Citation Needed - Times Beach

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Times Beach is a ghost town in St. Louis County, Missouri, United States, 17 miles (27 km) southwest of St. Louis and 2 miles (3 km) east of Eureka. Once home to more than two thousand people, the town was completely evacuated early in 1983 due to TCDD—also known as dioxin—contamination. It was the largest civilian exposure to this compound in the history of the US.   Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

So they just spent the entire episode talking about war with grandpa. Yep, the entire episode was about. Okay, see why don't we do shit like that? Right? I think people would like it. I think they would. Oh, holy shit. What happened in here? Did we do like sleep shenanigans again? Nope. Welcome to the 70s boys

Wait, no, you're smoking again. Not again. I was smoking in the 70s and so was I Stay Keith good for the heart. You can have so much of it now Stay love it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Love it here. This is the way to see the porn he nice Yes, yes, love it here. This is the way to see the porn he nice guy guys guys don't show Keith 1970s porn. Look, nobody likes pre-show shenanigans more than me, but the semites had some major problems and all this stuff, the smoking, the steak, and it'll turn out to be really bad for you. Plus a bunch of other stuff. he's right. Thank you. No, a little bit of reason. All right, Eli.

I guess you don't want these sleep drops. It was legal to give your baby in the 70s. Either I'll just throw them away, I guess. I mean, I'm not going to use them. So, I mean, I hear menthol is actually good for your throat. Doctor said that one. This? Yeah.

No, Doctor. Oh, well, here you go. You can have these. Man, this is a lot of pubic hair. Yeah, that's, that is a little. Yeah, well, here you go. You can have this. Man, this is a lot of you be here. Yeah, that's, that is a little. Yeah, it's not that much. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed. Podcast where we choose a subject, we do a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts.

This is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and Ben Shapiro's wife over in the wet. A jina is a disease. And speaking of which, I'm joined by our usual team of dehumidifier first time, two men whose beards are recommended by the party B to replace a bucket and a mop for cleanup scenarios. Tom and Ceece. Okay, well, I just think it's nice to bring both the problem and the solution to the party. That's just... I didn't say you were invited to party. It's clean.

Yeah. It hurts my feet. She says, give me everything you got. The longest thing I can offer is my beard. So, it's mine as well. And we also have two men whose moobs are recommended by Cardi B for preventing the cleanup scenario in the first place. Me and you.

Okay. I'm here. Oh, you're going to go. I am drinking this mango nectar for you, people. It's a slip and fall issue. Okay. It's not safety. It's about safety.

And also Noah is here. And capable of pleasing a woman. Oh, you know, he can power a broken Hitachi wand with nothing but rage from a And also Noah is here and capable of pleasing a woman. Did you know he can power a broken Hitachi wand with nothing but rage from a Facebook. We've seen him do it. It depends on the Facebook post, but I also, by the way, say a lot of names really fast at the end of scaling

atheist ladies. No, I'm not being fatted off. Fucks up a lot of my career. That's when I'm trying to do our things. I'm probably a focus fan. I know we're gonna be great. I was looking at fat. Man, anger's crossed. And when he quit smoking, come on. Because fat know would have been awesome.

Or you're just been like, oh, good. This is the thing. But the fake tables get them. Why? It would have been great. What? But he's doing it for the comedy. He just pretends to know.

Since you're the only person who could hop in the middle of the night. He's just pretends to know. He's just pretends to know. Since you're the only person who But he's doing it for the comedy. He just pretends. He just pretends. No. Since you're the only person who could possibly come close to correctly pronouncing the name of the patron who made the recommendation, what person plays thing concept phenomenon or event? Are we going to be talking about today and who gave us the idea? Yeah, no, actually, that's why I did this one so that I wouldn't have learned a pronunciation

for one fucking use on the suggestion of patron a Fiat la yokato the Icelandic volcano. We're gonna be talking about times beach Missouri cool Just barely edged out my recommendation of the strip mall in metanzas So what is Times Beach? It's a ghost town in Missouri that was hastily abandoned after the municipal government paid some redneck farmer to spend four years spraying extremely toxic industrial waste on all their roads. Okay. With Tron with Tron, they clearly wanted ascentation needed episode. And they fucking earned. So I got it. All right. So Times Beach was founded on the flood plane of the Maramaque River in 1925 by the now

