ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – Less than a month after visiting the St. Louis area to tour an area contaminated by radioactive material, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency announced a new plan to clean West Lake Landfill 12 to 18 months ahead of schedule.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin met with Senator Josh Hawley to tour the landfill, as well as portions of Coldwater Creek and the St. Louis International Airport. During that visit, Zeldin pledged his office would devote more resources to expedite the cleanup.

On Monday, Zeldin issued an updated timeline for remediation, noting that a projected May 2029 excavation start date might now take place as early as late 2027.

“Meeting and speaking with the St. Louis community members who have long endured radioactive waste in their community was beyond moving. This moment requires an unprecedented effort to clean up the West Lake Landfill and impacted sites in the area,” Zeldin said.

Nuclear waste contamination from World War II and Cold War-era activities has affected 19 locations across the United States, with several sites concentrated in the St. Louis area. Between 1942 and 1957, Mallinckrodt, a company in St. Louis, produced uranium for the Manhattan Project under a government contract. The resulting nuclear waste was initially stored in hundreds of thousands of drums and buried near St. Louis Lambert International Airport on a 21.7-acre site.

The waste was eventually relocated. Some was transported to Colorado, while the remainder was distributed between the West Lake Landfill and another landfill on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood. It’s estimated that 47,000 tons of that same radioactive waste was illegally dumped into West Lake Landfill in 1973. A portion of this waste leaked from both the Latty Avenue sites and the airport location, contaminating Coldwater Creek.

The EPA deemed the landfill as a superfund site in 1990 amid fears of a subsurface fire heading toward the buried landfill waste.

Government documents, released in July 2023, revealed that officials were aware of the risks posed by radioactive waste to residents near Coldwater Creek as early as 1949. Despite this knowledge, federal authorities consistently minimized the potential dangers, often describing the risks as “minimal” or “low-level.”