Of all the buildings in Times Beach, Missouri, one was left standing. It was a roadhouse that opened in 1935, first known as the Bridgehead Inn and later as Steiny’s Inn, according to St. Louis Public Radio. Today it is the visitor center at Route 66 State Park.
The town it stood in was gone by then. About 2,000 people, roughly 800 families, once lived in Times Beach, per the station. In 1972, waste hauler Russell Bliss sprayed oil mixed with dioxin-laced chemical waste on its roads to control dust, and on several dozen other sites around the region.
Record flooding on the Meramec River in December 1982 forced evacuations, and the CDC and the EPA recommended that no one move back, according to the EPA. On Dec. 23, the Missouri Department of Health and the CDC told residents the town would have to be evacuated, per History.com.
In February 1983, the EPA announced a federal buyout of 800 residential properties and 30 businesses, paid for with Superfund money, per the EPA. Missouri Life puts the government’s spending at nearly $40 million.
The burning came more than a decade later. Starting March 17, 1996, a temporary incinerator ran for about 16 months, destroying 265,374 tons of dioxin-contaminated soil from 25 eastern Missouri sites, according to a plaque quoted by St. Louis Public Radio. The EPA counts 265,354 tons from 27 sites, with 37,234 of those tons from Times Beach itself. Homes, businesses, and the town water tower were incinerated, too, and their remains were buried in a “town mound,” per the EPA.
The cleanup took 14 years and cost $110 million, per St. Louis Public Radio. Missouri designated the site a state park on July 2, 1997, and Route 66 State Park opened on Sept. 11, 1999. The park covers roughly 400 acres where Times Beach stood.
EPA soil sampling in 2012 found no significant health risk for workers or visitors at the park. The park now has trails, picnic shelters, and fishing, along with the original Route 66 roadhouse, according to Missouri State Parks.
“The whole country needs to know what happened here, so it doesn’t happen again,” Marilyn Leistner, the town’s last mayor, told St. Louis Public Radio. Disposing of waste could be a real problem for a lot of people, sometimes even becoming a national issue. In 1987, Islip, New York loaded 3,168 tons of garbage onto a barge that Mexico and Belize turned away.
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