The Continent Of St. Louis: The Final Answer

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Elizabeth Academy , St. Louis University High School , St. Mary's High School , St. Louis Visitation Academy of St. Louis , Town and Country. Olive Calvary Sacred Heart St. Mary's Ascension Glencoe Queen of Peace. Louis Post Dispatch, Jun. Three Centuries of Catholicism, Editions Du Signe, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St.

Ordinaries of the Archdiocese of St. Churches in the Archdiocese of St. Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis. Joseph Church, Apple Creek St. Maurus Church, Biehle St. James Church, Crosstown Ste. Mary's of the Barrens Church, Perryville St. Vincent de Paul Church, Perryville St. Alphonsus Liguori "Rock" Church, St.

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Mary of Victories Church, St. Rose of Lima Church, Silver Lake. Mary's Church, Bridgeton St. John the Evangelist Church, Lithium St. John Nepomuk Church, St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, St. Abbey of Saint Mary and Saint Louis. Francis de Sales Oratory, St. Ferdinand's Shrine, Florissant Shrine of St. Education in the Archdiocese of St. Louis Cor Jesu Academy , St. Higher education Marillac College High school St. An average 16, immigrants were admitted to Canada each year between and Although certain kinds of immigrants were admitted by Cabinet — farmers and the wealthy predominantly — very small numbers of Jews were permitted.

At the time, religious intolerance and anti-Semitism were common in Canadian society and even in its cultural and political leaders — right up to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King:. We must nevertheless seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood, as much the same thing as lies at the basis of the Oriental problem. I fear we would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted numbers of Jews. Between and , Canada admitted fewer than 5, Jewish refugees. During that same period, countries hit harder by the Depression admitted far more.

All told, Canada admitted the lowest number of refugees among developed nations. Though it was known that Jews faced persecution, false imprisonment, and outright violence in Nazi-controlled regions of Europe before the Second World War, their fate was unknown. On 5 November , members of the Canadian clergy gathered to apologize to 25 surviving St. Baptist minister Doug Blair was among the clergymen who apologized. He is the great nephew of Frederick Blair, who was in charge of Canadian immigration in On 20 January , a memorial sculpture commemorating the St.

The kinetic steel sculpture is comprised of four gears. The names of all the passengers who were on the ship are etched on the back of the sculpture. Ogilvie and Scott Miller, Refuge Denied: Louis Passengers and the Holocaust Canada and the Jews of Europe — From the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier Louis and hear first-hand accounts from passengers aboard the cruise liner. Search The Canadian Encyclopedia. I forgot my password. Immaculate Conception parishioner Ann Bachmann sings at every baby's funeral. She comes to all the committee meetings, too, and Kleba has come to count on her steady presence.

She confided her suspicions months ago, even showing a photo of her newborn twins, David with a festive little white chef's hat hiding the missing top of his head and brain. We always used to run and bike on the Katy Trail. In , Bachmann became pregnant with her fourth child. It was her first pregnancy in Weldon Spring, and the first time she had to go on bed rest: In , she became pregnant with the twins and learned that one had anencephaly, a rare birth defect that's even rarer in twins.

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While she was pregnant, her year-old son experienced kidney problems. Then her older kids were found to have ADD, and her 6-year-old started running degree fevers for six days at a time. Then she joined a support group, the Center for Loss in Multiple Birth.

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Months later, the president called her from Anchorage, Alaska: They were updating their database, and they were curious as to just how long her street was. Did it run the length of the city? The group had three members on that street, all of whom had lost babies. Dunsmore Circle, said Bachmann, is five blocks long. He and Bachmann share a bond: His baby girl died in as the result of a neurological degradation the doctors couldn't pinpoint. By now, Bachmann's drawing lots of connections, annotating Kleba's list of Weldon Spring contaminants with the latest in medical research.

Virtually every contaminant at the site is a known carcinogen.

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The radioactivity means that, for thousands of years, these ores will be spinning off atoms, reflecting alpha and beta energy that, if it escapes, could penetrate and damage cells, killing them or disordering their logic so they mutate, reproducing unnaturally. TCE, a clear solvent with a sweetish smell and a burning taste, is not only strongly carcinogenic but is suspected to have toxic effects on the neurological and reproductive systems. PCBs, lead and arsenic can cause developmental problems.

