Coldwater Creek Lawsuit: RECA Payments, Claims, and Deadlines

If you or a family member lived, worked, or went to school near Coldwater Creek in North St. Louis County and later developed cancer, the Coldwater Creek lawsuit history now points most people to a federal program rather than a courtroom. The private personal-injury cases against Mallinckrodt Chemical Works and Cotter Corporation were resolved by confidential settlement in 2018 and by summary judgment in a later group in 2022. Since July 2025, the practical remedy has been a claim under the expanded Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which pays up to $50,000 to residents of 21 designated zip codes who have a qualifying cancer diagnosis. Claims go to the U.S. Department of Justice and must be filed by December 31, 2027.¹

Who Qualifies for a RECA Payment

Eligibility turns on three things: where you were, how long you were there, and what you were diagnosed with. You must have lived, worked, or attended school in one of the covered Missouri zip codes for at least two years at any point after January 1, 1949, and you must have a qualifying cancer.¹

The 21 covered zip codes span much of North St. Louis County near the creek, parts of North St. Louis City, and portions of St. Charles County:

63031, 63033, 63034, 63042, 63043, 63044, 63045, 63074, 63102, 63114, 63121, 63134, 63135, 63138, 63140, 63145, 63147, 63304, 63341, 63367, 63368¹

The compensable diseases include most leukemias (if initial exposure occurred after age 20), multiple myeloma, lymphomas other than Hodgkin’s disease, and primary cancers of the thyroid, breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gall bladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary, bone, kidney, liver (excluding cases with cirrhosis or Hepatitis B), and lung.¹

You do not have to prove that the radioactive waste caused your illness. The program was designed to be non-adversarial: showing that you lived in an eligible area for the qualifying period and have a qualifying diagnosis is enough.²

How Much You Can Receive

A living claimant gets the greater of a one-time, tax-free $50,000 payment or reimbursement of documented out-of-pocket medical expenses tied to the qualifying illness. If the person with the diagnosis has died, a surviving spouse receives $25,000. With no surviving spouse, the payment is split equally among surviving children.¹

Early payout data give a sense of the pace. By late September 2025, the DOJ had processed roughly 100 applications, with six fully completed, and payouts issued about a month after approval.³⁴⁵

How to File and the Deadline

Claims are administered by the DOJ Civil Division. The deadline is December 31, 2027. You can file electronically through the DOJ’s RECA Claim Portal or mail a 24-page application with supporting documents. You will need proof that you lived, worked, or attended school in an eligible zip code during the qualifying period (leases, deeds, employment records, school records) and medical records confirming a compensable diagnosis.¹

You do not need an attorney. If you use one, federal law caps their fee at 2% of the award.⁶ Free help gathering residency documentation is available through congressional offices, the St. Louis County Library system (which has assisted more than 3,700 people), and advocacy groups.⁴

What Happened to the Civil Lawsuits

Before RECA covered Missouri, the only legal route for affected residents was suing the companies that handled the waste. Starting in 2012, several hundred residents filed personal injury cases under the federal Price-Anderson Act, consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri as McClurg v. Mallinckrodt, LLC. The plaintiffs alleged that Mallinckrodt and Cotter Corporation mishandled radioactive waste at the airport storage site and at Latty Avenue, contaminating Coldwater Creek and causing their cancers.⁷

The consolidated McClurg cases ended in confidential master settlement agreements in September 2018, approved by the court in December 2019. Cotter Corporation’s total cost for defending and settling those cases came to roughly $15 million.⁸ A separate group filed in 2018, the Butler cases, was severed from the consolidated proceeding and resolved in September 2022 when the court granted summary judgment for the defendants.⁷

Civil litigation proved difficult for many plaintiffs because the Price-Anderson Act sets a high burden of proof for causation. Some claims closed without any compensation. By the mid-2020s, the focus for most affected residents had shifted from private lawsuits to the federal compensation program, which does not require causation proof at all.

The Health Evidence Behind the Claims

You do not need scientific proof to file a RECA claim, but many claimants want to understand what researchers have found. The strongest evidence to date came in July 2025, when researchers from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a study in JAMA Network Open analyzing more than 4,200 participants from the St. Louis Baby Tooth–Later Life Health Study.⁹

Compared with people who grew up more than 20 kilometers from the creek, those who lived within one kilometer had a 44% higher risk of any cancer, a 52% higher risk of solid cancers, and an 85% higher risk of radiosensitive cancers such as thyroid, breast, leukemia, and basal cell carcinoma. The share of participants reporting a cancer diagnosis rose the closer they had lived to the creek: 30% within one kilometer, 28% at one to five kilometers, 25% at five to twenty, and 24% beyond twenty.¹⁰

An earlier 2019 public health assessment by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that exposure to radiological contaminants in the creek’s floodplain from the 1960s through the 1990s could have increased the risk of lung cancer, bone cancer, and leukemia. ATSDR cautioned that the increases were likely too small to see in community-wide statistics and said it could not quantify other reported concerns such as autoimmune disorders and birth defects because historical exposure data were missing.¹¹ Autoimmune disease and birth defects are not on the RECA list of compensable conditions.¹

Getting Help and Avoiding Scams

Much of the political pressure that produced the RECA expansion came from Just Moms STL, founded in 2014 by Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel. Since the law passed, the group has shifted to helping residents navigate the application process and warning against predatory firms and scams targeting eligible claimants.¹² Between the free library assistance, congressional caseworkers, the 2% attorney fee cap, and the non-adversarial claim design, most eligible residents can file without paying for legal help. If someone contacts you offering to handle a claim for a large fee or a contingency cut, that offer is inconsistent with what federal law allows.

The window is finite. December 31, 2027 is the statutory filing deadline, and residency records get harder to reconstruct the longer you wait. If you think you may qualify, gathering old school records, lease agreements, employment history, and medical documentation is the concrete first step.

1
U.S. Department of Justice. Radiation Exposure Compensation Act
2
St. Louis Public Radio. St. Louis Coldwater Creek Residents Federal Compensation
3
Spectrum Local News. STL RECA Payouts
4
St. Louis Public Radio. Residents St. Louis Region Beginning Receive Radiation Exposure Compensation
5
Yahoo News. 300,000 Could Be Eligible for RECA Payouts
6
Spectrum Local News. St. Louis RECA Forms Coldwater Creek
7
GovInfo. McClurg v. Mallinckrodt Consolidated Litigation
8
U.S. Department of Justice. Cotter Corporation Certiorari Petition
9
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Living Near St. Louis Area Coldwater Creek During Childhood Linked With Higher Risk of Cancer From Radiation
10
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Cancer Incidence and Childhood Residence Near the Coldwater Creek Radioactive Waste Site
11
ATSDR. St. Louis Airport Site and Hazelwood Interim Storage Site Public Health Assessment
12
Just Moms STL. Just Moms STL