Cleanup and Final Controversies

This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised . City Peat is here. She's from Wright City, Missouri, can we say that? You got you have a farm . I have a small farm now. How long did this happen? I mean, when did you first notice? nineteen seventy one ? Let me just show the camera . You've heard or just one of her animals This is pretty grim Look at the weight loss here. How many animals do you lose? sixty two You had sparrows almost falling out of the sky, didn't you? They did fall out because I felt very frightened though , but I didn't know what was wrong . The first sign that something was wrong at Shenandoah St ables was the frequent muffled thuds of barn swallows falling from the rafters onto the horse arena's dirt footing below . As if Judy Piot didn't already have enough on her plate as a single mother of two daughters and co owner of the facility. Much of her time during the final days of may nineteen seventy one was spent raking up dead birds and hauling them away by the bushel. Before long, Judy would be looking back at those days fondly . In the weeks that followed, the barn cats started howling in agony through the night. Most of them had swollen heads, open sores, thick yellow puss oozing from their eyes and noses, and clumps of fur falling out by the handful . Judy later said she had to turn up the radio just to drown out the sounds of their suffering . Within days all twelve of them were dead. Soon after, the family dog Ruff developed the same grotesque symptoms . Judy and her daughters watched helplessly as he withered away just as quickly . Then, the horses stopped eating , and they began, quote, spewing diarrhea. Lesions formed around their mouths, green foam dripped from every orifice, some became so weak they could barely stand , and there was no explanation. Veterinarians and equine experts across Missouri were baffled . Nothing they prescribed slowed the progression of whatever this was . And with each passing week, it got worse. Shenandoah Stables, once considered the finest boarding and training facility in the St. Louis area, had become a house of horrors. On a weekly basis, Judy Pot was finding aboarded foals in the horse stalls , their had mothers on the ground convulsing to death. Among them was Lobo, Judy's favorite mayor. She was devastated. There was no saving Louis either. The once prized stud was soon emaciated and hairless. Judy's children took turns every hour, throwing cold water on his bony sunburned skin and wiping him down with insect repellent, because quote, he was being eaten alive, like a dead rabbit on the highway . Months passed and the cause of the animal deaths remained a mystery. Everybody had been beating their brains out trying to figure out what was wrong, Judy remembered. She said they checked the feeded, check the water, took blood samples, checked for African horse sickness. Everyone was left scratching their heads, and Judy couldn't help but worry that this disease, this plague, this curse would eventually come for her family . By midsummer that fear became reality. Judy's young daughters grew increasingly lethargic and began experiencing persistent flu like symptoms, clusters of acne bro ke out across their faces and chest . Judy herself was battling near constant migraines and joint pain. Between the mounting illnesses and the relentless demands of a deteriorating herd, Judy was stretched to the limit. Her sister offered to care for the girls at her home in Illinois for a few weeks, but the relief was short lived. When the girls returned to Shenandoah on august nineteenth, the youngest, six years old Andy, complained that it hurt the pee. By the following day, she was hemorrhaging blood from her bladder. Judy rushed her to a children's hospital in St. Louis, where Andy underwent emergency surgery. Once again, the medical professionals were dumbfounded. In addition to the severe urinary problems, and these symptoms included gastrointestinal issues, nausea, and frequent nosebleeds, and a matter of months, she had lost nearly half her body weight. It's like she had been poisoned, the doctors reasoned. The autopsies performed on the horses had arrived at a similar conclusion, but no one could identify the source, so the hospital contacted the center for disease control . A team of government scientists arrived at Shenandoah stables in late August, wearing rubber boots, gloves, and gas masks . They collected soil from the arena , drew blood from the horses and humans, then flew the samples back to Atlanta for testing. The initial results showed traces of insecticides and PCBs in the soil, but not at concentrations high enough to explain the devastation unfolding there. The findings were essentially inconclusive. We didn't know what we were looking for, recalled Dr. Renati Kimbro, a toxicologist with the CDC. It was like a needle in a haystack , but the scientists had become convinced that needle was in the dirt. That's when it finally dawned on Judy Pot. Oh my god , it's the oil . I never it never entered my mind what they were doing or what they were making . I was told at one time they were making ladies' face cleanser. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. I know one time some of the workers down there, said what do you do with this old oil? And I said, Well, I spray it in harsh arena and sell it for refined oil and they make heavy industrial fuel out of it and spray it on country roads and nobody said nothing Back in may nineteen seventy one, just days before the birds started falling from the sky, Shenandoah Stables had hired Bliss Waste Oil Company to spray the arena's dirt surface with oil to keep the dust down. At the time, it was a common practice. Dust in a horse arena was more than a nuisance. It could irritate, it even harm the animals. Mixing oil into the dirt was considered a cheap, effective solution. Judy Pot never imagined her research the misfortunes could be connected to something she'd been doing for years . But in hindsight it was obvious. She remembered telling the tanker truck driver that the two thousand gallons of oil he sprayed that day smelled unusually pungent and burned her eyes. The driver, sucking on his teeth, told her that there was, quote, special stuff in it for special customers and that it would help kill the flies. Judy didn't know what that special stuff was, but she was determined to find out . Russell Bliss, the owner of Bliss Waste Oil Company, was a personal acquaintance of hers. Bliss owned horse stables in nearby Ellisville, and he and his wife regularly attended horse shows at Shenandoah. Judy picked up the phone and confronted him. Oil is oil, Bliss insisted, noting that he had been spraying horse are as, including his own, for over twenty years without a single complaint. I swear to God there was nothing in that oil that would harm you, your children, or your animals, he assured her. It was just plain old waste oil. Judy didn't believe him, and she passed on her suspicions to Missouri State Health Authorities, but quickly grew impatient with the glacial pace of bureaucracy. So Judy Pot decided to find the answers for herself. She began secretly following Russell Bliss's tanker trucks. To avoid being recognized, she borrowed friends' cars and occasionally wore disguises. Over the next fifteen months, Judy compiled a near exhaustive dossier, documenting every industrial plant and service station from which Bliss collected waste oil, and every road, farm stable and arena, where he sprayed it. She filled notebooks with dates, photographs, license plate numbers, and hand drawn maps. And in early nineteen seventy three, Judy sent copies of her findings to numerous state and federal agencies . She never received a response , but one location on her list immediately caught the attention of Dr. Patrick Phillips, a Missouri state veterinarian who had remained in contact with her throughout the ordeal . It