Dr. Marco Kaltofen is convinced that the students poisoned by radioactive waste at Jana Elementary School are only the tip of the iceberg. “I have a feeling this is not even the beginning” of the story he relates, and nowhere near the end of it either.
St. Louis students poisoned
A group investigating students exposed to abnormally high levels of toxic radiation at the Jana Elementary school revealed that a “tipster” started their probe.
Dr. Kaltofen is a resident of Boston, Massachusetts but he’s been doing an awful lot of work in the St. Louis area since 2014 including research on the West Lake Landfill. He’s President of the Boston Chemical Data Corporation and his current assignment involves Coldwater Creek.
Kaltofen and his company do “forensic, safety and environmental investigations” and their latest is an an inquiry into the elementary school to see how badly the students were affected.
Students are still attending Jana Elementary School in Florissant, Missouri, despite a private company’s new report that found radioactive material far above the expected level. https://t.co/bstg3m92B9
— News-Leader (@springfieldNL) October 18, 2022
A local news station was shocked to learn that it wasn’t the district who called him in. “The school district did not hire Boston Chemical Data Corp.” They’re giving him the run of the place, though. “The Board is authorizing a study of Jana and any places made aware of need.”
Since the school district isn’t paying Boston Chemical to test the students for radiation sickness, the reporters wondered, who is?
Kaltofen relates that Jana and Coldwater Creek have both been on his radar since 2014 but “the first time I ever heard about it was from someone from the FUSRAP office here in St. Louis saying, ‘You need to investigate in this place, there’s all types of stuff going on.’ And you know what? They were right.” FUSRAP “is part of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which cleans up sites with contamination.”
The attorneys paid
After a couple more tips came in and they did some checking, “the group got involved and the attorneys paid to move forward.” Their Investigators arrived in the area on August 15 and went straight to work, spending a week in the area and one day with the students at Jana Elementary.
“The school district was extremely helpful, completely open.” The team was given “free rein and nothing was denied in our investigation,” Dr. Kaltofen reports.
Kaltofen and his team collected a total of 32 separate samples and it took about seven weeks for the results to come back. When the reports came back from the lab, they learned that students had been exposed to “high levels of radioactive lead” called Polonium.
They found highly elevated levels “on the cafeteria fan, in the boiler room, and in the school library.” Outside, the Jana Elementary school playground areas practically glow in the dark, “specifically the kindergarten play area and near the basketball court area.”
According to Dr. Kaltofen, “The concern was the amount of radioactive we found was a good deal higher than we expected. It also involves a high level of thorium. The contamination inside the school is almost certainly related to the waste in Coldwater Creek.”
That makes a whole lot of sense because the Manhattan Project carried out a whole lot of nuclear bomb research work there. Obviously, students and their parents are freaking out. The children are all being moved, while hazardous waste cleanup teams do a full assessment.