defunct St. Louis Star Times newspaper. No idea why a company that would try to found a town on the flood plane of a major river would go out of business, but there you have it. Anyway, the idea was to parcel up the land and sell it to wealthy people in and around St. Louis So they could put up summer homes. You even got a six month subscription to the paper for free when you bought a lot Well, no more worthless than St. Louis real estate is a subscription to a print newspaper. Yeah then. Alright, so anyway, this happened in 1925, like Tuesday happened in 1929, needless to say, the Great Depression put a bit of a damper on the summer home market for a few

years. And Times Beach never lived up to the expectations it was born with. Instead, it wound up a low income community on the fringes of St. Louis with a population of about 1200 people by 1977. Right. But if it weren't for the depression, that floodplain near St. Louis would have been Miami fucking beach. Yeah. Absolutely. It like shouldn't have a case of community have a wealthy nearby city to draw in right. So like did I miss

I keep trying to get away from St. Louis, but I'm not sure of vacation is what people have in mind when they do this. Right. All right. So now we'll end to be clear like this tower talking about this was a shit hole by St. Louis. Wow. Wow.

The mayor of Mac river is easy to overlook when you got the Missouri River a dozen miles to your north in the mighty mother Fucking Mississippi a dozen miles to your east, but it's decidedly harder to ignore when it's in your front yard Which was the case for residents of times beach all the damn time which again? Which built on a goddamn floodplain, right? Like so in fact most of its earliest homes and businesses were built on still. So it's not that they didn't know that this was going to be a project. Oh, these, these, these sticks under the house, they are so that the house can be in a movie with Nicole Kidman.

All right, let's zip line in. Cool. Check out the house. I got to say though, like the overwater bungalow was a ballsy Midwestern American real estate trust. Like, right. Being underwater though would eventually become the least of time beaches concerns and understand that we have to introduce the villain in this story, which would be played by the

North Eastern pharmaceutical and chemical company ink or nepico. They were owned by Hoffman Taft, a company famous for producing agent orange during the Vietnam War. Oh, what could go wrong? They still exist. That's not true. Well, they sold a lot of agent orange. They got to have to nail it. That was a really good salesman. Like a really good salesman. The money wasn't the only thing they had to burn.

Yeah. He can sell Agent Orange. Let me tell you. So, so now sell Agent Orange to the VC. Genius. All right. So in the 60s, they started up a chemical processing facility in Verona, Missouri, which is a small town clear on the other side of the state from time speech.

All right. So the big water company deal with the guys from philidamide fell through. It's crazy that it fell through the hands too. Because guys, so they don't. Oh, Jesus Christ. He's catching whatever real estate flippers. Yeah, you should catch it back with flippers.

So I know. All right. So in the early 70s, this facility was primarily involved in the production of hexa chlorophyte. Bless you. Yeah, thanks. Which is an antibacterial agent used in soaps, toothpaste, and household disinfectants, or was, anyway, it's also, you know, used in scary ads by all natural connoirs trying to convince you to smear orange juice over your countertops rather than properly disinfecting them.

Which is why, and I've been telling chemistry this for years, they need to start naming their chemical compounds after my little home. Good job. It's made to job so much harder for the Gwyneth palatros and shit of the world. All right. So back to this chemistry talk here, hexaclorophyne is synthesized from formaldehyde and 2, 4, 5 trichlorophyne, which itself is synthesized from 1, 2, and 245 trichlorophenol, which itself is synthesized from one to four, five tetrachlorobenzene by the nucleophilic aromatic substitution

reaction. Oh my God. Which sounds sexy as hell to me. But unfortunately, the instantaneous dimerization of the resulting phenol produces trace amounts of two, three, seven, eight tetrachloridibenzopidioxin or TCDD. Yeah. That was really unfortunate. It wasn't so okay. Most of the details I included just a pissed time off, but that last one actually matters to the story because it's an extremely toxic compound that falls into a larger category of industrial toxins known as dioxins. Despite sounding like a portmanteau of dying toxin, dioxin is a pretty broad category of

compounds. And their toxicity varies widely. Dioxins and dioxin-like compounds are grouped together because they're similar in terms of their mechanisms of action, but the toxicity from one to another varies by five orders of magnitude. The most toxic, however, are the aforementioned TCDDs. Exposure to even relatively low doses of that can kill small animals. It can lead to dental deformities, skin diseases, lowered sperm counts and humans.

