Missourians still sickened by atomic bomb building and haphazard nuclear waste disposal since WWll are finally getting modest compensation, even during the federal government shutdown.
Payments of $25,000 to $50,000 have started arriving for at least 50 St. Louis-area radiation victims, after Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley waged a relentless Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style battle to get it.
Congress inexplicably allowed the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to expire last year, even though Hawley had won Senate approval not only to extend the law but to expand it to Missouri and other U.S. regions not covered in the original bill.
Ultimately, RECA extension and expansion was included in President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year.
But that comes only after several years of plaintive appeals by Hawley to his Capitol Hill colleagues, as well as visits there by cancer-stricken victims and heartbreaking testimonies about their own lingering illnesses and that of their loved ones.
One such victim is named Zoey. She had to have a mass removed from her ovary a few years ago – at the age of 3 weeks.
“My heart is just soaring,” Dawn Chapman, co-founder of radiation victim advocacy nonprofit Just Moms STL, told St. Louis’ KSDK-TV 5 On Your Side. “It makes the past, the sacrifices from the last couple of years, totally worth it.”
Chapman added on X: “RECA Compensation payments are being deposited into people’s bank accounts in Missouri! It’s working! Thank you Senator @HawleyMO and the @TheJusticeDept!”
“Great to see Missourians finally getting relief after having been poisoned by their federal government for more than 70 years,” Hawley posted on X.
“For some,” added Chapman’s Just Moms STL co-founder Karen Nickel, “it’s their lifeline. People are losing their homes, cars, filing bankruptcy every day because they can’t afford cancer.”
The St. Louis County Library Clark Family Branch has been key to helping many victims find the records they need to qualify for RECA compensation, KSDK reports.
“We specialize in the RECA residency lookup,” Brent Trout, manager of the library’s History and Genealogy Department, told the station.
“RECA requires documentation for anyone who lived, worked or attended school in 21 zip codes and developed certain diseases due to radiation exposure,” the station reports. “If they’re in those specific zip codes, people can apply if they were there between 1949 to present day for two years. … [T]he two years do not have to be consecutive.”
The Missouri zip codes qualifying for RECA compensation are:
63031, 63033, 63034, 63042, 63045, 63074, 63114, 63135, 63138, 63044, 63121, 63140, 63145, 63147, 63102, 63304, 63134, 63043, 63341, 63368, 63367
