'Don't stay quiet' -- and other lessons Herculaneum's cleanup offers decades later
In a country filled with more than 1,300 Superfund sites, the challenges related to remediating environmental contamination across the U.S. can feel monumental. But Steve Mahfood remembers what happened two decades ago in the small town of Herculaneum, Missouri, as a striking success — and a story that still offers lessons for today.
Mahfood, who was the director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources at the time, credits concerned residents, government officials and then-Governor Bob Holden for banding together to hold the Doe Run Company accountable for decades of illegal lead emissions.
“It really was a matter at the time of the citizens, and citizen advocacy, really [driving] the initial thinking about what was going on in Herculaneum. … We have so many problems in Missouri with Superfund sites and formerly contaminated sites,” Mahfood said Friday on St. Louis on the Air. “But this was one where there was an untold amount of lead contamination, and it was so obvious. And it was obvious that a lot of things had not been done up to that point.”
After a 2002 report by the state health department showed highly elevated blood lead levels in well over half of the children living near Doe Run’s smelter, state officials worked to negotiate a buyout of 160 homes within about a mile of the smelter — paid for by Doe Run. Such a buyout “had never happened in the country before that,” Mahfood said. And he suspects it hasn’t happened since.
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2022-01-21/herculaneums-environmental-cleanup-offers-lessons-for-today