Okay. Can I subscribe and save? Because that's the collection I'm collecting. Collect them all. Yeah. No. So in high enough enough doses it's fatal which I mean that sounds scarier than it probably should because that's true of all Substances not love no, I not love Tell that to Lenny My some men thank you Yeah, let's take those mentally disabled people down a peg that's important Yeah, let's take those mentally disabled people down a peg. That's important. He was helping him. It's not about that. Best laid plans of my son, man, end up on citation needed. That's for sure.

He told them about the rabbits. It's fine. He's fine. All right. So you can't go put in highly toxic shit that kills rabbits and turns people's teeth into oatmeal and you're so right. Or at least you shouldn't and Nebaco knew that. So they came up with this distillation process that took the amount of TCDDs in the finished product down from three to five parts per million to point one parts per million, which was considered at least by them, acceptable

from consumer products. But this led to a new problem for the company because the other end of this purification process is a shit ton of leftover dioxins. Specifically, they've got this thick toxic oily residue that the Wikipedia article refers to as still bottoms, which I guess is because that, well, that's what's left at the bottom of the still. Yeah, right, but it also could be because they figured this episode needed a good in for some ass humor right now.

Right. Yeah, right. Still bottoms is when you can get someone to ask who died in here when they use the bathroom after. That's what a still bottom is. Still bottoms also the number one mistake in starting up but sex the top is still right right It's like a titration you got to add the

The add you got to the water not the water the right Still bottoms a badge of honor for someone willing to give it another chance That was really good guys you're real I've. I've got some, I'm impressed. Still bottoms after all these years. Just paw. It's nothing. Still impressed. All right, for all these years. I appreciate you bringing the average right back to my hand. So this sounds terrifying, but the proper way to get rid of these dioxins is through incineration.

Some about turning highly toxic sludge into smoke that strikes me as bad, but apparently that actually was the correct thing to do in this instance, or at least that's what they thought, then, but you still couldn't just toss it on a bonfire and make smores, right? There was a rigorous process for proper incineration. We got incinerated in a poor neighborhood. I have that. Boyleurs. Yeah. This is my story. So at first, Nebuko was sending their still bottoms down to a waste disposal facility in Louisiana.

I love that sentence so much. But that was super expensive. It gets even better when I add that little clothes there. So they start looking for ways to get rid of their extremely dangerous industrial poison on the cheap. Okay, guys, have we tried liquefying the entire jungle of Vietnam? We have. Actually, what about suburban St. Louis?

What's that? Less complaints. Yeah. All right. So ultimately, they end up contracting out this work to one of their suppliers, a company called independent petrochemical corporation or IPC because they figured like, you know, we're the word like petrochemical in their title. They must know a little something about safely disposed of dioxins.

That's literally the reasoning, but of course they didn't. So it's not called independent dioxin corporation. Nothing like that. No, it had chemical in it though. So they have a pretty confident. So this company turns to a more experienced subcontractor, their buddy Russ. What is this?

What is this? What is this? This company has friends. Oh man. Oh man. Okay, so specifically this is Russell Martin Bliss who owned a local waste oil business. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, He's a pirate. Okay, he's dead shitty paper boy. He just shoves all the papers and the dumpster near his house available.

No, no. He said I'd try something in Vietnam. Okay, let's go with Russell. Let's go with Russell. Yeah, so he grew up to become Russell Bliss. Yeah, so over a period of nine months, Bliss collected six truckloads, totaling over 18,000 gallons of chemical waste.

