ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – On Tuesday, radiation exposure victim advocates are bringing their fight to Washington, D.C. Just Moms STL and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment will meet with politicians to push for the renewal of the RECA bill.
Families in 11 states currently receive radiation compensation. If Senator Josh Hawley’s bill gets approved, Missouri will finally be added to the list.
“We’re back at it. We’re still fighting and you know we have hope. We have strength; you know this is a hard fight and we don’t want people to get discouraged,” said Karen Nickel, Just Moms STL.
It’s their third trip to D.C. in six months.
“We’ve really kind of chipped away, if you will, at the education and made sure that we’ve got a base and then we kind of come back and do a little more,” Dawn Chapman, Just Moms STL, said. “I think this time it’s going to be much easier and we’re going to have people from Arizona and the Navajo Nation with us.”
The fight is for radiation victims.
“Honestly, we have people. We have personal photos. So, the combination of everything I think is going to be powerful this trip,” Chapman said.
The group plans on bringing documentaries, victim photos, cancer statistics, anything that can help explain the effect the Manhattan Project continues to have nearly 80 years later.
“It is the sad part of it that we even have to do that. That we even have to go out and put our stories out like that and we’re so grateful for the people that have been brave enough to share their stories with us to carry those stories to DC because that takes a lot,” Nickel said.
More than 40,000 people currently receive radiation compensation under the bill. Chapman and Nickel said each community comes with thousands of stories of heartbreak, cancer, and illnesses.
“I’ll take my last breath fighting this fight for my kids and this turned into everybody’s kids. We never thought that it would be like that; that it would be everybody’s kids. That I would be fighting for every single kid in this community,” Nickel said.