Word: beaching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...find out what it is like to live in the same neighborhood with toxic wastes, Associate Editor Kurt Andersen visited three communities with similar concerns but profoundly different circumstances. Times Beach, contaminated years ago, is now a Missouri ghost town; Holbrook, Mass., is discovering that it has a serious problem, but perhaps not a catastrophe; in Casmalia, Calif., toxins arrive each day at a modern treatment site, producing annoying fumes and fears about the future. People from all three places share chronic anxiety. Are they sick? Will they become sick? In all three there is anger, at businesses, at government...
...Times Beach...
Wandering these eerie late-20th century ruins, a visitor becomes a kind of archaeologist of the present. In one window, the paper Santa Claus dates the cataclysm that drove everyone away: just before Christmas 1982, the people of Times Beach discovered that their town had been drenched in dioxin, a poison so potent that one drop in 10,000 gal. is considered a dangerous concentration. Under political pressure, the EPA agreed to pay off all property owners; homeowners got between $8,800 and $98,900 apiece. And the town died. On one street remains an ex-resident's bright white...
...abandonment of Times Beach was attended by a frenzy of attention from newspapers, which was apt, since the town was created by a newspaper in the first place. The St. Louis Star-Times bought the square mile of flatland wedged between the Meramec River and the highway, and in 1925 sold plots for $67.50 each to anyone who agreed to buy a subscription to the paper (which is now defunct). After World War II it became a regular working-class town. Times Beach, like many Midwestern river settlements, had a tang more Southern than latitude alone could explain...
...during the early 1970s that Times Beach, looking to keep down the summer dust, hired a fellow to spread oil on ten miles of unpaved streets. Unfortunately, the oilman also filled his truck with waste sludge from a downstate chemical factory, and so for at least a couple of summers, he sprayed tens of thousands of gallons of a dioxin-laced goo all over town. The agent of the town's destruction was a man named Russell Bliss. "Do I blame Bliss?" asks Joe Capstick, who lived in Times Beach 14 years and, after the town's demise, moved down...