Times Beach: The Town That Dioxin Erased

Times Beach began as a real estate gimmick in nineteen twenty-five. The St. Louis Times newspaper offered small summer lots along the Meramec River to subscribers who bought a six-month subscription. The lots sold. People built cabins. The cabins became year-round homes. By the nineteen seventies Times Beach was a working-class community of about two thousand people on the old Route Sixty-Six alignment west of St. Louis, incorporated and ordinary in every visible way.

The invisible problem had been growing for a decade. A waste oil hauler named Russell Bliss had been hired to spray the unpaved roads of Times Beach to keep the dust down, which was common practice in rural Missouri. What Bliss didn't disclose, and may not have fully understood, was that his waste oil was contaminated with dioxin, a byproduct of the manufacture of the herbicide Agent Orange. Bliss had been taking waste from a Northeastern Missouri chemical plant, mixing it with oil, and spraying it across dozens of properties including horse arenas, where dozens of horses died. Children who played in the dirt became ill.

The EPA discovered the contamination in late nineteen eighty-two. Then, on the fourth of December that year, the Meramec River flooded and inundated the entire town. In the weeks that followed, the government announced that dioxin levels in Times Beach were one hundred times what the EPA considered safe, and just before Christmas, health officials advised residents not to return. Residents were advised not to return.

The federal government bought out every property in Times Beach for thirty-three million dollars, the first such buyout in American history. The entire town was demolished. The contaminated soil was incinerated on site over several years. By nineteen ninety-nine, the land was declared clean.

Today the site is Route Sixty-Six State Park. A visitor center tells the story. The Meramec flows past as it always has. Two thousand people lived here, and now there is no trace that they did.