Times Beach, Missouri

Times Beach began in 1925 as a real-estate promotion. The *St. Louis Times* offered readers a six-month subscription and a small lot beside the Meramec River for $67.50. The lots were sold as a summer resort; people built permanent homes on them instead. When a new Meramec bridge opened in the early 1930s, Route 66 was routed through the town. By the early 1980s more than two thousand people lived there. The roads were unpaved. Between 1972 and 1976 Times Beach paid a waste-oil hauler, Russell Bliss, to spray them with oil to keep the dust down. The oil was not only oil. Bliss had also contracted to remove waste from a chemical plant at Verona, Missouri, operated by the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, which had produced Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. That waste contained dioxin. Bliss mixed it with waste motor oil and sprayed the mixture at sites across eastern Missouri, Times Beach among them. Animals died first. At one breeding stable 62 horses died between 1971 and 1973, along with dogs and cats. It took another decade to establish why. In December 1982 the Meramec flooded the town. On 23 December, with residents still displaced by the water, the EPA announced it had found dioxin in Times Beach soil — up to roughly 127 parts per billion, against a CDC threshold of one. Residents did not return. In February 1983 the federal government used the newly created Superfund to buy the town; by the end of that month some $36 million had bought every house in Times Beach but one. Between two and three thousand people were relocated, depending on whose count you take. Times Beach was disincorporated in 1985. The soil stayed until the mid-1990s. A high-temperature incinerator built on the site burned 265,374 tons of contaminated soil — from Times Beach and 24 other eastern Missouri sites — between March 1996 and June 1997. The incinerator was dismantled and the land handed to the State of Missouri. Route 66 State Park, 419 acres, opened on the site on 11 September 1999. The EPA removed Times Beach from the Superfund list on 25 September 2001. Whether the evacuation was necessary is still argued. Vernon Houk, the CDC official who recommended it, said in 1991 that the risk had been overstated — a remark he made at a convention sponsored by Syntex, a company tied to the contamination's liability. The World Health Organization's cancer agency classified the dioxin TCDD a known human carcinogen in 1997 and has not withdrawn that finding.