was a chemical plant in Verona that a decade earlier had manufactured Agent Orange for the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. More recently, the facility had been operated by Nepico, the Northeastern pharmaceutical and chemical company which produced hexaglorophine for use in soaps and toothpaste. What do agent orange and hexaglorophine have in common? That's right, dioxin , the so called doomsday chemical. It all began ten years ago at this chemical plant. They made hexaglorophene here at the time a common ingredient in soaps and other household products. Few people then knew the manufacturing process had an unwanted and unavoidable byproduct , dioxid , listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as the deadliest substance made by man . At the time, even tiny amounts of dioxin have been linked to severe illness and death in laboratory animals . No long term human studies had yet been conducted, but the prevailing belief among scientists was that human exposure could be extraordinarily dangerous. Those fears intensified in nineteen seventy two after thirty six infants in France died when a manufacturing error exposed them to hexaglorophene contaminated baby powder . That incident prompted the FDA to impose severe restrictions on hexloracchine inop theh United States later that same year, ultimately forcing the closure of the Nepico plant in Verona, but the danger didn't disappear with it. When investigators inspected the facility as a result of Judy Pot's investigative work , they discovered what became known as the Black Tink , a massive storage vessel containing nearly four thousand six hundred gallons of thick, oily chemical residue. Tests revealed dioxin concentrations exceeding three hundred and forty parts per million. Federal cleanup action levels for dioxin at the time were one part per billion . The CDC fenced off the tank, locked its valve, and hoped neither active man nor God would release its contents. There was little else they could do. The plant's owner, Syntax Agribusiness, said they wouldn't touch the waste with a quote ten foot pole . But even more troubling than what remained inside the black tank was what didn't. Tens of thousands of gallons of dioxin laced waste that undoubtedly existed had been transported out of Verona. Where did it go? That answer would take years for federal and state authorities to unravel . What they did know was that at least eighteen thousand gallons had been hauled away by Russell Bliss, who claimed he had no idea the material was toxic. He readily admitted to mixing the chemical waste with used motor oil and spraying it at dozens of locations across Missouri , including his own property, his mother's church, roads, farms, and multiple horse arenas. Within days, horses here at the Bubbling Springs arena became ill, eventually a dozen died. The owners had the arena excavated. Doctors from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta linked the animals' deaths with dioxin in the dirt that had been hauled away . Then they discovered the contaminated soil had been sold to local residents and used as landfills around their home . No site was hit harder than Judy Piot's Sh,enandoah Stables however, , tests revealed the arena soil contained jaw dropping concentrations of dioxin more than thirty parts per million . It had taken more than two years to arrive at that definitive answer. By then , there was nothing left to salvage. Shenandoah's horse population had collapsed from eighty five animals to just seventeen. Of the forty one mares bred during that period, only one produced a healthy baby and it was off site . Even after multiple excavations removed tons of contaminated soil from the arena , the losses just continued to pile up. Eventually, Piot and her business partner were forced to sell the stables. The CDC instructed them to burn nearly all of their belongings to prevent further contamination. After being stripped of her livelihood, Judy took a job as a cashier to support her family , but that was the least of her concerns. The potency of dioxin was dramatically illustrated in a Missouri case when waste oil containing high concentrations of the substance was accidentally applied to a horse stable owned by the Piot family. All their horses died, and now misses Piat worries about the future of her young daughters. They won't get cancer or have a deformed child or anything that causes Judy Piot understood that it might already be too late for her and her daught . Whatever damage the docs and had done to their health could not be undone . But there was at least one consolation . They had identified the source of the poisoning and were tracing its spread. Surely that knowledge would spare others from the same fate . Surely the Pot suffering would not be in vain . Wishful thinking . The federal government largely viewed Missouri's dioxin contamination as Miss ouri's problem, and the state of Missouri lacked the money, the manpower, and even the technology necessary to address such a widespread catastrophe , declaring a public health emergency might have unlocked some additional funds to help combat the issue , but that just wasn't going to happen . Instead, a september nineteen seventy four memo revealed a very different strategy . Responding to a report identifying dozens of potentially contaminated sites, the state's director of epidemiology and disease control wrote Since most of the information contained in the report was obtained on a confidential basis and the resulting hypothesis still unproven , it is suggested that extreme care be exercised in any release of information for public consumption to the press . In other words, not only would the d ioxin not be cleaned up, the people living, working, and raising families in those problem areas would not even be notified that their environments have been poisoned. So instead of getting the expertise, solving a new problem , finding out where the money could come from, finding a place to put it , they just said, Gee, this probably will go away if we just sit on it It didn't . Instead, the invisible killer slept in the soil, out of sight, out of mind, as an entire decade passed before the people of Missouri learned the truth , for the residents of Times Beach , that truth would arrive at the worst possible moment, and it would cost them everything . A small Midwestern American town is completely wiped off the map on this episode of Swindled Officials accounting for decades they loaned as well billions of taxpayer dollars that were waste a hundred made t ofens of millions of dollars in hybrid into hide falsifying its books and records for the collapse of the entire system in the control of some goddess Times Beach was founded in nineteen twenty five by the St. Louis Star Times newspaper. If you bought a lot in Times Beach, you got six months subscription to the newspaper . It was named times after the newspaper and beach because of the Merrimack River, which ran alongside the community . A prosperous future is predicted for Times Beach, proclaimed advertisements placed by the St. Louis Star Times in nineteen twenty five . The newspaper had purchased four hundred ninety acres of farmland along the banks of the Miramak River near the small town of Eureka, Missouri, just seventeen miles southwest of downtown St. Louis . There, it envisioned a resort style community where urban dwellers could escape the quote, sweltering heat and discomfort of the city for a weekend of fishing, swimming, and leisure . The land was subdivided into six thousand identically sized lots and given away for free with the purchase of a six month subscription to the Star Times newspaper . That was the catch . Even so the total cost came to just sixty seven dollars fifty cents , less than thirteen hundred dollars in today's money. It was a bargain, even by roaring twenties standards. The lot sold quickly, and within a few years, Times Beach had blossomed