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Students start petition Pudding Club brings Women’s tennis for more diverse vampires, pudding and clinches victory history faculty friendship to campus in OVC Championship PAGE 4
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Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Thursday, April 25, 2024 Vol. 77 No. 27
THE student voice since 1960
PETITION
CONTAMINATION, COMPENSATION, COMMUNITY St. Louis residents continue the 80-year fight for acknowledgment of dumped atomic waste CHLOE WOLFE lifestyles editor MAXIMILIAN LENHART photographer St. Louis residents are fighting for inclusion and acknowledgement as the clock runs out on the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. St. Louis is an often forgotten factor in the development of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project. The government has left St. Louis — and Missouri as a whole — out of legislation compensating people affected by radiation poisoning. In 1990, the U.S. government passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. It originated as a way to compensate individuals either directly or indirectly involved in atomic bomb testing from 1945 through 1962. The act compensated those who worked in the uranium mines and those who were down wind from testing, among other reasons. The act only covers 12 states. What was left out of the compensation was St. Louis — a crucial uranium refining point through the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company was based in St. Louis. After World War II and the Cold War, Mallinckrodt began dumping its waste in a condemned area behind Lambert International Airport in northern St. Louis.
The waste was kept in metal barrels that began to rust and decay over time, allowing the materials to leak into the ground and nearby Coldwater Creek, which runs through several communities. Eventually, the waste was sold to Continental Mining and Milling Corporation in 1966. They moved the waste to another location in St. Louis — Latty Avenue — where it was left to sit in the elements before some of it was sent to Colorado, and some of it was dumped in the nearby West Lake Landfill. Karen Nickel grew up in Hazelwood, Missouri, near Coldwater Creek. She would ride her bike around the neighborhood, play in the creek and eat fruit and vegetables grown in the area. Neither Nickel nor her family knew about the contamination. “My parents saved for a long time to purchase our home in this neighborhood. It was perfect,” Nickel said. “It had two parks on either end of the street [and] lots of kids. It was a dead-end street and a great school district. They had no idea that they had moved their children into a neighborhood contaminated with atomic bomb waste.” Nickel said she learned about the role St. Louis played in the Manhattan Project in the late 2000s after watching a news story saying there was possible contamination in the creek. She began making a list of people she knew from the neighborhood. After reaching out, she found that several had that several had either passed away due to rare cancers or were dealing
Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark calls on Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to extend and expand the RECA program during Congresswoman Cori Bush’s recent press conference. As Nickson-Clark talks about being a two-time breast cancer survivor, Bush and other community members become emotional. | Maximilian Lenhart / The Alestle with autoimmune diseases like her. Nickel is a founding member of Just Moms STL, which started out as a Facebook group to “educate the community about the potential hazards and health risks surrounding the West Lake Landfill,” according to their website. “When I learned about the creek and
what I was exposed to, and then about the landfill, I knew at that point I would have to go to the ends of the earth to protect my own children,” Nickel said. “No one protected me — my parents couldn’t. They didn’t even know they needed to. see RECA on page 2
Edwardsville High School student donates more than 300 items in support of growing need at Cougar Cupboard CIARA FOLKERTS reporter Amid growing concerns about food insecurity on campus, junior Edwardsville High School student Landon Dykes-Sadowski partnered with the SIUE Police Department for a successful food drive and donated 300 items recently. The Cougar Cupboard has been in need of donations as their shelves are feeling the strain of the surge in demand. “The demand has really gone up since January,” Student Care and Advocacy Coordinator Lealia Williams said. “We’ve had more students visit the Cougar Cupboard than we did last semester.” According to Williams, over 2,800 students have used the cupboard within the past year,
with many of them being transfer students and international students. As the school year comes to an end, Williams has found that the Cupboard struggles in receiving donations at this time. “Right now it’s really hard,” Williams said. “Our economy and food has gone up [in price]. It’s a number thing — food has been more expensive than it’s been in the past.” In response to this issue, junior EHS student Landon Dykes-Sadowski worked with Detective Sergeant of the SIUE Police Department Dave Baybordi to organize a food drive, collecting over 300 donation items to support the college food pantry.
“I’ve done work with other food drives in the past,” Dykes-Sadowski said. “It’s a moral thing for me — help others the way you help yourself, treat others the way you want to be treated. What you put out is what you receive, in a way.” Baybordi initially heard about the increase of students utilizing the cupboard and the concerns surrounding the demand through a conversation with Interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Miriam Roccia. “It was just kind of an idea that I’m like, ‘Hey, you know, it’s a good cause on campus, so let’s see if we could make some phone
calls,’” Baybordi said. “All I did was just call around to a bunch of different people [and send] out some emails.” One of the contacts was Holly Sadowski, a member of the Junior Service Club of Glen Carbon. She informed the sergeant that her son, Landon, would be able to organize the food drive. “I knew the need was more immediate,” Sadowski said. “That’s when Landon was able to chime in and kind of took it over for me because I really didn’t have an idea, since I couldn’t reach out to the [Junior Service] Club and get that working as quickly as I wanted to.” Dykes-Sadowski raised awareness posting to Facebook about the food drive and receiving several donations from people around his neighborhood, as well as his mother’s coworkers. “It was really exciting to see
how the neighbors responded and the people that he asked to donate,” Sadowski said. “It’s a big ask right now with the way that the economy [is going] … It was really nice that people really gathered together for him, and I think that it was just nice to watch him get excited about that too.” According to Williams, this was one of the biggest donations that the Cougar Cupboard has received since she started in Fall 2023. “He is [an] amazing student. We need more students like him, more people like him giving back to a community,” Williams said. “It’s so important to see a young person giving back and caring and actually listening. He didn’t just hear somebody say this — he actually took action and did something about it.”