Lakes and streams in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area were contaminated with uranium from refining efforts in Weldon Spring
By Allison Kite, Derek Kravitz and Kelly Kauffman
Steve Allen and Eric Singsaas grew up hunting and fishing in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area and swimming in quarries along the Missouri River in St. Charles County, never knowing they were playing near nuclear waste.
“Everything we did,” Allen said in an interview, “we did together.”
Allen said he and Singsaas even attended a tour of an old uranium plant nearby — put on by the federal government in 1991.
“For the most part, we trusted what the government told us,” Allen said, “and surely, in our brain, if there was something bad there, (the government) wouldn’t allow us to be there.”
Decades later, Singsaas woke up with a numb foot. Within a week, he found out he had three cancerous brain tumors.
Two years later, he died.
