Is Nuclear Waste Poisoning This Missouri Suburb? How 2 Moms Teamed Up for Answers, Even If They Die Trying

“I think the kindest, and meanest, thing anybody’s ever said about us is we’re lovable pains in the ass,” Dawn Chapman tells PEOPLE

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 in this week's issue of PEOPLE. 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.

Both landfills have the same owner, who strongly disputes claims of danger from either site, citing federal research that found there was no risk.

Still, outside analyses by the state of Missouri and news organizations suggest a pattern of unusual health problems around Bridgeton that stretches back years.

In the past decade, as Chapman’s husband and oldest son fell ill with chronic diseases that she links to the radioactive waste, she and Nickel cofounded Just Moms STL, building up 100,000 supporters to confront the landfill company and government while pushing the EPA to clean up the waste site, matching work being done with local Coldwater Creek.

Activist Lois Gibbs, who helped fix similar issues in New York’s Love Canal in the ’70s, mentored the women. “They’re extraordinarily effective,” she says.

But Chapman and Nickel don’t relish their mission. “We wanted simple lives,” says Chapman, 44. “This didn’t just rob us of our health. It robbed us of that too.”

For more on Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel's fight to clean up nuclear waste in their St. Louis suburb, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe.

Their suburban dream was tainted by toxic remnants of the country’s wartime past. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. chose St. Louis as one of the places to process the uranium used in the nation’s atomic weapons program the Manhattan Project.

In the decades that followed, the resulting radioactive waste was dumped close to the city airport, and contaminants washed into nearby Coldwater. In the ’70s the waste was moved to the West Lake Landfill, amid single-family homes in Bridgeton. In 1990 the landfill was designated a Superfund site — one of the nation’s most contaminated areas.

Many residents were none the wiser. Nickel grew up in the ’60s and ’70s playing softball in the parks beside Coldwater, where years later scientists would discover Manhattan Project-era radioactive material in the soil.

“Fifteen people on my street passed from rare cancer in their 40s and 50s,” she says.

Three of her four adult children, whom she raised with husband Todd in a house less than two miles from the landfill, live with neurodevelopmental challenges, she says. And Nickel has lupus, an autoimmune disease she blames on exposure to radioactivity.

Chapman and her husband, Brian, moved to the Bridgeton area in 2000, unaware of the history. In 2002 her husband learned he had Crohn’s disease.

Later, as she and Nickel took up their cause, she hoped her own kids might escape the illnesses she saw around her: “I thought if I fought as hard as I could, maybe it wouldn’t get my family.”

But four years ago, as her oldest son was turning 14, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that can be triggered by environmental factors.

Chapman, who says her family has no history of the condition, blames toxic waste. “Until they clean up, we’ll continue to bury victims of World War II,” she says. “Our loved ones are victims of friendly fire.”

Related: Girl's Cancer Leads Mom to 'Overwhelming' Discovery of More Than 50 Sick Kids Near Closed Nuclear Lab

Advocates like her and Nickel, together with some lawmakers, continue to clash with the Environmental Protection Agency and the landfills’ owner over the extent of any risk.

Experts say there’s no evidence that directly connects cancers or autoimmune diseases to a single cause like radiation, but a 2014 study by Missouri health officials found zip codes bordering the creek and landfill had rates of leukemia, breast cancer and, in one zip code, pediatric brain cancer (all often associated with radiation) that were “significantly higher” than those in the rest of the state.

The company that runs the Bridgeton and West Lake Landfills, Bridgeton Landfill LLC, says “no reliable study has ever indicated” a public health peril, pointing to statistics cited by the EPA.

But a Reuters investigation published in August found those studies “often are rooted in faulty research” and, in the case of West Lake, used “faulty equipment,” though the EPA disputes this.

Chapman and Nickel have mobilized thousands through Just Moms to call attention to what they insist is a crisis, organizing more than 300 community meetings and making 20 trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress and the EPA, including a new Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to provide money and medical support to victims.

“I think the kindest, and meanest, thing anybody’s ever said about us is we’re lovable pains in the ass,” Chapman says.

At the same time, they say, “dozens” of their volunteers have died of cancer or have lost children. “If I die tomorrow, Karen’s going to run as hard as she can at it,” Chapman says, “and vice versa.”

The subterranean fire, which in 2014 prompted local officials to send out an evacuation plan in case of nuclear disaster, continues to burn at Bridgeton Landfill. Amid the pressure campaign, however, steps were taken to contain its fumes — and the owners paid $16 million in 2018 to settle a state lawsuit that Just Moms advocated for.

The EPA has also developed a cleanup plan while acknowledging that implementation is still being worked out. (Similar efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are underway at Coldwater.) The EPA maintains that in West Lake’s “current state,” chances of exposure are “extremely low.”

Often people ask Chapman and Nickel why they don’t simply leave. Their homes have lost value because of the surroundings, they say.

But, says Nickel, it’s more than that: “This is our community. We stick together. And if we were to move away, who would fight this fight?”

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