The creek begins in a small spring-fed lake in Overland, then flows north through the cities of Breckenridge Hills, St. Ann, and Bridgeton before entering a culvert underneath Lambert International Airport.
That release of information halted a flood-control project planned between the United States Army Corps of Engineers and local suburban communities for the previous eleven years.
In 1942, Mallinckrodt had reached an exclusive agreement with the U.S. government's Manhattan Engineering District, an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, to produce weapons-grade uranium at its factory north of downtown.
[2][5] From 1947, the company and the USACE used a 21.7-acre property near Lambert Field for the purpose of burying steel drums containing the radioactive wastes from the downtown plant and other locations.
[8] In January 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the high rate of cancers in the area, and confirmed a potential link between the cluster and the polluted creek.