And since he didn't have the slightest fucking clue what to do with any of it, he just, he just put it all in the same vats that he kept his used motor oil. Okay, basically what you told us so far, I'm guessing he bought those from a molasses company in Boston for that. No, because then this disaster would be so much more localized. Um, so you might be thinking to yourself, hold on a second, didn't you have to be licensed to handle that stuff or maybe you're thinking, wasn't NEPICO required to account for what happened to all their toxic waste? And if you were, you know, congratulations on growing up in

one of them generations where we weren't given carcinogens to play with, but no, no, this story happens in 1971 back when America was already great again. And it was damn near the wild, wild west when it came to waste disposal. You know, after the last three years, I guarantee not a single one of us was thinking you needed to be licensed to handle that stuff. Okay. After the last three years, I was wondering where I can buy some to drink. So, yeah, these shooters I can buy some to drink. So, yeah.

These shooters keep going with the mango nectar. You'll be fine. Flint, Michigan has it coming right out of the taps. Actually, it's fine. Yeah, actually, yeah. Okay, so I should be clear that there was a nascent environmental movement by 1971. Rachel Carson's enormously influential book Silent Spring was published in 1962. And as largely considered kind of like, you know, the fused that lit the public involvement in environmental issues. In fact, the EPA began

operation in December of 1970. So it was actually a couple of months old. By the time Bliss picked up his first truckload of noxious sludge, though at first it was just taxed with setting guidelines and had no enforcement or regulatory powers. So for whatever it's worth, 1971 is kind of like the tail end of the, just try not to make candy out of it, era of toxic waste disposal. Just try. I knew there was a reason they stopped selling nerds rope, those sons of bitches.

Love nerds rope. True story, when I was growing up, my dad used to pour paint and oil and wood stain, varnish, and on at least one occasion, pharmaceutical grade cocaine and heroin down the sewer drain in front of his house in the streets. Jesus Christ. That last part's crazy. Why would you do that?

I used to think that that was irresponsible, but I now realize that he was just like building his early 80s chemical disposal CV. That was a second career. Yeah. He was just like building his early 80s chemical disposal CV. There he goes. There he goes. Yeah. So, okay, so what did you do with 18,000 gallons of toxic waste back before the EPA had enforcement powers? Well, in Russell Bliss' case, you had just kind of sprayed it around.

What? You're a real one there. What? Okay, better as an aerosol. You are not saying the tame. So in addition to owning a waste oil facility, Russell also owned a horse arena and farm. A while. I am calling it a horse arena.

The wiki article kept referring to it as that, so I'm sure I'm making some horse nerd happy by using the term, but we're talking about like an enclosed indoor arena where you would have horse competitions and what. It feels like a really big space for a horse spelling bee, but whatever. They all tie and yeah, I'm not just like horse gladiatorial fights, you know, just so much better. So okay, now you're probably thinking to yourself, hey, I bet when you get a bunch of horses stomping around in an enclosed dirt, floored area, it gets really dusty. Well, no worries. Russell Bliss had just a thing

Wastoyle mixed with dioxin rich still water Seems like the thing so that's he actually he sprayed the ground with waste oil to keep the dust down and it works so well that soon All the horse serenas were higher in Russell for his famed dust suppressant services. Okay, we're in a place that needs dust suppressant services. Like if a tornado of dust is a feature of your public arena, you're already stupid. And now the tornadoes are smaller, but also that world is poison. Yeah, poison. Situation is serious.

And we'll find out how serious after a quick break or some op-ropa of nothing. That whirless poison. Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul,

Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Oh my God. He wrote the sentence weird. I thought the same thing. I was like he doesn't usually speak. You're the white Mr. Bliss I am the representative from IPC independent petrochemical corporation. I'm here to inspect your facility. Alright, come on over, fella. Just ride over this way. Come on over. I'm sorry, this is your containment facility.

Yes, siree, Bob, it is. It's a bond with a collapsed roof. And she, but I think she's still got two good sides. Nope. No. Is that a pile loose gunpowder on the floor next to that? Hey, and other very flammable material. Yeah, we're real, real careful with it. Don't worry.

We make sure not to smoke when we're moving around or when we hit it. We don't do any of that. I'm sorry. You what when you what now? Well, we have to remediate the gunpowder here. So every day we whack it a few times with this shovel to help it retrograde. Ah, do you mean biodegrade?

I said what I said, boy. Great, okay. And those over there, are those just free Roman bears? What, those aren't, no. Okay, one, why do you have bears at all? And two, I disagree, they are pretty much just walking free. Well, hold on now, I reckon that I do some animal control housing for the government and they're fine.