Lead and arsenic are suspected of affecting endocrine, nerve and immune function. Mercury, PCBs and lead can cause reproductive toxicity. And children are 10 times more susceptible to any health threat than adults, with their still-wobbly immune systems and rapidly dividing cells. All that's irrelevant, say public-health officials, because there have been no exposures, no "pathways" by which the site contaminants could have reached residents. Since the cleanup began in , the site has been fenced, with hour guards -- and even if the rumors of teenage devil worship and daredevil swimming in the quarry were true, such instances couldn't have been frequent.

The groundwater is contained, most of the contaminated sludge is already buried in the cell and officials feel sure that whatever contaminants have escaped -- blowing away as dust or bubbling up in the springs of Busch Wildlife -- they're not enough to pave "exposure pathways. Kleba and his parishioners heard the DOE's reassurances in late August. In October, the seventh infant died.

Then he called the Missouri Coalition for the Environment and asked whether someone could provide a little more information for his parishioners. They steered him to Kay Drey. Drey was Weldon Springs Joan of Arc, crusading for a cleanup since Louisans had no idea they were living with the oldest radioactive waste of the atomic era -- let alone what its health effects might be.

The Continent of St. Louis

Drey told them and watched the outrage build. Then she watchdogged the project, filling a row of filing cabinets with documentation and challenge. She's convinced that the DOE, the Army and the Missouri DNR, charged with overseeing the cleanup, have done -- despite a few blind spots and slip-ups -- their human best. What haunts her, she told the parishioners, is the chance that in a place like Weldon Spring, their best might not be good enough.

Back when they were cranking out explosives and uranium, government workers dumped toxins in the fissured limestone quarry, then hacked out rock to build roads. They poured chemicals into seven wastewater lagoons and burned buildings soaked in explosives. They pumped radioactive quarry water into Femme Osage Creek and filled unlined raffinate pits with toxic sludge. They used simple bag filters to vent uranium dust out of the buildings into the fresh air. They watched stormwater run off the lagoons and soak into ditches and ravines, eventually reaching the shallow aquifer and traveling to nearby springs and creeks.

All that ended when the government returned in spacesuits and "contained" the site. Now they talk about it as if it's Alcatraz. But Drey still remembers the day cleanup workers lost a piece of radioactive pipeline and couldn't figure out whether they'd incinerated it. She remembers how, in , they wanted to pipe treated leachate from the disposal cell across a uranium-laced drainage ditch and discharge it into the clear waters of Dardenne Creek.

She's read the annual incident reports: The day they overpressurized a gallon drum and it blew, spraying material everywhere. The day the PVC pipe separated at an elbow, spraying brine contaminated with , picocuries per liter of uranium. The day the truck operator fell asleep, squirting that puddinglike grout of contaminated sludge, ash and cement into an uncontrolled area.

Drey doesn't trust the governments tests, either. Soil hasn't been sampled off-site. Air sampling has been difficult; radionuclides can whiz by in minuscule amounts and still do damage once inhaled. Much of the site testing has been sporadic, stopping for a while, then resuming when work resumes in a given area. Contaminants such as tritium have vanished from discussion, and she's not convinced they're gone. Levels of uranium and other radionuclides have fluctuated dramatically, increasing whenever workers moved the water, soil or sludge.

Unusually high readings have been written off as anomalies or mistakes. Contaminants such as TCE are heavier than water and tend to settle in the sediment, contaminating all the water that rushes over them but not getting measured themselves until they're flushed out by heavy rain. Cleanup crews found traces of thorium as high as 5, picocuries per liter in the raffinate pits and quarry. Then it stopped showing up on their tests. But in , it increased again, after a shot of sulfuric acid dissolved thorium that had sunk into the pond solids to hide.

Testing, Drey warned Kleba's group, is tricky. So is mapping groundwater as it filters its way through dissolved limestone as porous as cheesecloth.

She thumbs through the homemade Post-It tabs on one of the first site reports "the earlier ones tend to be more honest" and reads aloud: Every time Drey asked just where all that contaminated water was going , she was told, "To the Femme Osage Slough," a long, narrow canal on the edge of the wellfield that she thought was bound to overflow into the field.

