Word: dioxin
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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...
...knows where else, say the minority of townspeople who are upset. A water main that runs right under the site still supplies a thousand homes. Last spring the Cochato's sediment was found to include arsenic and naphthalene. Then last summer even the EPA seemed jolted: high concentrations of dioxin were discovered at Baird & McGuire...
Toxins like organic solvents, PCBs and dioxin will be broken down ^ completely only when burned at temperatures exceeding 2,400 degrees F. Some conventional incinerators can generate such heat, but without careful controls to maintain high temperatures they may spew toxic gases into the air. People fear the fumes may prove as perilous as the chemicals from which they come. But new technologies may overcome these obstacles...