into the kind of destination its newspaper promoters imagined. A riverside getaway dotted with cottages and dance halls, many of which were constructed on stilts since the area was historically prone to flooding. But while the town was built to withstand high water , it was not built to withstand a great depression . As the economy collapsed in the nineteen thirties, Time's Beach gradually transformed from a seasonal resort into a permanent refuge for families who could no longer afford to live in the city . At the same time, the construction of route sixty six directly through the town breathed a new life into the local economy. Then came World War II, and the housing shortages that followed , which further solidified Times Beach's status as a working class suburb. New homes were built without the stilts, young families moved in. Neighbors looked after one another. For many longtime resid ents like Marilyn Leisner . It was the first time there was a genuine sense of community. It's the kind of community where mom and dad married and raised their children and their children rais,ed their children here I think at one time somebody told me that everybody in Times Beach somewhere or the other was related to one another . By nineteen seventy, nearly two thousand people called the beach home . It was a decidedly blue collar community where the men worked in nearby auto plants or found jobs as mechanics and truck drivers . Some women stayed home to raise children, others worked as secretaries or waitresses. The town had grown to include a community recreation center, three mobile home parks, and twice as many bars as churches, and that's the way they liked it. The Times Beach locals had no interest in pressing their snobby neighbors in Eureka who often dismissed them as quote river rats . Besides, they couldn't afford to impress anybody. Time's Beach didn't even have enough money to pave its sixteen miles of dirt roads, and dry weather, every pass ing car or truck would kick up massive amounts of dust. A running joke among the residents was that the police didn't even need radar to catch speeders. They could simply measure the size of the dust cloud. Yeah, the dust was annoying, everyone agreed. It intruded into their homes and settled on the laundry drying on the clotheslines. But that was life at the beach, as they say. And eventually, someday, they would cough up the funds to have the roads paved , but until then, the town relied on a cheaper solution to manage the nuisance , or so it seemed . Beginning in the summer of nineteen seventy two and continuing for the next three years , the city of Times Beach hired the Bliss Waste Oil Company to keep its dusty roads under control for two thousand four hundred dollars rough,ly a penny and a half per gallon, Bliss sprayed forty thousand gallons of oil based dust suppressant across the town streets annually . It was an affordable and effective solution . And as an added bonus , it provided cheap entertainment for the local children. Whenever the bliss truck rumbled through town, kids would race after it on their bicycles as if it were the ice cream man. They were fascinated by the way the substance turned the roads a deep shade of purple . At the end of the day, many would return home, coated in a fine black mist and smelling faintly of paint thinner. Nobody thought much of it at the time. In fact, residents were so comfortable with the arrangement that they allowed Bliss employees to dump leftover oil into a nearby field, land that would later be converted into the town's baseball park . By then, Russell Bliss's services were no longer required. Times beach had paved its roads with Macadam, and its dust problem was forgotten until about ten years later, when a single phone call brought it all back to the surface . In early november nineteen eighty two, a reporter from the Tri County Journal called Times Beach City Hall seeking comment on a set of recently released EPA documents . The city clerk who answered the phone had no idea what he was talking about, so the reporter filled him in. A week earlier, the Environmental Defense Fund had sued the EPA to force the release of records concerning dioxin contaminated sites across Missouri . The lawsuit followed the discovery of nearly ninety fifty five gallon drums of waste from the Nepo plant Verona that had been buried in trenches on a nearby farm owned by James Dyenn, a name long time swindled listeners may recognize . According to the New York Times, the documents identified as many as four dozen additional potentially contaminated sites throughout Missouri. Several had already tested that diox id levels exceeding those found at Love Canal. Many were linked to the spraying operations of the Bliss Wast Oil Company . One of them was Times Beach . In nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy three , more than one hundred thousand gallons of waste oil was sprayed on the city's streets. Most of the streets at that time were unpaved, and the oil was supposed to control dust. The EPA says that oil may have been tainted with dioxin. The city clerk was stunned . Well, how long have they known about it? Who the EPA? Yeah . Oh, about a decade . Okay, so what are they planning to do about it? Who the EPA? Yeah. , nothing . The document released contained another bombshell, internal EPA memos detailing quiet policy revisions made by the Reagan administration. Under the new guidelines, cleanup would only be required at sites where doxin concentrations exceeded one hundred parts per billion , a threshold one hundred times higher than the CDC had previously recommended as a warranting concern. The city clerk immediately alerted the mayor, who in turn contacted the governor's office. State officials reached out to the EPA seeking answers. The agency confirmed that the documents were authentic, but insisted there was no cause for alarm. Leading that reassurance campaign was the EPA's assistant administrator, Rita LaVell. I'm confident there is no emergency situation down there. If there was an emergency situ ation, we would have moved in immediately. We have done that in the last fifteen months at ninety one sites across this country. We are willing to move when it's appropriate. After sustained pressure from state and local officials, the EPA agreed to hold a public meeting in Times Beach . The agency also committed to conducting soil tests throughout the region, but cautioned that the results could take anywhere from nine to twelve months. Residents were understandably frustrated . What are people supposed to do in the meantime? Someone asked EPA Deputy Director Art Spratlin. His answer was easier said than done . Just avoid contact with the area . That means move from their home, move from the property. Oh, we have not said move from your home at this particular point. No. What are you saying? Saying don't number one, don't go out and eat the dirt . Although all the questions may not have been answered at today's hearing, the EPA definitely got the message from Missouri's elected officials, and that is to speed up the testing of the contaminated sites and make the Missouri Dioxin problem a priority for the EPA . The EPA had no intention of speeding up the testing process , which didn't sit well with the people of Times Beach. We didn't like that because people were building new homes. Businesses were locating there. Marilyn Leisner later told St. Louis Magazine, nine to twelve months was a long time to live with the uncertainty. The people were scared. Most residents had never heard of dioxin before or its health effects. But the more they learned about places like Love Canal and Shenandoah Stables, the more alarmed they became. Also, the more they learned, the more certain memories seemed to take on new meaning , like all the dead birds in the yards, all the squirrels without tails, that one dog the policemen had to shoot because it was secreting some kind of pus and acting