Those levels have since dropped, but Drey reads sentences like "The likely future land-use for the Femme Osage Slough is recreational" and gets nervous -- especially because the DOE now believes the alkaline slough acts as a "reduction zone," preventing the uranium from dissolving in water. So where does it go?

Into the soil -- which they're not planning on exhuming. Finally, Drey doesn't trust a foot-high disposal cell sited amid porous limestone in a rapidly growing residential area. Thompson insists that the ground directly beneath the cell is solid -- "the site was chosen by the DOE because of its stability" -- and as for the cracking, dissolving geology all around it, she says, "We think it's very controlled. The fractures are tiny, and we know where they are going. We feel like the karst topography is not karst like many people think. She remembers DOE subcontractors telling her they weren't allowed even to use the word , it was such a bright red flag.

Groundwater flow maps in karst have a different significance; it seeps, and, locally, the seepage can go the opposite way of regional groundwater flow. The water can be like a spiral. Karst environments are the curve balls of Mother Nature. Raising his voice over the buzz, he introduced Bachmann, who said a soft prayer for all mothers. Then they waited, all eyes on the Missouri Department of Health and St. Charles County officials they'd invited to answer their questions. Because, in the absence of solid information, people tend to assume "it's in the water," Angela Minor, an environmental specialist with the state health department, opened the meeting by explaining that her department started out monitoring wells around the site but cut back to 30 as the findings improved.

Only four wells recently tested positive for low levels of radium and uranium, Minor said, and the source had been deduced to be natural and "recommended water softeners. Charles County environmental-services coordinator, leaned forward. In '82, we came to the conclusion that we had an elevation [in leukemia], but we couldn't attach it [to a cause]. It's happened at least twice since then.

At this, Halliday's boss, Gil Copley, director of community health and the environment, retrieved the microphone and assured the group that studies showed no link whatsoever between the site and area health problems. Up rose Bachmann, who looks as fragile as Mia Farrow and fights for her children just as fiercely: This report, he hoped, would close the case: Charles County with lower infant and in utero death rates than the state in general, and the ZIP codes around the Weldon Spring site with even lower rates than the county's.

Now, they didn't have the stats analyzed yet, but The morning after the meeting, Kleba, who'd pushed for a full epidemiological study all along, started to worry. He knew they needed detailed medical and lifestyle information -- as a promise of justice and a safeguard for future generations. Yet he'd sat with bereaved parents for hours, trying to help them accept death's mystery, urging them past anguish over whether they could have somehow saved their babies. The next week, after a visit to the preemie twin, now three months at Cardinal Glennon, he dropped in on Minor.

What information would they need for an epidemiological study? Could he take the official forms and permission releases to the parents himself, all at once, so they wouldn't have to unfold their grief for a succession of strangers? Minor called Pat Phillips, D. Four days go by. I call and say, 'You know, if I get them by the weekend, I can spend a little time with the families after church. I don't want to do your work for you.

And I don't want to limit you to seven, either -- why don't you study any infant in this area who's died since last October? You might find more.

Finally a parishioner called state Rep. Jonathan Dolan R-Lake St. Louis , who elicited a renewed promise from the state health department to analyze the deaths. Charles County Executive Joe Ortwerth also had a change of heart and joined the push, demanding thorough case histories. But when Eduardo Simoes, M. Charles County is a wealthy county compared with others, and you'd expect health to be better," he noted. The only data they could present that would make any sense would be historical data for the same place, but St. Charles County isn't static enough; there are too many people moving in and out.

What you need," he concluded, "is an M. It's when you start adding everything together different cancers, reproductive problems, learning disabilities, etc. The world is more contaminated every day, and the sources are hard to isolate; subtle effects can accumulate over time "body burden," it's called ; diseases often involve multiple factors, and toxic substances interact with each other in unforeseen ways. Yet public-health officials still reach for the medical model, striving to link a specific agent to a specific disease and calling it good news if nothing that neat emerges.

They're looking, in other words, for a smoking gun and big fat bullet holes -- but toxic chemicals spray shotgun pellets.

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