STRANGE HAPPENINGS

Did this really happen? I'm afraid it did.

The town of Times Beach, Missouri in St. Louis County was founded in the 1920s and by the early 1980s had a modest population of 2,240 residents. Times Beach sat on the shores of the Meramec River.

The town suffered from a dust problem because it had many miles of dirt roads. In 1972, it decided to pave the roads. First, however, the roads were sprayed with waste oil. The man who had the contract to spray the roads bought some of it from the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company (NEPACCO). It worked well. The dust was held down and nothing grew there. As it turned out, much of the waste oil used contained extraordinarily high levels of dioxin -- thousands of times higher than the defoliant used in Vietnam called Agent Orange.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discovered the problem after a flood in the early 1980s. President Reagan declared the town unsafe and in 1983 spent over $30 million to buy out the town and evacuate it. The evacuation was complete by 1985 and the town was completely leveled in 1992. Amazing!

It could have been Cleveland!
:D