They're behind a sheet wall I put up last week. They pretty much stay in there. They rarely come out in the name people. I'm not sure that we can do business. Well, here, right here is where I would store your cancer juice, right? In here, safe and sound in this old, leaky oil barrel, right? Yeah, I think we're going to go with somebody. You give me, let's say, hmm, let's make it $125 American dollars and I will take it off

your hands forever. I'm sorry, did you just say $125 and twenty five dollars? Yes, sir. We are not a penny more. I won't accept the penny more for it Mr. Bliss I do not think I have ever taught such a top notch facility We think our cancer juice will be saving your hands sir Who who stop chat chewing on that barrel now? Get off that barrel boy. And we're back. When we left off, two, three, seven, eight, Petra Chloro-Dybenzo-He-Gyoxin, was emerging from a nucleophilic aromatic substitutional cup. And then Noah stopped flirting and told us about

a horse arena owner vertically integrating into the toxic slug stuff. That's it. Great summary. Okay, so before we move on, I want to take a second to emphasize that it's really fucking stupid to suppress dust by spraying used motor oil all over the ground. Oh, now you tell me. If that hasn't been marinating, like toxic byproducts of soap production along the way, right? So this is already bad going in.

But again, giving a fuck about earth was in its infancy at the time. So plenty of horse owners were quick to pay blessed to spray down their indoor arenas and stable. It's so the horses could drift easy around those tight corner. Or Torridor drift, if you will. or Toriador drift, if you will. Toriador. I just think those are the visual of the horse going like when my cats get scared when you get the bass and the bass legs are going faster than the front.

They're just like, you're like, how's it? You can't get going on the little wheel. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Any body. He's just. So. Guys, we're investing in a fucking oil spill horse. I'll do that. Valdez horse arena. They're already open and Florida. All right. So one of the first people to notice that anything was a miss here were the owners of the Shenandoah stable near Moscow, Mills, Missouri.

After paying bliss, $150 to spray 2,000 gallons of waste oil on the floor of their arena, they used a PUNCHANT BURNING odor. That's the word the Wikipedia article uses PUNCHANT BURNING odor. I don't know if that means that it smelled like something was burning or that like Smelling it Mr. Bliss should my horse's legs melt up to the knees when it goes across Just call him knee biscuit, you're fine. Yeah.

Brilliant. Yeah, hey, so I probably should have mentioned when I hired you, I definitely want less dust in the old bat one. But I also definitely do not want combustible horses. I think I have combustible horses. I want to be a shit of. End of the job, yeah, that doesn't help. do not want combustible horses. I think I have combustible horses now. That's what it's gonna be. I should have.

End of the job. Yeah, that doesn't help. No. All right, so, but it wasn't just the odor that tipped them off. There's something might be wrong. There was also all the dead shit. So pretty much immediately after the spring,

they started noticing, act one of a horror movie shit happening like birds dropping dead at the rashes and unusual sores and bald spots on their horses. She's within a few months of the spring, 62 of their horses had either died or become so emaciated from unexplained illnesses that they had to be euthanized. Fuck. On top of that, the couple that owned the ranch also had two young daughters who started developing headaches, nosebleeds, abdominal pain,

and diarrhea so bad that it was mentioned in a Wikipedia article 15 years ago. Okay, that's fair. People get touchy about the homophone euthanasia. I guess. How fucking mortifying would it be like, oh, this is going to be fun. Let's Google ourselves. And I'm famous for that time in middle school when I pissed out of my asshole every night for a while. Right. I love the internet. Thanks, guys.

