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N0KFQ > TODAY 23.12.13 17:35l 62 Lines 2808 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Dec 23
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Sent: 131223/1555Z 9125@KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA BPQK1.4.57
Dec 23, 1982:
Road contamination prompts evacuation of town
On this day in 1982, the Missouri Department of Health and the
federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) inform residents of
Times Beach, Missouri that their town was contaminated when the
chemical dioxin was sprayed on its unpaved roads, and that the
town will have to be evacuated and demolished. By February, the
federal and state governments had spent $36 million to buy every
house in town except one (its owners, lifelong residents of Times
Beach, refused to sell). In 1985, the city was officially
disincorporated.
Times Beach was founded in 1925 as a part of a newspaper
promotion: A 6-month subscription to The St. Louis Times plus an
extra $67.50 bought a 20-by-100-foot lot along an unsettled
stretch of the Meremec River. The town never became the booming
resort that the newspaper had intended; instead, it evolved into
a lower-middle-class hamlet of about 2,000 people. It was located
just off Route 66, a two-lane highway that ran from Chicago to
Los Angeles and was once was one of the major routes across the
American Southwest.
Unfortunately, Times Beach never had the money to pave its roads,
and all the dust kicked up by cars and trucks was a real
nuisance. In 1972, town officials thought they'd found a perfect
solution to the problem: they paid local waste-hauler Russell
Bliss just 6 cents per gallon to spray its roads with oil,
theoretically gluing the dust to the ground.
Bliss got the oil for free the year before, when a chemical
manufacturer that had made most of its money selling napalm to
the military paid him to get rid of its waste materials. He mixed
six truckloads of that waste--which turned out to be
hexachlorophene tainted with dioxin, a dangerous chemical that,
once absorbed, can remain in the human body for more than 10
years--with a tankful of used motor oil. Next, he sprayed this
carcinogenic cocktail all over town.
The children of Times Beach loved sliding around in Bliss'
purple-tinted goo, and no one gave the substance a second thought
until animals (particularly horses, who had contact with
Bliss-sprayed roads and barn floors and riding rings every day,
all year round) started dropping dead. Soon people started to get
sick, too. In 1979, the EPA came to town and took soil samples,
and in 1982 the agency announced that the levels of dioxin--"the
most potent cancer-causing agent made by man," the newspaper
said--in Times Beach were off the charts. The agency evacuated
the town just after Christmas. In all, the agency spent $250
million and incinerated 265,000 tons of dioxin-tainted soil.
In 1999, the bulldozed and cleaned-up Times Beach reopened as the
Route 66 State Park.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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