Times Beach, Missouri, Declared Uninhabitable

The Bad news is never welcome.  But at Christmastime, bad news is particularly dreadful. 

On December 23, 1982, the town of Times Beach, Missouri, got the worst kind of bad news:  The entire city was contaminated by a highly toxic chemical—dioxin.  In a few years, the city was wiped off the map.

            Times Beach, Missouri, was designed to be a recreational paradise.  The site is just a few miles southeast of St. Louis, along the route of the  historic “Route 66.”  The St. Louis Times newspaper owned a small tract of land on the shore of the Meramec River, and they decided in 1925, as an advertising gimmick, to sell small lots for a negligible price ($67.50) to new six-month subscribers.  Soon after, the new land owners formed the town of Times Beach.  It never developed as a major recreational destination, but it did become a modest middle-class town, with 2,500 residents living in about 800 homes.        

     The town never had much money, so when the dusty roads became an issue, they turned to a low-cost solution.  They hired a nearby company to spray used crankcase oil on the roads, a common practice in rural communities.  For four years, from 1972 to 1976, the company sprayed the used oil on Times Beach’s roads.  Unknown to the town and its residents, however, the company had mixed other industrial waste into the oil.  That industrial waste contained one specific chemical in high concentrations—2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, also known as TCDD, or simply as “dioxin.”

Source: todayinconservation.com for the complete article