Yeah. Right. Um, okay. So now for his part, Bliss kept insisting he hadn't sprayed anything but used motor oil on the floor, which, well, fucked up, wouldn't cause dead horses and sick daughters. But that was a fucking lie. He used to one that put the dioxin contaminated shit in with the oil so we know good Damn well that he like he knew other shit was in there But the rear-journers went ahead had the top six inches of soil removed from the arena and hauled off to a landfill

Which turned out to not be enough. Yeah, looks like in order to fix this You're gonna have to dig down to the water table and just use that to wash the hell out of the dirt About a month later, another arena bliss sprayed had similar problems. A dozen horses died, children who had been in the arena started coming down with chlorachne, which is a skin problem that's common to people who have been exposed to dioxins. I couldn't confirm the etymology,

but I'm pretty sure that the term just means chlorine acne as in skin irritation caused by chlorine exposure. Less than a month later, a third ranch blizzard sprayed had the same prop. Baby Brian Camp opens four more ranches just to be sure. All right. So the EPA was pre-pvestigated at the time, but we did have a CDC and back then they were a trusted scientific institution. When Scorsor horses started dying and horses started getting sick at the Shenandoah stable, they sent out a team to investigate, but you know, not all the way or anything. Keep in mind, the stable's owners already pegged the culprit.

That's how. And somehow the CDC managed to miss it. They did question bliss as part of their investigation, but he just... Lie up and Lie. Yeah. Are you trying to hide a cancer filled oil tanker behind your back? There Russ is that what's going on? No, what? No, no.

You want to buy a humidifier? All right. So the CDC did not interview anybody from NEPICO, but in their defense, that's because the investigation started in 1973, they had gone out of business in 1972 when the FDA issued a ban that limited the use of exoclorophyne because it turned out that the thing that they were making that had a toxic byproduct was itself toxic. So we paid that guy to spray horse poison for nothing. This is the worst.

This is a hundred bucks. So ultimately, the CDC made the wrong call. To their credit, it was the 70s. Every consumer product had a deadly poison in it back then. They were pretty sure that the problem that they had here was something that had a relatively short lifespan in the wild, right? So they figured it was gonna take another year plus of study to narrow down what the exact culprit was,

and they also figured that by then that would have worked itself out in payroll. Wait, well, they were really thinking like, well, by the time we solved the problem, the problems will just die. This was when the CDC was a more trusted institution. By the way, that's correct. I feel, well, the chemical would have broken down

is what they were thinking. So meanwhile, Bliss is still spraying away with his contaminated sludge. Yeah, and by now he's marketing as a fucking sprinkler attachment for kids on hot summer days. So just, we are allac me with every game. And that brings us back to the sad little ghost town that the episode's named after, right? So time speech was never the wealthy community that the newspaper dreamed it would be.

Instead, it was just this broke ass town that never even raised enough money to pave their roads. Okay. Well, the stilts for all the roads are expensive. You got to buy those. And the dirt, oh, the dirt just falls right off the stilts, like right away. No, it's not yet a lot of dirt.

That makes sense. Yeah, okay. So all of these dirt roads made their town pretty damn dusty, but luckily somebody had a guy. And in 1972, the town paid bliss $2,400 to spray about 160,000 gallons of painted waste oil onto their roads. This process went on over a period of four years. Just a guy shaking his st. Louis Star Times newspaper trying to get all the oil off of this.

How does this fucking keep happening? Sir, we have a problem with our dirt roads. Yeah, is it that they're dirt? Cause that's, well, in a matter of speaking, yes, you see, there's a lot of dust everywhere. And that's really annoying. Okay. Well, have you tried spraying them down with water? Uh, water? No, then we just have mud and the dust would come back when the water dried up, so that's

not going to fix it. Okay, all right, I see. Uh, well we need something that won't dry up. I guess something that we can spray. Yeah, yeah, so I got this cousin Russ. He's got a whole thing where he sprays motor oil on dust. Uh, okay, well that would get rid of the dust. Are there any drawbacks though?

I'm just thinking of through. Ah, I'm in a mud. Obviously the roads would be greasy and flammable, but that's about it. That's, that's all right. Yeah, well that's obviously a lot better than dust. I mean, unless you know something stupid, like add poison to it. Haha, yeah, that would be. Uh, do you want buy humidifier?

