody noses caused, she believes, by the caustic fumes.

By January 2013 Chapman, then a full-time mom, had discovered the source of the overpowering odor: a fire in an underground quarry at the Bridgeton Landfill about two miles from her home. The blaze raised fresh alarm about a decades-old issue—how much atomic waste had been stored in the region post-World War II, with some radioactive material mixing with a local creek and, separately, 43,000-plus tons of it piling up at West Lake Landfill, which is next to Bridgeton Landfill.

Frightened for her family, Chapman went to a community event about air quality and met Karen Nickel, a fellow stay-at-home mom who was wondering whether her own health issues were connected to the nuclear waste. The two bonded immediately. “We were in shock because of what we were learning,” says Nickel, 60.