funny . The more the people of Times Beach learned about dioxin, the more they became convinced that it was affecting them too. The premature births, the urinary and bladder problems, the nosebleeds, the rashes, and the throat and facial swellings . These afflictions seem to be far more common among the residents of Times Beach than anywhere else they had lived , albeit anecdotally. Marilyn Leisner, whose own daughter suffered from serious health problems , decided she wanted more than rumors and speculation . So she called Russell Bliss directly. I will bet you two weeks pay there is no dioxin on your streets, he told her . But if the residents were unwilling to wait nearly a year for the EPA to give them that peace of mind, Bliss had a suggestion . He referred them to a private laboratory called Environ Dyning Engineers, which, he said, could analyze soil samples and return results in a matter of weeks and at a reasonable cost. He told me about a lab , so I immediately got the idea that maybe between the business community and the residents we could collect enough money to do our own testing and get the test results back much sooner . Marilyn quickly raised two thousand seven hundred dollars from her neighb ors, just enough to pay for a basic chemical analysis . The test wouldn't determine how much contamination was present in the soil, only whether contamination existed at all, but a simple yes or no was good enough for now . Was the EPA caught wind of the community's plan to conduct their own tests? The agency's response magically accelerated . The federal government announced that it too would have tests completed in a few weeks . They'd quickly and quietly contracted with the same lab. EPA officials ask city officials to arrange for this informal meeting to warn residents men in white suits will be in their community taking samples in the morning. EPA officials confirmed what the residents knew Times Beach is a suspected dioxin contaminated site . A team of EPA contractors completed its first round of soil sampling on the morning of Saturday december fourth, nineteen eighty two. The timing could not have been more fortunate . Less than twenty four hours later, days of torrential rain pushed the Merrimack River over its banks, unleashing the worst flood in Times Beach history. It was a cruel twist of fate. The disaster that residents had feared for years had finally arrived at their doorsteps just as they were beginning to learn about another one lurking beneath their feet . Support for Swindled Comes from Gusto You know, if I could go back in time and give myself one piece of business advice, it would be this stop trying to do payroll manually . For years, payroll was one of those things I dreaded, tracking payments, keeping up with tax paperwork, making sure everything was filed correctly. It was the kind of administrative work that always seemed to take longer than expected and pulled me away from actually making the show . Gusto is an online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses . It's all in one, remote friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire , onboard, and support your team from anywhere. What I appreciate most is how much of the process is automated. Payroll runs smoothly, tax filings are handled automatically and things like direct deposit and onboarding documents are built right in. It saves time, reduces mistakes, and removes a lot of the stress that comes with running a business. And if you're switching from another system, it's surprisingly easy to get set up, plus you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto dot com slash Swindled and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto. com slash swindled. One more time gusto dot com slash swindled . Thousands of people have abandoned their homes in some of the worst flooding here since nineteen fifteen . The raging Merrimack River just west of St. Louis swamped hundreds of homes and submerged the entire town of Times Beach, Missouri population two thousand , the town is totally one hundred percent underwater . As far as I know, there's nothing left . By december sixth, nineteen eighty two, the Merrimack River had crested at nearly forty three feet , roughly twenty five feet above flood stage . In some areas the water rose as much as four feet per hour. The flood of the century was so widespread that as many as thirty Missouri counties were later declared dis aster areas , but nowhere was hit harder than Times Beach . The town's two thousand residents had only about three hours to evacuate before the flood swallowed their community. Those who stayed behind scrambled to higher ground, while others slogged through the swift, debris filled current toward the relative safety of the interstate. I don't have a home. I can just see the top of my roof . It's completely underwater. I was very afraid that the whole house is going to collapse from the crush . The entire town of Times Beach had vanished beneath the floodwaters , and some neighborhoods only rooftops remained visible . Nearly a week passed before residents were allowed to return to assess the devastation . They found homes coated in foul smelling mud , personal belongings scattered for blocks, clothes tangled in tree bran ches, and furniture strewn across streets The extent of the destruction was overwhelming , for many the thought of rebuilding from scratch was simply too much . Nearly two thirds of Times Beach residents never returned . I'm not going to go back . I'm just going to get out what I can , try and rebuild our lives because it sure destroyed it. Except for some family pictures, jewelry and guns. The people of Times Beach, Missouri have lost almost everything . And a lot of people say they have no one to blame but themselves . Less than three years ago in an election and by one vote, Times Beach rejected federal flood insurance . And then just as Times Beach began to contemplate how to put the pieces back together , a second disaster arrived. On december thirteenth, nineteen eighty two, Marilyn Leisner received a phone call from Viral Dying Engineers. The results of the long awaited soil test were finally in. The samples had confirmed the presence of PCB's and dioxin. When the news reached City Hall, Times Beach Mayor Joe Capstick, an employee of Monsanto, abruptly resigned and left town . A man named Sid Hammer, who was Chairman of the Board of Alderman, stepped in as acting mayor while Marilyn Leisner assumed his former role as acting chairwoman of the Board. Together, they would help guide what remained in the community through an increasingly uncertain future. For the moment, however, there was little they could do but wait for the EPA's test results, which would provide a more comprehensive picture of the contamin ation . Those results arrived ten days later on december twenty third, nineteen eighty two. Many residents first learned of them while attending the annual Christmas party at the recently reopened community center . The findings were alarming . In some areas, soil samples contained more than one hundred parts per billion of dioxin , and those measurements had been taken before the flood . No one knew what effect the flood waters had on the contamination . Perhaps the chemicals had been diluted, perhaps they had been carried far beyond their original boundaries. The EPA announced that additional testing would be needed to find out and that would take at least another month. Until then, federal health officials had a simple recommendation for the people of Times Beach Leave , and don't take anything with you. When the water from the rampaging Merrimack River poured through Times Beach, Missouri early in December, it was called the flood of the century. But the news from federal health officials may be worse than the flood. Officials at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta pre,l aiminary testing shows Time's Beach is contaminated with a