A Town Lost to Time: The Tragic Story of Times Beach, MO - Essay Sample

Introduction

Times Beach is a former town in Missouri which was located at the famous route 66 which ended up being one of the largest environmental disaster sites in the history of the United States. The town was established in 1925 being part of the promotion of a newspaper 'The St. Louis Star-Times'. The newspaper enabled those individuals who bought a plot of land at the cost of $67.50 to get a six-month subscription. The town was marketed as being an escape for the city folk from St. Louis to find recreation and respite, although the oncoming restraints of the World War II and the Depression prevented it from growing as a retreat for the wealthy professionals.

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The town ended up becoming a tight-knit lower-middle-class community whose residents enjoyed the comforts and intimacy of a small-town life such as spending nights at the saloon, fishing as well as going to picnics. Former residents recall of the town comprising of amiable people who lived as if they were all related and was safe since they could even leave their houses without having locked their doors and on coming back the house was just as they had left it.

Dust was a significant problem for the people living in the town of Times Beach Missouri in the 1970s to the extent that during summer, clouds of the earth would rise and also spreading alongside the unpaved roads. To end this problem, Russell Bliss was given a contract to help reduce the dust in the town through a method that was later on regarded as illegal of spraying used motor oil on the ground to put an end to the dust. The operation gave the first warning in 1971 after a horse arena where he had been hired to spray the motor oil reported of birds falling dead from the barn rafters. Later horses started to refuse food and lose patches of hair while dozens of them became too ill a situation that left sixty-two horses dead.

The owners of the Shenandoah stables accused Bliss of polluting their property accusations Bliss dismissed by claiming that he only used motor oil which he did not think was toxic since he had also used it on his property too. Later on, it was discovered that Bliss had a contract to drag waste from a plant in Verona, Missouri which belonged to Hoffman-Taff and the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and chemical company. It was in this company that agent orange for Vietnam also a disinfectant that fell into disuse after dozens of deaths in France and the United States were tied to it. The disinfectant is known as the hexachlorophene. It was this waste which infected Bliss' motor oil with the carcinogenic and toxic chemical referred to as dioxin. Hence since 1972 to 1976, Bliss had been spraying a mixture of motor oil and industrial waste on the roads and lots of Times Beach.

Along with the reported cases of death of small animals, horses, and birds, there were acute poisoning symptoms such as stomach pain, headaches, skin rashes, nosebleeds, diarrhea that were experienced by those individuals who lived in and around the properties where Bliss had sprayed the substance. CDC conducted soil tests which revealed high dioxin levels at three different locations in Missouri town; however, there was no clear information on the extent of the contamination. In 1982, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents which were related to cases on the dioxin contamination in Missouri were leaked and the people who lived in Times Beach came to understand how Bliss was connected to the toxic chemical. It was a time when Bliss sprayed the roads of the towns a decade before.

December 5, 1982, was the day when EPA completed their soil tests in the town and it was in the same day that the worst floods to ever hit the city in its history struck which demolished many homes in the city leaving some of the residents without any option apart from escaping the deluge using boats. EPA Superfund during the Christmas period announced a plan which they wanted to buy the town from its owners who were estimated to be 900 property owners for $36.7 million with the help of the state of Missouri. It was the flood that resulted in most of the residents relocating and leaving the town, although some never felt or ever imagined of ever leaving their beloved village.

People in the town argued over the bill while those who had to build new homes were upset since their compensation was dictated through square footage. Lorene and George Klein were the only couples who remained still to get more money hence being the last residents in the town. Life on isolated land now remained a restricted zone such that to enter people who came to visit the couple had to undergo a gate that comprised of uniformed guards and there they would sign a detailed release form. According to some gossip by the people as well as the media frenzy, the Times Beach residents who had been displaced were treated as outcasts whereby some communities in fear that they could be carrying the contagions, hence tried to keep them from settling in their communities.

Most cities such as the Catawissa in Missouri declared that no Times Beach resident was welcomed there while teachers instructed the students to sit in specific parts of the class. It was a period when the former Times Beach town residents lived in unimaginable anxiety leaving them in wonder whether they were sick or not and whether the illness that they got was as a result of the dioxin. Dioxins are chemical compounds which are highly toxic environmental persistent organic pollutants, which are mostly the by-products of different industrial processes. Dioxins have varying toxicity depending on the position and the number of the chlorine atoms. These environmental pollutants belong to the dirty dozen group which comprises of dangerous chemicals which are known as the persistent organic pollutants.

