The River Rats Want to Stay

The troubled town of Times Beach copes with a dioxin scare

Ira Bennett puttered about his yard, cleaning up debris and casting watchful glances at the still rain-swollen Meramec River across the road. "I don't know what to think about dioxin," said the 60-year-old construction worker. "I've lived here for 13 years. The birds are still flying, dogs are still running around." Then he bent over to turn up a strip of plywood, revealing a colony of worms in the dirt. "See there. If something was wrong, do you think they'd still be living?"

Bennett and the other residents of The town (pop. 2,000), a Missouri hamlet 25 miles southwest of St. Louis, are confused and frightened. In recent weeks they have been hit with a one-two punch that leaves them wondering where to turn next. First, on Dec. 5, the waters of the Meramec swept through the town in the worst flood in Times Beach's history. The town, which sprang up in the 1920s as a summer resort and later became a permanent working-class community, is now a picture of near desolation. A muddy brown film coats the small clapboard houses and trailer homes, many of which are ripped apart. Stoves and pieces of carpet sit in yards. Piles of trash and decaying food are heaped everywhere. Many of the 800 families are homeless.

Then, two days before Christmas, the Federal Government released Environmental Protection Agency findings that oil mixed with the deadly poison dioxin, sprayed on unpaved streets a decade ago as a seemingly harmless means to hold down dust, had left dangerous concentrations of the chemical in the soil. But since the EPA samples were taken before Dec. 5, it is still unclear whether the flood waters washed away much of the chemical, making Times Beach safer, or unearthed more dioxin, spreading it throughout the town. The EPA plans new tests, scheduled for this week.

At a town meeting last Tuesday with state and federal politicians and health officials, Dr. Henry Falk, an epidemiologist with the federal Centers for Disease Control, advised residents who had left Times Beach after the flooding to stay away. He told those who had returned to avoid exposure to soil and debris until new tests were completed. Falk said that scientific studies with animals show that dioxin, an acutely toxic substance that is produced as an unwanted byproduct in the manufacture of herbicides and other chemicals, can have extremely adverse effects on the skin, liver and immune system. Many of the residents attending the session told Falk about persistent rashes and other medical ailments that may be related to dioxin pollution. Said Falk: "It would be difficult to overstate the problems here." There are at least 15 other sites in Missouri believed to be contaminated with the chemical.