Wittenoom was a company town in the rugged Hamersley Ranges of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, built to support the mining of blue asbestos — crocidolite, the most carcinogenic form of the mineral. Blue asbestos was found in the gorges in the 1930s, and after Lang Hancock and Peter Wright began working the deposits, the Australian Blue Asbestos company, associated with the conglomerate CSR, took over operations. A company town rose at Wittenoom from 1947 and was officially gazetted in 1950, growing through the 1950s into the largest settlement in the Pilbara.
The town’s prosperity was built on a poison. Crocidolite fibres are exceptionally fine and durable, and the dust permeated the mine, the mill, the homes, and the streets — asbestos tailings were even spread around the townsite as a cheap surfacing material on roads, driveways, and the school playground. Workers and their families breathed it daily, often without warning of the danger. The Australian census of June 30, 1961, recorded the resident population peak of 881, but tens of thousands of people passed through Wittenoom across the mine’s life.
The mine closed in 1966, unprofitable and increasingly shadowed by alarm over its health effects. The legacy proved catastrophic: more than 2,000 former residents and workers have since died of asbestos-related diseases including mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung cancer, making Wittenoom one of the worst industrial disasters in Australian history. The surrounding contamination covers roughly 46,840 hectares — among the largest asbestos-contaminated areas in the Southern Hemisphere.
Government authorities recommended closing the town as early as 1978 and gradually withdrew services, disconnecting power and removing the town from tourist promotion. In December 2006 the Western Australian government announced it would strip Wittenoom of its official status, and in June 2007 the townsite was formally de-gazetted, erasing it from maps and road signs. The state subsequently moved to acquire the last private properties; the final resident, 80-year-old Lorraine Thomas, was evicted in September 2022, and demolition of the remaining buildings began in May 2023 to wipe the town from the landscape entirely.
Picher was a lead and zinc mining town in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, the heart of the Tri-State Mining District that once stretched across the Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri borders. Mining began in 1913 after lead and zinc were discovered on Harry Crawfish’s claim, and the boom was so explosive that the settlement — named for O. S. Picher of the Picher Lead Company — incorporated in 1918 and peaked at 14,252 residents by 1926. For three decades the district was among the most productive ore fields on Earth, supplying more than half the lead and zinc used by the United States in World War I and an estimated $20 billion worth of ore between 1917 and 1947.
The ore came at a hidden cost. Beneath the town the ground was honeycombed by hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels and shafts, while above it rose mountains of crushed mine waste — called “chat” — laced with lead, zinc, and cadmium. Children climbed and swam in the chat piles for recreation, and wind carried fine, contaminated dust across the community for decades after the last mine closed in 1967. By the late twentieth century Picher had become the textbook case of a town that could not be cleaned, only emptied.
In 1983 the surrounding area was designated the Tar Creek Superfund site, one of the first and most intractable on the national priority list. A 1994 study by the Indian Health Service found that roughly 35 percent of local children carried blood-lead levels above the federal threshold of concern, and a 2006 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study concluded that 86 percent of Picher’s buildings — including the school — sat over ground at imminent risk of collapse. Federal and state authorities responded with a voluntary buyout funded through Superfund and other appropriations.
An EF4 tornado on May 10, 2008, killed six people in Picher and destroyed scores of homes, accelerating an exodus that was already underway. Most remaining residents accepted relocation checks; the city government formally cancelled Picher’s incorporated status on September 1, 2009, and the municipality was fully dissolved in the years that followed. Today Picher survives only as a near-empty ghost town surrounded by toxic chat piles, its name a byword for the limits of environmental remediation.
Times Beach was a small town on the Meramec River about 17 miles southwest of St. Louis, founded in 1925 as a summer-resort subdivision promoted by the St. Louis Star-Times newspaper — buyers of a 20-week newspaper subscription received a riverside lot for a low package price. Over the decades it evolved from a seasonal getaway into a modest, year-round working-class community of roughly 2,000 residents. Like many such towns it had unpaved dirt roads, and to control the choking summer dust the town hired a waste-oil hauler named Russell Bliss to spray oil on its streets in the early 1970s.
Unknown to the town, the oil Bliss sprayed was contaminated with dioxin. In 1971 Bliss had collected chemical still bottoms from a facility in Verona, Missouri, operated by NEPACCO, which produced the antibacterial agent hexachlorophene and generated waste laced with one of the most toxic dioxin compounds known. Bliss mixed the waste into his used-oil tanks and sprayed it for dust control. The same dioxin-tainted oil that coated Times Beach’s roads from 1972 to 1976 had already proved lethal elsewhere: at Shenandoah Stables near Moscow Mills in 1971, spraying killed roughly a dozen horses and sickened children with chloracne, an early warning that went unheeded for years.
In December 1982 two crises collided. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, finally tracing the waste-oil trail, sampled the roads and found alarmingly high dioxin levels just as a major flood of the Meramec River inundated the town and threatened to spread the contamination across yards and homes. Days later the Centers for Disease Control recommended that evacuated residents not return. In February 1983 the EPA announced a buyout, pledging about $33 million in federal Superfund money — joined by roughly $3.7 million from the state, for a combined sum near $36.7 million — to purchase every property, relocate the residents, and shut the town down. Times Beach was added to the Superfund National Priorities List in September 1983 and formally disincorporated in 1985.
The contaminated soil was not simply abandoned. From 1996 to 1997 a specially built on-site incinerator burned roughly 265,000 tons of dioxin-tainted material from Times Beach and dozens of other eastern Missouri sites, after which the EPA removed the location from the Superfund list in 2001. The remediated land reopened in 1999 as the 419-acre Route 66 State Park, with a former roadhouse — one of the few original structures left standing — repurposed as the park’s visitor center, interpreting the history of the town that the federal government bought and erased.