Experiments prove that dioxins affect varying systems and organs in the human body and once they get into the body, they can last for an extended period due to their chemical stability as well as their capacity to be absorbed by the fat tissue where they are stored. Dioxins half-life in the body is estimated to be between 7 to 11 years while in the environment, they accumulate in the food chain. Dioxins cause developmental and reproductive problems; they cause cancer; they damage the immune system as well as interfering with the hormones in the body.

To stabilize the site, the long-term remedy was through the inclusion of the spur levees for controlling the velocity of water during flooding as well as limiting the erosion of contaminated soils. In 1989, the EPA completed the project on spur levee. The long-term remedy that was selected to ensure treatment of the contaminated soils, debris, and structures included thermal treatment of the soils contaminated and evacuation as well as the disposal of waste and structures. The disposal and demolition of the uncontaminated trash and structures were completed in 1992 while treatment of soils, as well as the excavation process, finished in 1997.

The entire Times Beach town was evacuated, and in 1983, it was declared a superfund site later on in 1985, the town was officially disincorporated. In the 1990s, all the other houses in the town were bought, and the EPA constructed a massive incinerator in the town to remove all the contamination found with the environments of Times Beach town. The incinerator was operated by three hundred employees who burned the dioxin that was present in the soil. In the whole process, about two hundred and sixty-five tons of dirt was processed while the employees buried and deconstructed all the homes.

According to EPA, the whole process of decontamination cost over $200 million with the construction of the massive incinerator incurring the most of the total costs since it incurred $100 million for its completion then the cleanup and decontamination processes committed the other $100 million. The incinerator was managed and constructed under the supervision of Syntex, a company that was a parent to the sites where the dioxin came from. The State of Missouri declared the area safe again in 1999, and today the city is home to Route 66 State Park where an information center, as well as a gift shop, preside over the land, and over two thousand two hundred people now call it a home again.

It was on December 11, 1980, when the CERCLA or in another name the Superfund was enacted through Congress. This law established requirements as well as prohibitions concerning abandoned and closed hazardous waste sites. It provided for the liability of people responsible for the release of the dangerous wastes on such sites also established a trust fund which would fund or deliver best possible ways to clean up the debris when there was no party of individual found responsible for it. The CERCLA law authorized only two types of responses in the case of a hazardous waste cleanup which may include the short-term removals meaning that actions should be taken in an aim to threaten releases or address releases which required an immediate response.

It also authorizes long-term corrective response actions which significantly and permanently reduce the dangers that are related to threats or releases of hazardous substances which are severe although not life-threatening. In Times Beach Missouri, the law acted, and in the year 1999, EPA announced the area safe again and was not in any danger from the dioxin substance anymore. This shows the success of their decontamination efforts since before they took charge of the town to clean it up their soil tests indicated the presence of dioxin in the soil which was too much hence posing a threat to human beings. It was as a result of these tests that EPA announced the plan to purchase the town to decontaminate it.

The reason why the contamination occurred was because an ignorant individual who did not first take precautions of early getting to understand what components the industrial waste that he hauled but continued to mix the industrial waste with used motor oil to come up with a preventive measure of the excess dust that was in Times Beach town which had started becoming a problem to the residents of the city. The contamination also occurred due to the reckless waste disposal by the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and chemical company hence causing hazardous waste getting to the extended hands, therefore, being used to contaminated and destroy the environment.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act gives the EPA the power to control hazardous waste from the time the waste is generated up to its eventual disposal. Hence the goals of RCRA are to protect human beings from the hazards of waste disposal, to eliminate or reduce waste, to conserve natural resources and energy through recovering and recycling as well as cleaning up trash that might have been improperly disposed of, leaked or spilled. According to my opinion, if the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act regulations were applied in the case of Times Beach town, the contamination would not have occurred in the first place. The main reason is because the pharmaceutical and chemical company would have a better plan for their waste disposal hence Bliss would not get the chance to mix the industrial waste with the motor oil and in the long run, Bliss could not have sprayed the toxic mixture on the roads and on the properties of the residents of Times Beach town.

Belli, Giuseppe, Silvia Cerlesi, Shubhender Kapila, Sergio P. Ratti, and A. F. Yanders. "Geometrical description of the TCDD contamination of Times Beach." (1989): 1251.

Evans, R. G., B. N. Shadel, D. W. Roberts, S. Clardy, D. Jordan-Izaguirre, D. G. Patterson, and L. L. Needham. "Dioxin incinerator emissions exposure study Times Beach, Missouri." Chemosphere 40, no. 9-11 (2000): 1063-1074.

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