chemical waste, dioxin. The recommendation is that no one should live here, and even clean up workers should evacuate. That was the moment panic truly set in. Almost overnight, Times Beach transformed from an idyllic riverside retreat into the nation's newest symbol of chemical waste contamination . Every major television network was reporting on location. Newspapers across the country ran scary headlines. Time's beach was uninhabitable, they said. Stay away . Guards and gates were stationed at the town's entrances . Large signs bearing skulls and cross bones warned of the hidden danger. Even the red cross which had been assisting flood victims, packed up and left , fearing for the health of its volunteers. The residents of Times Beach left we're to face the cris is alone with nowhere else to go. And nobody, I don't care who they are should have to live through this. And I never, ever , so help me, God, if I have to go through health of this, I never want to see them do this to another family again . In the weeks that followed, a series of public meetings were held at the junior high school in nearby Eureka, about two miles from Times Beach, where many displaced residents were tempor arily staying , hundreds showed up, armed with questions for the panels of doctors, environmental experts, and government officials . Will we ever be able to move back? When will we know? How am I supposed to get to work? Where will my kids go to school? Is dioxin really the most dangerous chemical on Earth? Why did it take ten years for anyone to tell us? Are we all going to die like the, h orses down the road . The answer was more or less the same for every question . We don't know . If I was sitting there representing the people which I'm not doing and I don't want the job, I'll guarantee you, if I had to go with my own money, I'd go to DC, that I'd come that there was eight thousand people, five thousand people down here that needed some help and maybe even better . One thing the meetings did make clear, however , was that Times Beach was deeply divided about what should happen next . Most residents favored permanent relocation . As painful as it was to admit, they couldn't see a future there. Even if the government found a way to remove the contamination, cleanup could take years, maybe decades. And then what? The river floods again What's to be gained by staying? There's no future in it. The house I could make a hundred thousand dollars house and couldn't sell for ten . Another uncomfortable reality, no one wanted to say out loud was the Times Beach had opted out of the Federal Flood insurance program, dioxin or not, many families had already lost everything . For some, the contamination felt less like a second disaster and more like a blessing in disguise. The idea to gain the most traction at the meetings was a federal buyout through the EPA's newly established superfund program , like what had already happened at Love Canal. We don't want a temporary move. We want out. When I leave my house, I want to be gone for good. But not everyone agreed . A small but vocal group were happy to stay put . Many of them were still living there and their paid off houses just as they had for years. And guess what? They felt fine . In their view, the dangers of dioxin had been greatly exaggerated by the lying government, the deceptive media, the pencil necked scientists and the bleed ing heart environmentalist . No, I'm not scared of it because I don't believe there's nothing to it. If you want to know truths, bad, I don't I'm not a bit afraid of it. I'm saying, yeah . Dioxidin or not. Dioxiden or not.. They take me out They take me out in the wooden box . Acting mayor Sid Hammer became the face of that resistance . A plumber by trade. Hammer said he spent years crawling around in Times Beach Dirt , he had inhaled it, swallowed it, gotten it all over his skin, and quote, I'm as healthy as anybody standing in this room. The only way I'm leaving here, the mayor declared, as if they carry me out, forcibly. Mayor Hammer almost got his wish. The debate over Times Beach's future turned nasty. Residents who supported relocation were accused of giving up. Residents who wanted to stay were threatened with h having theiromes burned down. City officials advocating for a buyout should be shot, one anonymous letter read . But as the weeks passed, the numbers began to shift even more in favor of leaving, especially after volunteers cleaning flood debris broke out in rashes . Even acting mayor Sid Hammer eventually had a change of heart, but only after his wife divorced him. She had refused to live in Times Beach for one second longer and left. Hammer resigned soon after and followed her out of town. That left Marilyn Leisner, acting chairwoman of the Board of Alderman, the next in line to become mayor, the third in as many months . Under her leadership, the push for a better buyout gained momentum. She organized a petition demanding either the purchase or relocation of the entire town and prepared to send it directly to the White House , but she knew what she was up against. The residents of Love Canal had spent years fighting for a federal buyout, and they had done it under President Jimmy Carter . Time's Beach, on the other hand, would have to convince the final boss of corporate puppetry. President Reagan says the media are exaggerating the dangers of dioxin with the fantastic and the dramatic or melodramatic treatment of some of these things we have frightened a great many people unnecessarily. A footnote on the president's trip for residents of nearby Times Beach, Missouri today, no payoff, but a no show. Some officials of that town were angry and upset that Mr. Reagan declined to visit Times Beach, which is currently being evaluated for possible serious contamination by highly toxic dioxin . At about the same time, the man who admits to spraying waste oil that was contaminated with dioxin in at least forty four locations in Missouri, including Times Beach , testified for the first time in public before a committee of the state legislature. My name is Russell Martin Bliss . On january thirteenth, nineteen eighty three, at a hearing of the Missouri House Energy Committee in Jefferson City, the man at the center of the contamination crisis made his first public appearance against the advice of his attorney, he noted. Russell Bliss said he wanted to clear the air and his name. I swear to all of you, I had no idea this material was bad and God is my witness . In an emotional testimony, Bliss insisted he never knew the waste was dangerous. He claimed that the chemical company in Verona never warned him that the material they hired him to haul away was hazardous. When he picked it up, he said employees were walking around in cut off shorts and sandals and splashing around in the residue covering the factory floor. Bliss said he asked one of the workers what the plant manufactured. They told him they made Lady's face cleanser. Would you be suspicious of oil that came out of machines that made Lady's face cleanser? he asked rhetorically. I wouldn't have known what it was if they had to told me what it was. If you want the truth , you could tell me it was some kind of a new jelly and I'd put it on toast and eat it. I didn't know what dioxin was and still don't know exactly what it is . They are crucifying me for something I did twelve years ago that wasn't against the law. Russell Bliss complained privately. Back in the seventies, nobody knew what dioxin was. Nobody knew what PCBs' were. You could take whatever you wanted and spread it anywhere you wanted, and nobody thought anything about it. He wasn't exaggerating. The St. Louis Post Dispatch characterized Bliss as quote, one of the worst polluters in the nation's history . Bliss waste oil had racked up at least ten violations for illegal dumping, some occurring after the company had already been linked to the growing dioxin scandal, which had expanded to