Additional testing expected to begin at West Lake Landfill Superfund site

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Chief Andrew Wheeler has said cleanup efforts at West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri, are on schedule during a visit to St. Louis on Sept. 16.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the coronavirus pandemic has slowed work on some other Superfund sites around the country, causing some workers to get sick, or preventing them from accessing certain areas. But not at West Lake, where World War II-era radioactive contamination from the Manhattan Project was illegally dumped, decades ago, the EPA said.

The site is now poised to cross a milestone on its long-awaited road to remediation. The public and private entities responsible for covering the $205 million cost of the landfill’s cleanup are submitting design-phase work plans in preparation for excavation at the site.

The EPA expects it could approve those plans as soon as this month, after which point additional investigation of the extent of on-site contamination will begin. That work will include 200 additional borings, from which 1,500 samples will be collected, to define where waste needs to be excavated, said Mary Peterson, the director of the EPA’s regional Superfund and emergency management division.

Some locations of that additional sampling were chosen to address concerns voiced by community members about areas where there has not been previous testing for radioactivity.

The cleanup’s design process is expected to conclude in the spring of 2022, after which excavation can start. EPA leaders said they didn't know when the work would finish.