All right, so fast forward to 1979 three years after all the road spring was complete a former employee of NEPICO comes forward to the To the EPA and they say um a Back in the day we buried a And they say, um, a back in the day, we buried a fuck ton of toxic waste and people's yards and shit. You guys have a department for that anything Well, I got you on the line Yeah, just like Oh, man, just now start something that'll deal with this Well, okay, so specifically he reported that the company had paid a local farmer 150 bucks to let them Barry 90 lead He's got his thumbs up and dust

Real poison on his property. Yeah, well and apparently the farmer was like Are you kidding? We spray that shit on our horse The money is great. I'm gonna save fortune on dapper Dan and Superb the most slippery as horses in three So the EPA goes back out to check it sure enough they find nine. Jesus, toxic waste leaking all over the place and included in those are 11 barrels containing these still bottoms. Now if you'll recall the original process had three to five million parts per million

of this dioxin and that was considered way too dangerous for consumers by 1971 standards. Right. Many of these still bottoms had dioxins in excess of 2000 parts per eight. I'm presuming there's no dioxin man super hero we never heard about from the 70s then is that. No, sea so toxic avenger. Cecil, there were plenty of dioxin man, just, you know, their power is mostly like coughing and dying and stuff. We'll get there. Okay, so the presence of these dioxins leads the

EPA to revisit all those mysterious horse illnesses in that general area years ago. And sure enough, they find that not only are there traces of that very same dioxin, but far worse, the dioxin levels are about the same as they were when the CDC checked that soil some eight years earlier. Right. So this left the EPA with a huge problem in terms of a cleanup. The contamination was spread all over the fucking place, and nobody was entirely sure what would be required to fix the problem or what the long term affects on the people and animals exposed to it would be. So here the EPA is taking their sweet fucking time figuring out what to do when they inherit themselves a ticking clock in the form of a leaked EPA document that the Environmental Defense Fund published in 1982.

So the document shows that the EPA is aware of several sites where toxic chemicals have been sprayed, including every road in some small town. And instead of immediately warning everyone about it, they discussed it at length in committee. Gosh, it would be terrible if they did something like's defense a little bit here because I've been using the term toxic waste pretty liberally here, but it's fair to say that they had no idea how serious a problem they were dealing with. Yes, this shit is mad toxic, but there was very little data on what the results of the exposure in humans was, how much you'd have to be exposed to before it caused any problems, and what kind of problems

those might be. A quick congrats to Noah for being the first person to use the term mad toxic and not be talking about their eighth grade point. I know it's not related. Well, he was all, you know what, that's totally different story. So it's not like the EPA though can just go out and say, hey, guys, we found a bunch of toxic chemicals all over the fucking town. We don't know what they're going to do or anything. Right. They have

to answer these basic questions. Keep in mind that they weren't responding to some ongoing health crisis or anything. Yes, a bunch of horses and birds died a decade earlier and a bunch of kids got sick, but there was no unexplained illness that they had to account for at that time. Okay, please release oil eating cobra snakes that turn into these. Find no our shell. Yeah, the perfect. The final episode of citation heated. So none of that mattered, of course, because once this shit hit the press, the story was

the EPA knew some evil chemical company exposed some poor pounded toxic chemicals and didn't warn them. The leaked documents listed 14 confirmed in 41 possibly contaminated sites, including the entire town of Times Beach. That leaked document was the first anyone in Times Beach heard about this. Well, it's a good thing they got that free paper.

That's it. That's it. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. All right. So on December 3rd, 1982, the Merrimek River breached its banks and Times Beach was flooded.

This was not an unusual occurrence, of course, being that it was built on a goddamn flood plane. But this would be the worst flood in its history. The entire town was evacuated. Except for all those people living in their stilt houses, laughing and throwing stones, skipping stones, skipping. Oh, that'd be sweet. You don't have like a good title.

You can't have high right next to your porch. You have to get the stones in advance, but yes, but you just keep a supply. I'm sure in a town like that. All right, so before they could come back the cdc was issuing recommendations to the city not be re-inhabited ultimately the federal government bought out the town for the price of thirty six point seven million dollars and relocated the towns two thousand plus residents and i hope they got their newspaper subscription for what it

happened that uh... real right why even have a house? That's ridiculous. All right. So in 1985, the town was officially disincorporated and interesting site note, the town was disincorporated by then Governor John Ashwell.

Because you would be a hard, prestified, a story about industrial waste in US history that doesn't at least tangentially involve. Yeah. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with childhood cancer. It's exactly. Yes. John Ashcroft of Chicago, Illinois. Everybody. So, up.