roughly one hundred suspected contamination sites , and those were only the locations authorities managed to identify. Russell Blissett even buried hundreds of drums filled with dioxin and poured industrial waste into open pits and storage tanks on his own property. Regardless of his supposed ignorance, Bliss' record was undeniably poor. My record is poor, Russell Bliss readily admitt ed a month later, at an appeal hearing to reinstate his company's license to transport hazardous waste . By then, the self made millionaire had retired to his two hundred acre farm, but his son Jerry had taken over the family business , and Russell's wife was still listed as the principal stockholder. I started hauling oil in nineteen fifty one, Bliss told the committee. And I realize now and realized that a few years ago, the old way was not the right way. My son, I hope, has learned from my mistakes. Let's hope so, because not only was Russell Bliss under the microscope for his environmental record , but he was also under indictment for tax evasion. According to the IRS, Bliss had inflated business expenses by tens of thousands of dollars using phony checks written to shell companies created by employees who allegedly cashed the checks and kicked back the money in exchange for a ten percent cut . Bliss would stand to trial for the financial charges later that year, but he was never criminally charged for contaminating Times Beach, Shenandoah Stables, or any of the other sites tied to the Dioxin catastrophe . Because, as Bliss himself had explained, his actions at the time were perfectly legal In Times Beach, Missouri, these are the worst of times. Residents have lived for weeks now with floods, homelessness, and the threat of dioxin poisoning. Teams of faceless men in white suits gather sail samples from the flood ruins . Debris laden truck convoys are hosed down before roaring out of town to a hazardous waste dump. After six weeks, the homeless residents of Times Beach are still wondering what it means. It's a whole community that's involved , you have something of really staggering proportions . I mean, you have really the second coming of Love Canal . The Times Beach residents had reached their wits end . More than two months had passed since the flood, and they were still trapped in limbo, waiting for the government to decide their fates . Then, on Monday, february twenty second, nineteen eighty three , word began to spread that EPA administrator , Anne Gorsuch Burford , yes, the mother of that Gorsuch was on her way to the holiday inn in Eureka to make a major announcement. Hundreds of anxious residents rushed to the hotel, only to find the conf erence room doors locked. Burford wasn't taking questions , and she certainly wasn't mingling with the contaminated crowd. Ew , instead, a speaker system had been set up so the residents could listen from out side. Let me talk to you directly because you are the people I've been very concerned about, she began, speaking just one day after marrying her second husband. I'm as upset as all of you have been over the uncertainty you have had to live with . Then came the news everyone had been waiting for. In response to the CDC's advice, EPA and FEMA have determined that permanent relocation is necessary . The Environmental Protection Agency will be allocating to FEMA Federal Emergency Operation thirty three million dollars For buyout at the option of the citizens Using thirty three million dollars in superfund money , Burford announced that the federal government would purchase all eight hundred homes and thirty businesses in Times Beach and permanently relocate the town's two thousand residents . The state of Missouri agreed to cover the remaining ten percent of the cost . She also announced that the region would be placed on the superfund national priorities list, making it eligible for remediation and long term monitoring. It's been a difficult process, Burford admitted. The cleaning up of America will not be easy. The decision to proceed with the buyout, she explained, was based on the EPA and CDC's latest post flood analysis of the area , which concluded that dioxin, which is not water soluble , remained a threat to public health. According to CDC official, Dr. Vernon N. Huk, soil samples still measured dioxin concentrations as high as three hundred parts per billion in some areas . Given the findings, Spurford said, a buyout of Times Beach was the appropriate course of action . The details of the acquisition, she announced, would be finalized within three weeks. Anne Burford went to Toms Beach, not because she cared about the people , but for political purposes to try and help get her off the hot seat of this major probe by Congress that could have landed her in jail. The timing of the announcement made the politically attuned roller eyes . Let's not pretend like the Reagan administration suddenly discovered a passion for environmental protection or developed, you know, general empathy. This buyout, critics alleged, was an entirely politically motivated attempt at generating positive publicity for a beleaguered agency . Just weeks earlier, Rita LaVell, the EPA's assistant administrator and top toxic waste official, had publicly downplayed concerns about dioxin. In the right concentration, table salt is just as deadly, she claimed , but her credibility quickly unraveled. The congressional investigation later concluded that Levell hade maintain ed an improperly cozy relationship with the chemical companies she was tasked with regulating . She was ultimately removed from her position and later convicted of lying to Congress. At the same time, LaVell e's boss, Anne Gorsuch Burford , was facing mounting accusations of obstructing congressional investigations into alleged political favoritism and mismanagement within the superfund program. After refusing to turn over internal EPA records, she became the first cabinet level official in U. S. history to be cited for a contempt of Congress . She resigned just one month after announcing the Times Beach buyout . President Ronald Reagan dismissed the controversy as the work of quote, environmental extremists, complaining that they wouldn't be satisfied until they turned the White House in the quote, a bird's nest . Good one, boss. Homeowners like Tom Hance will be offered what their property was worth before contamination and flooding destroyed the market value, in his case, forty three thousand dollars . It's, you know, the best news I've heard since this whole thing started . Whatever the motivation behind the buyout , the people with actual skin in the game couldn't care less. This is the answer to all our prayers, resident Evelyn Zufal told UPI. It's what everybody wanted, except for very few people who don't realize the dangers we're in. Clarence Stone, who owned two mobile home park s in Times Beach, said he was so happy he felt like doing handstands in the middle of I forty four or turning cart wheels in the parking lot . The relief was palpable , but so was the sense of mourning for the loss of community, of identity, of security, of memories, of health, potentially. Life as we have known it is going to end . The danger may have been behind them, but so was the life they had spent years building. It was naive to think a buyout could solve everything , given that so many questions remain unanswered . The future was still painfully uncertain . And for many former residents of Times Beach, the most difficult part of the ordeal was just beginning. Despite the poison and the devastation, many will be sad to leave Times Beach. Just a few months ago it was a quiet river hamlet, a decent place to live. Soon it will be little more than a ghost town. The following is a paid advertisement for the Swintle Valued Listener Rewards Program . Are you tired of hearing advertisements in Swindled like this one? Do you wish there was more swindled content to distract you from your miserable existence? Don't