David Hubbard, 68, remembers the carefree days of the 1960s, when he and his friends played sports and other outdoor games near their school playground in the Robertson Township area, a historic, predominantly Black community in St. Louis County.
The children paid little attention to trucks with large containers attached that frequently drove through the neighborhood, dumping unknown substances at what was then called the Kent Landfill, which Hubbard said sat just a couple hundred feet from his grade school. Nothing sinister registered in their minds, even when small fires spontaneously combusted on grass or dirt where the trucks unloaded their waste.
Now, some 50 years later, Hubbard has learned those trucks were dumping radioactive waste in the neighborhood where he lived until his early 20s…