Now, there's an important note on this whole story, right? So nobody in time speech ever got sick or anything, right? That needs to be part of the story here. I'm not trying to defend NEPICO or bliss or the idea of spring industrial waste around on your dirt roads. But later research strongly suggested there was never any real justification for the town being evacuated. Yeah, but still I miss when we didn't wait for people to die to do stuff about stuff.

Yeah, boy, I'll tell you what, it would have been nice to still have that. Remember, this is a great way to be wrong. Remember the responsible 70s. That's cool. Okay, but so here's the thing though, in this case, it was noable at the time, right? There were definitely some merits to the better safe and sorry, I pushed, but the off people of being forcibly reclocated and led to fear for their health and the health of their children based on misinterpreted data in a newspaper

was almost certainly more harmful than their minimal exposure to dioxin. Okay, masks are stupid, got it. Who's like that? No, it's been spending way too much time around me, you guys. We gotta, yeah. Okay, so next change. So the difference here is that the stuff I'm saying is actually the scientific consensus is there as I can tell.

Let's see. I'm a pretend, remember I'm a pretend expert. Yeah, right. So up in a weird twist for this show though, no people died in this story. So, but this story could have been so much worse because I looked at the spot where the town used to be on Google Maps and I was surprised to find that it is not three goddamn miles from six flags of St. Louis. Really? Which opened in 1971. I'm just saying we came really close to having our sequel to the action park episode. Yeah, I mean like

every once in a while that's a water park, right? With the river right Okay. Yeah. I mean, like every once in a while, that's a water park, right? With the river right there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Ah. Did I should really pay a lot of attention to the blanks that are left in the S.

Masks are stupid. Got it. And are you ready for the quiz? More so than I was ready to summarize what I learned in the same question. I know. We learned earlier of a possible dioxin based superhero, what alter ego would that superhero go by? A Lewis Kimia, the gratis stasis, C Melvin Anoma, or D Victor Yushanko. That was good. That was good.

I think that last one's there to distract me. I think the actual answer is E. Boney Stark. Very good. Very good. That's the answer, actually. You got it. All right. Noah. This started out as a story about a stilt-based vacation community built on a flood plain outside of St. Louis, Missouri.

And strangely ended with, A, the same number of final residents it would have had even without big Russ's discount dust and horse removal. That is correct. Oh, I love it when you keep it easy on me. Yes, a I'm going to go. Oh, all right. No, what is the time's beach official city song? Hey, singing in the chemical train. Be it she country roads.

Okay. See? Spray on me Oh, this is just a... He does a woman he loves her. Oh, do that! We'll see what we can do. We'll see what we can do. Oh, come on. You could just ask a question that's based on the topic and like the actual material and not doing it. You guys do good puns! I didn't do a putter all I've had done puns for weeks, but you took the one answer job thing.

I don't even answer Eli wins apparently. Great. Some dice to Eli has to win. I do win. Thank you. I love you. Winner. I've let dioxin would have been good.

Straight off. Can you just tap a man, man? That's your tag team and one guy's obviously the one who's going win and the other one's not like just don't I'm your iron cheek Oh great all right well for Tom Noah Cecil and Eli I'm Heath thank you for hanging out with us today We'll be back next week and by then Tom will be an expert on something else. You do it now and then, you can hear Tom and Cecil on cognitive dissonance, and you can hear Eli know on myself on God off the movies, scathing Atheist, Skeptocrat, and D&D Monis.

And if anyone's feeling generous, or less than the price of a cup of coffee a day, you can pay Donald Trump's income tax. Yeah. Oh, no. It's a failure of beer and literally, you can make a per-apps donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. If you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, take a look at the show notes, pick out citation pod dot com. And this here is where we keep the fire mill. I'm sorry, fire mill? Yeah, well, that's what we call it

It comes out of the teeth there and it's like stop right there. Oh, no, it's the it's the newly formed EPA That's right now Pretty pleased with sugar on top Stop doing whatever you're doing I'm gonna go with no no on this one Damn it. Well did all I could. Hey you want to you want to blaze up this fire milk with us? Hell yeah I want to blaze up some fire milk.