Stories of Coldwater Creek

Coldwater Creek is about as bucolic as they come, a lovely little tributary of the Missouri River that meanders through North St. Louis County.

It’s also contaminated with nuclear waste. Has been since the late 1940s, just about the time subdivisions like the one in which I grew up near St. Ferdinand Park in Florissant, Mo., were sprouting all over North County.

The uranium used in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bombs that ended World War II was curated in St. Louis, and its waste stored improperly in two sites in North County. Over time, it seeped into the groundwater and into the soil. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a website started by a group of very courageous women. The official government site can be read here.

Turns out, most of us who lived in North County in the second half of the 20th century are Cold War collateral damage. The stories will be collected here, beginning with my own mom, Betty Gibson, who died of leukemia in 1994 at age 55.