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The Environmental Protection Agency met with Bridgeton’s mayor, local activists and staff for area congressional representatives. The meeting let EPA officials share findings about additional areas where waste has been found, discuss ongoing testing for radioactivity and also to answer questions about the site’s long-awaited cleanup.

“It all comes down to: There’s no boundary. They’re finding radioactive waste all over this site,” said Dawn Chapman, a local resident and co-founder of Just Moms STL, a group that closely tracks the situation at West Lake Landfill.

“Our jaws kind of hit the ground,” she said, when one map shared by the EPA on Wednesday showed newly found contamination that extends outside of the landfill.

Contamination has been discovered to the north, on an industrial parcel of land belonging to a trailer company. It also has been found southwest of the landfill, heading toward the former training facility for the ӣ����Ƶ Rams, which has more recently been leased for youth sports leagues and other programs.

Chapman said “we don’t think anybody is being harmed” by the contamination at this time, but the EPA’s new map raises concerns about how the site’s contaminants might affect surrounding water — something the EPA continues to study.

The contamination “has the ability to move,” Chapman said. “It’s had 50 years of being rained on.”

Bridgeton Mayor Terry Briggs said the situation at the landfill, specifically delays to launch the site’s cleanup, is testing residents’ patience.

“We’ve been dealing with this issue for years and years and years,” Briggs said. “The public is getting a little apprehensive, at best, because they don’t see a whole lot of activity taking place.”

The site’s radioactive history goes back half a century, to when waste tied to the Manhattan Project in World War II was illegally dumped at West Lake in the early 1970s. The site has been in the EPA’s Superfund program for decades, and a cleanup strategy was selected in 2018 but has yet to begin.

Concern over the site has skyrocketed since 2010, when an underground fire was detected in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill. The fire is still smoldering but has been slowed and restricted by an engineered cooling system of pipes that run into the landfill.

In recent weeks, the EPA has said that additional testing for radioactive material at West Lake has been the primary cause of cleanup delays there.

A map the EPA released after Wednesday’s meeting showed hundreds of sites where boreholes have been drilled to test for radioactive material, with samples coming from multiple depths in a single hole.

In all, 627 borings have been drilled, and as new radioactivity is found, additional “step-out” borings are being made to map the spiraling extent of known contamination. The original group of borings was completed in January 2021, but 169 more have been drilled since. Data has been analyzed from 531 of the sample locations, with approximately 215 of them — about 40% — meeting the EPA’s definition for radioactive contamination.

The agency said that until the step-out borings are completed, it cannot specify when the “design phase” of cleanup will wrap up, clearing the way for the actual cleanup to proceed.

“I give them credit for doing the study, and we want them to be thorough,” Briggs said. “But by the same token, how long does it take?”

The EPA is planning to provide a congressional update on its work at the site in the next week or two, officials said.

A public hearing also will take place in ӣ����Ƶ at some point, according to local officials at the meeting.

Chapman said she welcomed assurance from the EPA that representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, one of the parties responsible for paying for the site’s cleanup, would attend that meeting.

Editor’s note: Updated to correct location of contamination outside the landfill.