Dioxin Made Times Beach Unlivable. The Town Was Abandoned

ByGeoff Dyers
Abandoned remnants of Times Beach, Missouri after contamination and demolition

Times Beach, Missouri, is a former town about 17 miles southwest of St. Louis that was abandoned after its roads and soils were contaminated with dioxin. The contamination came from waste oil sprayed on unpaved roads for dust control, and after the Meramec River flood in December 1982, federal and state officials concluded the town should be permanently relocated in 1983.

What happened at Times Beach was simple in outline and grim in practice. A contractor sprayed roads with oil contaminated by 2,3,7,8-TCDD, the most toxic form of dioxin, and that turned an ordinary small town into one of the most famous environmental disasters in the US. The flood did not create the problem. It exposed it at the worst possible moment.

How Times Beach became uninhabitable

Road surface contamination from sprayed waste oil

Times Beach sat along the Meramec River in St. Louis County. It had many unpaved roads, and in the early 1970s those roads were treated with waste oil to keep dust down, a common-enough-looking practice that turned out to be disastrous in this case, according to the EPA’s history of the site.

The oil had been mixed with chemical still-bottom waste from the production of hexachlorophene, and that waste contained TCDD dioxin. The spraying was done by Russell Bliss, the waste hauler tied to several Missouri contamination cases, not just Times Beach, according to the EPA retrospective.

By the early 1980s, investigators were already tracing animal deaths and contamination at horse arenas and other sites back to the same oil spraying. Soil sampling in Times Beach later found dioxin at levels as high as more than 300 parts per billion, far above what officials considered safe for residential exposure.

Then came the December 1982 flood. The Meramec River inundated the town, displaced residents, and complicated any idea of simply cleaning around occupied homes. Soon after, the CDC completed soil analysis, and the federal government and Missouri announced a permanent relocation plan for the town’s roughly 2,000 residents.

In the joint relocation announcement, the EPA said in 1983 that the decision followed CDC findings that showed “significant dioxin contamination throughout the community.”

That is the answer to why Times Beach was abandoned: officials concluded the contamination was widespread enough that buying out and relocating the entire town was safer than trying to leave people in place. This was not a temporary evacuation. It was an organized disappearance of a municipality.

The cleanup, relocation, and demolition

The buyout that followed turned Times Beach into a ghost town. EPA later described it as having been a “ghost town” since 1983. Homes were purchased, residents moved out, and buildings were eventually demolished as part of the long cleanup and redevelopment process.

The site then became one of the highest-profile projects in the early Superfund era. In its Record of Decision, EPA selected a remedy centered on incineration of contaminated soil, sediment, structures, and debris. The agency estimated that about 265,000 tons of contaminated material would require treatment.

That figure later grew in practice. The EPA’s Superfund site profile says the on-site incinerator ultimately treated about 413,000 tons of contaminated soil and debris before cleanup was completed in 1997. That is roughly 56% more material than the 265,000-ton estimate in the Record of Decision. Environmental cleanups have a habit of getting larger once you start digging. This one did.

The town itself was later disincorporated in 1992. That formal step mattered. It marked the point where Times Beach stopped being a damaged town waiting to come back and became a former town.

There is a broader American pattern here: once land is declared unsafe or newly valuable, people with the least leverage usually lose first. Times Beach was an environmental disaster, not a case of racially motivated eminent domain, but both stories turn on the same hard fact: governments can permanently rearrange communities when risk, power, and land use collide.

What remains of Times Beach today

Times Beach does not exist today as a functioning town. The cleaned site was redeveloped as Route 66 State Park, according to EPA, which is probably the strangest afterlife a toxic-waste ghost town could have: a recreation area built on land that once had to be erased.

EPA says the Superfund construction work was complete by 1997, and its historical summaries frame Times Beach as a case where full relocation, demolition, and treatment were judged more practical than trying to preserve the original town in place. The site remains important because it helped define public understanding of dioxin contamination and the federal government’s willingness to use Superfund for a full-scale community buyout.

If you are asking what “Times Beach dioxin” means, it usually refers to the TCDD contamination from sprayed waste oil that poisoned the town’s roads and soil. If you are asking what happened to Times Beach, the short answer is starker: the town was bought out, torn down, and cleaned up because the contamination made normal life there unsafe.

Key Takeaways

Further Reading

Last reviewed: 2026-06