Times Beach, Missouri: The Town the EPA Bought and Erased After Dioxin Poisoning

Summary

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.

Timeline

Before It Was Erased

Times Beach began in 1925 as a Meramec River resort development, marketed through a promotion in which buyers of a 20-week subscription to the St. Louis Star-Times received a low-cost riverside lot carved from former farmland. What started as a place for St. Louisans to escape the city in summer gradually became a permanent settlement as families converted vacation cabins into year-round homes.

By the second half of the 20th century, Times Beach was a low-income, working-class town of about 2,000 people, with modest houses, small businesses along old U.S. Route 66, and the unpaved roads typical of such communities. The dust kicked up from those dirt streets was a persistent nuisance, and the cash-strapped town turned to the cheapest available remedy.

In the early 1970s the town contracted Russell Bliss, a local waste-oil hauler, to oil its roughly 23 miles of roads for dust control — an ordinary, seemingly harmless arrangement repeated in many rural communities at the time. Spraying waste oil on dirt roads was a common and accepted dust-suppression method, and Bliss charged only a few thousand dollars for the work. Residents had no way of knowing that the oil being sprayed onto the streets where their children played and where they walked daily carried a hidden, long-lasting poison that would ultimately cost the town its existence.

The Decision

When the EPA confirmed dangerous dioxin levels in the town's soil in December 1982 — at the same moment a Meramec River flood was spreading the contamination — federal authorities faced a community soaked in one of the most toxic substances known. The Centers for Disease Control advised residents not to return, effectively ending the town as a functioning place overnight, and the Reagan administration convened a dioxin task force to decide what to do.

Faced with a choice between attempting an enormously costly and uncertain decontamination of an entire inhabited town or removing the people altogether, the government chose relocation. In February 1983 the EPA announced a buyout, ultimately spending around $33 million in federal funds plus roughly $3.7 million from the state — about $36.7 million in all — to purchase the homes and businesses, compensate and relocate the roughly 2,000 residents, and close the town down. Buying out Times Beach proved more practical than trying to clean it while people still lived there.

With its population gone, Times Beach was formally disincorporated as a municipality in 1985. The contaminated material was later destroyed in a purpose-built on-site incinerator in the mid-1990s, and the cleaned land was turned over for public use as a state park.

Contributing Factors

What's There Now

The former site of Times Beach is now Route 66 State Park, a roughly 419-acre park along the Meramec River managed by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. The town's homes and streets are gone, the contaminated soil long since incinerated and capped, and the open land given over to trails, wildlife habitat, and river access; the EPA removed the site from the Superfund National Priorities List in 2001.

A former roadhouse — one of the few original buildings to survive — operates as the park's visitor center, with exhibits interpreting both the old Route 66 history of the area and the dioxin crisis that ended the town. Times Beach endures as one of the most cited examples in American environmental history of a community erased by industrial contamination, and a milestone in the development of federal hazardous-waste and Superfund policy.

Lessons

References

• Times Beach, Missouri Wikipedia
• A Town, a Flood, and Superfund: Looking Back at the Times Beach Disaster US Environmental Protection Agency
• Route 66 State Park Missouri State Parks