They Knew for a Decade: How Times Beach, Missouri Was Sacrificed to Corporate Waste and Political Calculation

A Town Built on a Flood Plain, Sprayed with Agent Orange Waste

Times Beach was not a wealthy place. Founded in 1925 on a triangular parcel wedged between the Meramec River and a Frisco Railroad line southwest of St. Louis, the town had been platted as a summer resort by a newspaper company trying to boost circulation. By the 1970s, roughly 2,400 people lived in modest homes on unpaved roads that flooded regularly. When city officials contracted with waste oil hauler Russell Bliss to spray those roads for dust control, they thought they were solving a maintenance problem. What they did not know was that Bliss had been subcontracting to haul chemical waste from a facility outside Verona, Missouri.

That facility had been operated by the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, known as NEPACCO. The Verona plant had spent years producing Agent Orange for use during the Vietnam War under its prior owner, Hoffman-Taff, before Hoffman-Taff was acquired by Syntex Agribusiness. NEPACCO ceased operations in 1972, but not before generating significant volumes of waste byproduct containing TCDD, a form of dioxin considered at the time to be among the most toxic synthetic compounds ever produced. That waste, removed from the plant as sludge and liquid, contained dioxin at concentrations estimated to be some 2,000 times higher than the dioxin levels in Agent Orange itself.

Bliss mixed that waste with used motor oil collected from service stations and industrial facilities. He sold the resulting mixture to horse farms, churches, and municipalities across Missouri as a dust suppressant. Between 1972 and 1976, he sprayed Times Beach’s roads and more than 25 other locations. The town paid him for the service. No one disclosed what was in the oil.

The Early Deaths and the Eight-Year Gap

The first signal came from horses. In 1971, animals at Shenandoah Stables began dying after Bliss sprayed the dirt surfaces of the training arena. Over the following two years, 62 horses died at the facility. Birds, cats, and dogs were also found dead near the grounds. When the six-year-old daughter of the stable owner became seriously ill, the Missouri Department of Health and the CDC were called to investigate.

Testing traced the source of the contamination to the oil Bliss had sprayed. Soil samples sent to the CDC in Atlanta confirmed dangerous dioxin levels, and in 1975, the CDC issued a confidential report to the EPA recommending the removal and burial of contaminated soil from the affected properties. That recommendation was not acted on. Missouri officials relied on a CDC estimate within the same report that dioxin’s environmental half-life was approximately one year, meaning they calculated the contamination would degrade on its own. That estimate was wrong. The actual half-life of dioxin is now understood to be between seven and eleven years.

The EPA did not become heavily involved in Missouri dioxin contamination until 1979, when a former NEPACCO employee reported the burial of toxic waste on a farm near Verona. When EPA scientists retested the Shenandoah Stables area a decade after the original spraying, they found dioxin concentrations of up to 1.8 parts per million, indicating the contamination had not degraded at all. Regional EPA officials urged national headquarters to begin cleanup operations. Those requests were delayed.

1982: Crisis, Flood, and the EPA’s Calculation

In late 1982, the EPA’s handling of Missouri dioxin contamination leaked to the public in the most damaging possible form. The Environmental Defense Fund obtained and published an internal EPA document listing 14 confirmed and 41 possibly contaminated sites across Missouri. The document also revealed that EPA headquarters was planning to limit cleanup action to sites where dioxin exceeded 100 parts per billion, while the CDC’s threshold for hazardous exposure was 1 part per billion. The gap between those two standards is not a scientific disagreement. It is a policy choice about whose risk the agency is willing to tolerate.

Testing in Times Beach began in November 1982. Before results were finalized, the Meramec River flooded. On December 5, 1982, the river breached and inundated the town, spreading contaminated soil from the roads across homes, yards, and every surface the floodwater reached. The dioxin, which binds tightly to soil particles, did not wash away. It dispersed.

On December 23, 1982, the EPA announced it had confirmed dangerous dioxin levels in Times Beach’s soil. Some samples read above 100 parts per billion. After flooding, some areas tested at concentrations 300 times the CDC’s safety threshold. Police established roadblocks. People in protective suits returned to take additional samples. Times Beach residents, already evacuated by the flood, were told not to return.

The Political Architecture of Delay

The delay between December 1982 and the February 1983 buyout announcement was not administrative processing time. It was a period of active institutional resistance, documented in internal EPA communications that would later become central to Congressional investigations.

Rita Lavelle, a 34-year-old political appointee with a background in California Republican politics and defense contracting, had been installed by the Reagan administration as assistant administrator overseeing the Superfund program. Lavelle’s response to the crisis at Times Beach was to insist that more data was needed before any emergency action could be justified. She stated publicly and repeatedly that no emergency existed. Meanwhile, internal EPA memos showed her staff debating not just the science of the cleanup but the public relations implications of various remediation options, including the cost of reducing dioxin to safe levels and which approach would generate the least political damage.

Lavelle was not operating alone. EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch, appointed by Reagan and arriving from Colorado’s state legislature where she had been an outspoken conservative, had restructured the agency to reduce enforcement capacity significantly. Personnel was reduced by 23 percent. Enforcement referrals to the Justice Department were cut in half. The enforcement office was disbanded entirely, with staff dispersed into other programs. Gorsuch later refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas demanding EPA documents related to Superfund enforcement, citing executive privilege at the direction of the Reagan White House.

The Liability Chain and What It Cost the People Who Lived There

The corporate structure behind the contamination was designed, intentionally or not, to absorb accountability at each transfer point. NEPACCO generated the waste. Bliss hauled and sprayed it. Hoffman-Taff had owned the Verona facility when Agent Orange was produced there, but by the time contamination became a legal issue, Hoffman-Taff had been acquired by Syntex. Syntex’s liability was thus inherited rather than direct, making litigation complex and the corporate paper trail difficult to trace to any single party that could be compelled to pay full remediation costs.