settle for those other inferior podcasts with the annoying hosts who laugh at their own jokes, become a swindled valued listener today to receive easy access to new episodes and exclusive access to bonus episodes that are not available anywhere else completely advertisement free . It's fun for the whole family, but don't take our word for it. Being a Swindle valued listener changed my life. With the knowledge I picked up listening to episodes , I was able to successfully orchestrate a CIA backed coup to protect my family's fruit plantation profits. Thanks, Swindled. Couldn't have done it without you. Millions of Swindle fans have discovered this secret of becoming a valued listener. Try it in your own home today . Also, act now to receive the valued news for valued listeners update show at no extra cost. That's a five thousand dollars value for one easy monthly payment of four ninety nine cents . Go to valuedlistener. com to sign up using Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Patreon, no long term commitments, satisfaction guaranteed, foreign currency accepted, cancel any time . Please just give us your money . Nobody talked to us . We were in a place all by ourself and it stayed that way . But it wasn't only that . It was the snide remarks of they're going to glow in the dark, let them come out after dark and see if they glow Don't get near them . You can catch it . The former residents of Times Beach scattered across the country , exhausted and on the verge of financial ruin . they While wa ited for the federal buyout to be finalized, they searched for new jobs and new communities to settle into . Uprooting their lives was difficult enough. What many didn't anticipate was the stigma that traveled with them. In Missouri, especially, Time Speach refugees were treated like modern day lepers . Sometimes it was subtle, like a whispered conversation or oncomers crossing to the other side of the street . In many cases, it was blatant, like when an entire McDonald's would empty out when someone from the contaminated town would walk through the door . People refused to shake hands with former residents of Times Beach , they wouldn't hire them, some wouldn't even do business with them. Marilyn Leison recalled struggling to find a dry cleaner, willing to touch her leather coat. Another former resident Robert Goodman, told the Chicago Tribun e that he couldn't even pay his bills because companies would send his checks back unopened, sealed inside protective plastic sleeves . But no one had it worse than the Times Beach children. They were taunted and bullied by their peers at their new schools. The teachers didn't help matters much by forcing them to sit in a segregated section for fear that they were contagious . It was difficult to fault people for being afraid , even those directly impacted by the contamination didn't fully understand the implications , but the rejection still hurt. They were only human . Well, depending on who you asked, in some places like Catawisa, Missouri, there were signs at the city limits warning that Times Beach Trash was not welcome . Life at the beach had taken on a whole new meaning. It had almost become a psychological bur den, like you were cursed to live the rest of your life as a pariah for no fault of your own, and no path to redemption , condemned by a contamination that would forever haunt you. Judy Pot could relate . After Shenandoah's stables collapsed, she moved her family twenty miles west to Warren County, hoping to leave the dioxin and the memories behind . Instead, a decade later, she and her daughter, Andy, now seventeen, found themselves watching trucks dump dioxin contaminated debris from the Times Beach Flood into a landfill less than two miles from their new home. I'm grieved , Judy told UPI . This stuff just follows you around . Indeed . Six of the families who live in the Quail Run Trailer Park in Grave Summit, Missouri have heard it all before They used to live in Times Beach, Missouri and were forced out by dioxin. The EPA says the road they live on now is also contaminated with dioxin, and there's enough of it there to be concerned. I think it's just like a ghost that keeps haunting us or something. If we have to move, we're going to move to a place that's already been tested and confirmed not a dog's inside. It's terrible . We thought we were clear of it . As if history hadn't already repeated itself enough . Times beach flooded again on may third, nineteen eighty three , further damaging the homes and businesses that hadn't even been repaired from the previous disaster. Most of the sixty or so families still living there were forced out for good. By then, every modern utility had been shut off . Not a single business was operating. Mail was no longer being delivered, and the abandoned streets smelled like rotting garbage . Yet even then, a handful of residents refused to leave. More than a dozen families remained at the beach in the months that followed, taking sponge baths, hauling water, flushing their toilets with buckets scooped from the Mirramec ar the last holdouts, people like Mary Ortez. Ortez will leave soon though, and it looks like the rest will, too. A dispute that has held up a federal buyout of all the property in Times Beach for three months has been settled. More than thirty three million dollars has been allocated to purchase the land and buildings . The first buyout offers arrived in august nineteen eighty three months after the program had been announced . The government based its appraisals on pre flood property values, but many residents were still outraged by the amounts they received. Former residents returned to Times Beach to spray paint the insulting offers on their homes and big red letters. thirty nine thousand dollars bullshit, someone scribbled on one of the nicer properties. In the end, after a lengthy appeals process , the average homeowner in Times Beach walked away with about thirty grand . If you look at it from a financial point of view, nobody's happy. Former resident Lane Jumper told the Chicago Tribune , but everyone's just thankful to get out . On april second, nineteen eighty five, Missouri Governor John Ashcroft signed an executive order officially disincorporating Times Beach. The town ceased to exist on paper. Its name was stripped from road signs and erased from highway maps, a development that pleased many neighboring communities. Proximity that Times Beach had become a drag on property values. The abandoned town had become a magnet for vandals, looters, and arsonists, and it's difficult to fight fires when there's no running water. Yet remarkably, even as Times Beach was being deleted from history and burned to the ground, one elderly couple still called it home, the last people to do so . George and Ida Klein, had spent the previous forty years at eight theh Elm Street . George admittedly was ready to move, but quote, The wife she didn't like the money they were offering and she wanted to fight, so I guess I had to go along. As the months pass, the government's offers to the clients grew increasingly generous, eventually exceeding those accepted by many of their former neighbors . Still, they refused, which proved to be a bad move. Eventually the house was condemned, and the dispute moved to court, where the clients were forced to accept a sum lower than the EPA's initial offer . When the final residence departed, Times Beach had officially become a modern American ghost Town . The only former resident who can go back to Times Beach today is its former mayor, Marilyn Leisner , a community that had been sprayed with dioxin, a dangerous chemical that some believe causes cancer. It has taken years for the state to purchase all the houses in order to destroy them. They will be dumped into a massive landfill. The final chapter of the Times Beach saga, The Cleanup, or Dragon for more than a decade . In nineteen eighty eight, officials approved a