That Time A Town Had To Be Demolished After Roadworks Went Horribly Wrong

Located just a half-hour’s drive down Interstate 44 from downtown St. Louis, Missouri is the scenic Route 66 State Park. It’s a vestige of a bygone era in American society, when the transcontinental “Route 66” came to represent the glory days of road-tripping in the United States. You can come to the park to enjoy lush scenery and natural beauty, and you can even drive down a preserved section of the old, iconic Route 66.

You’d never know that this beautiful park is located above the ruins of a suburb that was destroyed by one of America’s worst environmental disasters of all time.

Once upon a time, the land that the Route 66 State Park occupies was once a colourful suburb of St. Louis. The town was founded in 1925, and a famous promotion from the St. Louis Star-Times newspaper included a 6-month subscription with the purchase of a new lot in town. Add the fact that the town was located on the banks of the Meramec River, and it’s easy to see how it got the name of Times Beach.

Over 60 years, Times Beach morphed from a summer playground for the rich into a working-class suburb of St. Louis. Its proximity to the Meramec River made Times Beach vulnerable to flooding, which was part of the reason why the town could never afford to have paved streets.

Of course, one of the drawbacks of gravel roads is the amount of dust that comes from them. This is especially true in the American midwest; where the hot, dry summers of the 1930s gave the region the nickname ‘The Dust Bowl’. Because all of the streets in Times Beach were unpaved, the town was very dusty, indeed. Although paving them was not an option, the local residents still wanted to do something to keep the dust from coming off the town’s roads. In 1972, the town of Times Beach contracted the services of Russell Martin Bliss, the owner of a small waste oil business, to control the dust on the town’s roads.

Russell Bliss’ job was to spray the waste oil he collected from various businesses on the streets of Times Beach. This is a common practice on gravel roads, and it seemed to make sense at the time. Since asphalt is essentially a compacted mixture of oil and aggregate, common logic suggested that the waste oil mixture would work as a cost-effective alternative to covering the roads with tarmac. For four years, the waste oil treatments did a good job of keeping the dust down. At a total cost of less than $2500 US, it seemed as though Times Beach was getting a good deal from Russell Bliss.

Of course, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article about a small Missouri town’s road maintenance strategy unless there was something terribly, terribly wrong with it. Indeed, the bargain that Times Beach thought they were getting from Russell Bliss would end up killing the town.

What nobody (including Bliss) knew at the time was that the bituminous brew being sprayed on the roads was extremely toxic. Among the companies that Russell Bliss collected waste oil from was the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company (NEPACCO) of Verona, MO. NEPACCO was owned by a company called Hoffman-Taff, which was producing Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam War. NEPACCO wasn’t producing Agent Orange itself, but it did make a compound called hexachlorophene between 1970 and 1972. Hexachlorophene is an antibacterial agent that was commonly used in soaps and disinfectants until the FDA banned it in 1972.

Despite the safety concerns, Russell Martin Bliss continued to haul NEPACCO’s waste oil to his facility; and eventually to the streets of Times Beach. What Bliss didn’t know was that this waste oil was extremely toxic. One of the waste byproducts of hexachlorophene production is a chemical called dioxin, which has been identified as one of the most potent carcinogens in existence. A significant proportion of the rubbish from NEPACCO contained this chemical, which then became part of the gravel road dust control solution used by Bliss.

In other words, Russell Bliss was spraying cancer on the roads of Times Beach.

It’s hard to imagine dying a horrible death from the consequences of road improvements, but that’s exactly the prospect that Times Beach residents faced in the late 1970s. When the owners of several stables complained of numerous horses dying after race tracks had been sprayed down by Russell Bliss, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to investigate. They discovered that the dust control spray contained dioxin, and were able to trace it back to NEPACCO and Russell Bliss. Once Bliss had been connected to the deaths of the stable horses, the EPA naturally wanted to investigate Times Beach to see if there was any dioxin in the town.

By 1982, the EPA had finished their preliminary soil testing on the town of Times Beach. The results were alarming—dioxin had been found in concentrations of up to 300 parts per billion in the town’s soil. Although it may not sound like much, dioxin is considered to be harmful to humans at just one part per billion. You can do the math - the town of Times Beach was found to have 300 times the harmful amount of one of the most potent carcinogens in existence. Once the results were released, Times Beach was considered uninhabitable.

Times Beach may have only paid $2500 to keep the dust down from their streets, but the investment ultimately cost them everything. The entire town (save for a couple of squatters) was permanently evacuated in 1982, turning the one-time resort town into something more reminiscent of Chernobyl. In order to get rid of the toxic chemicals, the entire town had to be bulldozed, excavated, and incinerated. $200 million later, and the area once known as Times Beach had finally been cleaned up.

Today, waste oil is still commonly used to control dust on gravel roads. However, contractors are now much more conscientious of what’s coming out of their trucks. Russell Bliss was ultimately cleared of any legal responsibility, since he was unaware of how toxic his gravel road brew was. Nevertheless, the saga of Times Beach goes to show that the roads we drive on can be deadly in more ways than we think.