Russell Bliss was prosecuted on charges of illegal dumping and tax fraud. He served one year in prison. The waste hauler who physically applied the dioxin to Times Beach’s roads received a sentence most white-collar fraud defendants would consider light.

Syntex, as NEPACCO’s corporate successor, eventually entered a consent decree with the EPA and the State of Missouri. Under that agreement, Syntex was required to design and construct the incinerator at the Times Beach site, operate it, and demolish non-contaminated structures and debris. Syntex contributed $10 million toward the total cleanup cost of $110 million. The remaining $100 million was borne by federal Superfund resources and state government. The incinerator Syntex built treated 265,354 tons of dioxin-contaminated materials from Times Beach and 27 other eastern Missouri sites between 1996 and 1997, and was then dismantled.

The scientific picture that emerged from post-evacuation EPA studies made the jury outcomes more jarring. Researchers found that dioxin was particularly damaging to animals exposed before birth, affecting behavior, learning ability, and immune response. They found extensive hormonal disruption. None of that science had been available to jurors in 1988, but neither was it retroactively admitted into evidence that might have reopened claims. The statute of limitations had run. The cases were over.

What Accountability Actually Looked Like

The Congressional response to the EPA’s conduct at Times Beach was direct and consequential, though it took public scandal to trigger it. Lavelle was fired in February 1983, the same month the buyout was announced. She was charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about her removal from the hazardous waste program. At trial, she was acquitted on that charge. In 1984, however, she was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing a Congressional investigation, and served three months of a six-month prison sentence, paid a $10,000 fine, and was placed on five years of probation.

Gorsuch resigned under Congressional pressure in March 1983. Reagan was compelled to appoint William Ruckelshaus, a widely respected former EPA administrator, to replace her, specifically to restore public confidence in an agency that had become synonymous with regulatory capture.

Lavelle’s later career traced a consistent pattern. In 2004, she was convicted again, on federal wire fraud charges and making false statements to the FBI, arising from a separate environmental consulting scheme. She served 15 months in federal prison and was released in 2007.

The Monsanto Question the EPA Did Not Ask

The official account of Times Beach traces the contamination to a single source: NEPACCO’s Verona facility, whose waste Bliss picked up and spread. That account is accurate as far as it goes. What it omits is a second contamination thread that was documented at the same sites, never fully investigated, and traced in a 1984 court proceeding to one of the largest chemical companies headquartered in Missouri.

When CDC scientists analyzed soil samples from the Shenandoah Stables site in the early 1970s, they found not only dioxin and the herbicide 2,4,5-T, but also significant concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, known as PCBs. The dioxin and herbicide were attributed to the Verona facility. The source of the PCBs was never officially identified. The CDC noted them. No one pursued the question.

PCBs were manufactured commercially in the United States by a single company from 1929 until their production was banned in 1976: Monsanto, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, with its primary manufacturing plant on the outskirts of East St. Louis, Illinois. Monsanto was the sole domestic producer of PCBs throughout the period when the contamination in eastern Missouri occurred.

The Times Beach Action Group, formed in 1993 to contest the EPA’s incineration plan, spent years documenting what it described as EPA’s refusal to examine the Monsanto connection. TBAG investigators, led by Steve Taylor, uncovered laboratory reports showing high concentrations of PCBs in contaminated soil samples from the Times Beach area, and presented evidence to the EPA that those PCBs traced to Monsanto’s production. The EPA and Missouri Department of Natural Resources declined to pursue the question.

The Monsanto connection to the broader Times Beach story extended into the political arena. A Philadelphia Inquirer investigation identified Monsanto as among the chemical companies whose executives held private meetings with Rita Lavelle during her tenure as the EPA’s Superfund administrator. Those meetings were part of what Congressional investigators characterized as a pattern of Lavelle entering into favorable arrangements with companies whose contaminated sites were under investigation, arrangements that reduced the scope of cleanup obligations those companies would face.

Monsanto has consistently denied any connection to the Times Beach contamination. That denial has never been tested through litigation or a formal EPA investigation specifically focused on the PCB question. The EPA removed Times Beach from the Superfund National Priorities List in 2001, with the Monsanto thread officially unresolved. After the incinerator was dismantled, new Bliss-related dioxin sites continued to be discovered in eastern Missouri, as TBAG had predicted they would. The cleanup was incomplete at the point the agency declared it finished.

What the Monsanto thread adds to the Times Beach record is not a proven finding of liability. It is something more institutionally significant: a documented pattern in which a regulatory agency identified a potentially responsible party, received evidence pointing toward that party from a court proceeding and community investigators, and chose not to investigate. That is not a gap in the record. That is the record.

Times Beach was the first time the federal Superfund was used to permanently relocate residents of a contaminated community. That precedent matters. The Superfund law itself had been passed in 1980 partly in response to the Love Canal crisis in New York, and times Beach became, almost immediately, its defining test case.

What the Times Beach record establishes is not that government eventually acted. It is that government acted only when the crisis became impossible to suppress. The contamination was documented in 1973. The CDC recommended action in 1975. The EPA knew the extent of Missouri’s dioxin problem by 1979. Testing did not begin in Times Beach until November 1982. The buyout was not announced until February 1983. Each interval between those dates represents a window during which residents were living in, raising children in, and building lives in soil that federal and state officials had already classified as dangerous.

The cleanup eventually worked. Route 66 State Park sits on the former town site today. The EPA delisted Times Beach from the Superfund National Priorities List in 2001. None of that changes what happened in the years between 1973 and 1983, or what it cost the people who could not afford to leave on their own before the government decided their situation was urgent enough to address.