City of Times Beach - A Quick History

The Times Beach resort was founded in 1925 by a promotion by the St Louis Star-Times newspaper. If you bought a 20ft x 100 ft land plot for $67.50, you got a free six-month newspaper subscription! The town was originally a summer resort, but the Great Depression & World War II made it impractical to have just summer homes, so the town became a community of low-income housing. The town soon became a middle-class area, but due to the location on the Meramec River floodplain, it was susceptable to flooding with the first buildings actually constructed on stilts! There was a significant flood in the early 1980's with 95% of the city covered with 10 feet or more of water & this, combined with an announcement by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led to the town's evacuation (by 1985) & complete demolition by 1992.

The town had a dust problem in the early 1970s due to 23 miles of dirt roads & had no funds to pay for tarmac or concrete paving. The city hired a waste hauler spray oil on the roads (a technique that he had sucessfully used to control dust in horse stables). The hauler also had a waste contract with a pharmaceutical company

that operated a facility that had been used for the production of Agent Orange (which was a herbicide & de-foliant used during theVietnam War), & the waste clay & water from this site were found to have dioxin levels greater than 2,000 times that contained in Agent Orange.

After a number of horse deaths in the stables treated with oil by the haulier, investigations showed that waste from the pharmaceutical site had been mixed with the oil. The EPA visited Times Beach & found that dioxin levels in the soil were more than 100 times greater than the one part per billion that was considered to be the hazardous threshold limit.

The EPA announced the town's buyout for $32 million in 1983 & by 1985 the town was completely evacuated (except for one elderly couple who refused to leave) & the site was quarantined. Approximately 265,000 tons of contaminated soil & debris from Times Beach & 28 other sites in eastern Missouri were destroyed between March 1996 & June 1997 in an incinerator built on the location of the town. After the cleanup was complete, the incinerator was dismantled & the site was turned over to the State of Missouri to become the Route 66 State Park. The only building from the town that still exists is the park's visitor center. This was originally a roadhouse & was also used as the EPA's headquarters for the area. (Aerial map courtesy of Google Earth).