controversial plan to construct a temporary incinerator that would burn dioxin contaminated soil from twenty six sites across Missouri. The resulting ash would be sealed inside a twelve hundred foot long containment mound alongside the remains of nearly four hundred abandoned buildings . Eventually the area would be transformed into a state park . The plan immediately sparked furious opposition. Residents of neighboring communities feared the incinerator would release toxic emissions into the air and mounted a campaign of petitions, public protests and lawsuits. At the same time, government agencies and private companies fought over who should bear the cost of the cleanup. The disputes delayed remediation for years . Eventually a settlement divided the responsibility. The EPA would oversee the excavation and transportation of contaminated soil , while Syntec's agribusiness, the owner of the Verona Chemical plant where the dioxin originated, would build and operate the incinerator and pay for the demolition and disposal of the remaining structures. As Cintax clean up coordinator Gary Pendagras later explained to NPR , we have leased space to the company that produces the dioxin, so that left us holding the bag . This week, an engineer reached out and pushed two buttons , and the flame of this incinerator went out, ending the saga of the town that is no more. Construction of the incinerator finally began in june nineteen ninety five. It operated for two years, destroying more than two hundred sixty five thousand tons of dioxin contaminated soil. By the time the project was completed, the price tag had climbed to roughly two hundred million dollars. More than twenty five years had passed since Russell Bliss first sprayed the roads of Times Beach. The dust , as they say, had finally settled . But not without one final controversy. Back in may nineteen ninety one, Dr. Vernon Hauk , the CDC official, whose recommendation played a central role in the federal government's nineteen eighty three decision to buy out Times Beach made a stunning admission. Times Beach was an overreaction, he said. It was based on the best scientific information we had at the time. It turns out we were in error . Newspapers all over the country ran with the story. The newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported today that the great Dioxin scare at Times Beach, Missouri in the early nineteen eighties may have been unnecessary. The paper quotes Dr. Vernon Huke, a senior official with the Centers for Disease Control as saying that based on what he knows now about the dangers of dioxin, a man made chemical, he would never have recommended that Times Beach be evacuated . Blind sighted by Howex's claims that dioxin was less dangerous than previously believed, the EPA launched a comprehensive scientific reassessment of the chemical . The results pointed in the opposite direction. Researchers concluded that dioxin was even more toxic than earlier studies had suggested . Long term exposure and higher concentrations were linked to cancer, hormone disruption, liver damage, reproductive disorders, skin diseases, and a host of other serious health effects. The CDC soon published findings that echoed those conclusions. So did the World Health Organization . There was a scientific consensus . So why was Dr. Hauk saying otherwise? A little digging revealed that Hauk's remarks were based on research funded by Syntex Agribusiness and had been delivered at a convention sponsored by Syntax Agribus , one of the largest defendants in the wave of dioxidin lawsuits working their way through the courts at the time was Hawk providing scientific cover for companies facing enormous legal liability ? This certainly appeared that way , but he wasn't alone. The reason America's newspapers were so keen to repeat Hauk's erroneous claim is that many of them owned and operated paper mills, which, you guessed it, produce dioxin as a byproduct. This is Kate Jenkins, a chemist at DEPA. Copen paper mills are your largest dioxin polluters in this country . For instance, the New York Times is currently being sued . The New York Times owns a pulp and paper mill itself. They are being sued because of dioxin pollution. So of course there's a reason for the newspaper industry to detoxify dioxin . It affects all these lawsuits . It's money . Plain and simple . It always is. A reported nineteen thousand lawsuits were filed against New England pharmaceutical and chemical company, Syntax Agribusiness, Russell Bliss, and numerous other defendants. It's impossible to know how much the chemical company's misinformation campaign influenced the outcomes, if any, but in the end, tens of millions of dollars were paid out to nearly fifteen hundred plaintiffs. Among them were Judy Piot's daughters, Andy and Lori, who have battled health problems for much of their lives . Judy did too. She died of cancer in twenty thirteen. Was Dioxin to blame . No one could say for certain, but others who were exposed long term, such as Times Beach Final Mayor Marilyn Leisner attribute many of her family's lifelong health problems to the chemical. So do hundreds of others who called the beach home. They spent years wondering whether the illnesses they developed later in life had been set in motion decades earlier. There was, however, one person who seemed to have escaped the dioxin cur se entirely. When you say Dioxin or Times Beach, you don't think about Napaco, you don't think about all the other companies that were involved in it. You think of one thing , Russell Bliss . But to this day, I will say this , I didn't generate it, I didn't make it. I hauled it from there and put it over there. I was a transporter, no more, no less. Russell Bliss died in his sleep in april twenty twenty four at the ripe old age of ninety . He went to his grave denying responsibility for the contamination, but spent decades battling lawsuits and the public scrutiny of being forever linked to one of the worst environmental scandals in American history . Not that he personally ever bought into the severity in nineteen eighty three before, he was sentenced to a year in prison for tax evasion, Russell Bliss, with a smirk on his face told a reporter , I wouldn't mind being sentenced to life in Times Beach Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen with original music by Trevor Howard, AKA the former AKA the Black Tank. For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast. com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at Swindled Podcast , or you can send us a postcard at POBOX two thousand , Austin, Texas seven eight seven six eight . But please know packages. We do not trust you. Swindled is a completely independent production, which means no network, no investors, no bosses, no shadowy moneymen, no buyouts. And we plan to keep it that way, but we need your support. Become a valued listener on Patreon, Apple Podcast, or Spotify at Valuedlistner. com for as little as five bucks a month, you will receive early access to new episodes and exclusive access to bonus episodes that you can't find anywhere else. And everything is one hundred percent commercial free. Become a valued listener at valued listener. com or if you want to support the show and need something to wear while chasing the oil truck. Consider buying something you don't need at swindled podcast dot com slash shop. There are t shirts, patches, hats, hoodies, posters, coffee mugs, and more. Swindledpodcast dot com slash shop. And remember to use coupon code capitalism to receive ten percent off your order . If you don't want anything in return for your support , you can always simply donate using the form on the homepage. That's it . Thanks for listening. Hello , I am Tyler from North Carolina. Hello , my name is Andrew from Georgia. This is Nisha from Baltimore and I'm a conservative citizen. Now that you have my phone number, please don't sell it to keep your foot on there next year AC