Word: dioxin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meanwhile, fears about toxic wastes continue to grow. Each day more and more communities discover that they are living near dumps or atop ground that has been contaminated by chemicals whose once strange names and initials--dioxin, vinyl chloride, PBB and PCB, as well as such familiar toxins as lead, mercury and arsenic--have become household synonyms for mysterious and deadly poisons. "The problem is worse than it was five years ago," contends New Jersey Democrat James Florio, who as a Congressman from one of the most seriously contaminated states became the key author of the 1980 Superfund...
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...
...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 the road. "Sure. Hell, yes. Hell...
Medical science is not sure what a decade of daily dioxin exposure has done or will do. Cancers and genetic damage are the most fearsome possibilities. But one obvious effect of the dioxin discovery has been the rearrangement of townspeople's memories: in retrospect, that purplish coating on the streets has become the paradigm for life in Times Beach. They remember, now, all the dead birds around town, and the stillborn kittens and puppies. Michael Reid, 19, remembers that he and other children loved to bicycle behind the dioxin truck, skidding and sliding in the thick oil slick...
...Orange case will never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. Last week U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed a suit by seven manufacturers of the defoliant. They had sought to force the Government to contribute to the $180 million fund created for veterans who claimed that exposure to the dioxin-contaminated chemical left them with various ailments and caused birth defects in some of their children. The Government, said the judge, was "within its legal rights in refusing" to pay, since the veterans never proved that the chemical caused their problems. But Weinstein in effect criticized the U.S. for abandoning...