The open house held last Friday afternoon at CWM Chemical Services in the Niagara County town of Porter dissolved into a public relations nightmare for event organizers. An extremely heavy thunderstorm frightened children in the parking lot where the event took place, sending those in attendance scrambling for shelter in the big tent that housed a buffet at one end and a live band at the other.

Not far from CWM is the Niagara Falls Storage Site, a federal facility where massive quantities of radioactive waste, a legacy of Niagara County industry’s role in the Manhattan Project, is stored and monitored by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The 191-acre NFSS is one of the world’s largest repositories of radium-226, for example, a toxic by-product of uranium processing. The materials are stored in a concrete containment cell, subject to continuous chemical and radon sampling, according to the Corps.