Environment: Living, Dangerously, with Toxic Wastes

Natural disasters and wars do their damage spectacularly and quickly–shaking, crushing, burning, ripping, smothering, drowning. The devastation is plain; victims and survivors are clearly distinguished, causes and effects easily connected. With the unnatural disasters caused by environmental toxins, however, the devastation is seldom certain or clear or quick. Broken chromosomes are unseen; carcinogens can be slow and sneaky. People wait for years to find out if they or their children are victims. The fears, the uncertainties and the conjectures have a corrosive quality that becomes inextricably mingled with the toxic realities.

To find out what it is like to live in the same neighborhood with toxic wastes, Associate Editor Kurt Andersen visited three communities with similar concerns but profoundly different circumstances. Times Beach, contaminated years ago, is now a Missouri ghost town; Holbrook, Mass., is discovering that it has a serious problem, but perhaps not a catastrophe; in Casmalia, Calif., toxins arrive each day at a modern treatment site, producing annoying fumes and fears about the future. People from all three places share chronic anxiety. Are they sick? Will they become sick? In all three there is anger, at businesses, at government, at unsympathetic neighbors. Yet like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each town is unhappy in its own way.

Times Beach, Mo.:

Overgrown and Ghostly

On Interstate 44 in Missouri, motorists heading east toward St. Louis glide past the giant Six Flags amusement park and the big fireworks emporium across the road, past the eager little town of Eureka, past billboards inviting them to visit the Black Madonna Shrine and the Meramec Caverns. But then comes a quick stretch where the familiar green interstate signs are disfigured by blank areas, apparently painted over. There down to the left of the highway by the river, weeds and tall grass obscure a whole area.

Is it a town? Was it a town? There are streets and street signs and houses, but no people. There are trailers at the Easy Living Mobile Manor, and the Easy Living Laundromat has a sign out front that says, THANKS FOR COMING, but there are no people. Windows are unbroken, and a few have curtains, neatly sashed back. There are some cars, a bird feeder made from a plastic Seven-Up bottle, a hammock tied from an elm to a sycamore, a riding mower with a Six Flags sticker on it, and FOR SALE signs all over the place. Pinned up on one front door is a printed passage from Psalms: “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” But there are no people at all.

Wandering these eerie late-20th century ruins, a visitor becomes a kind of archaeologist of the present. In one window, the paper Santa Claus dates the cataclysm that drove everyone away: just before Christmas 1982, the people of Times Beach discovered that their town had been drenched in dioxin, a poison so potent that one drop in 10,000 gal. is considered a dangerous concentration. Under political pressure, the EPA agreed to pay off all property owners; homeowners got between $8,800 and $98,900 apiece. And the town died. On one street remains an ex-resident’s bright white graffito: GOODBYE TIMES BITCH.

The abandonment of Times Beach was attended by a frenzy of attention from newspapers, which was apt, since the town was created by a newspaper in the first place. The St. Louis Star-Times bought the square mile of flatland wedged between the Meramec River and the highway, and in 1925 sold plots for $67.50 each to anyone who agreed to buy a subscription to the paper (which is now defunct). After World War II it became a regular working-class town. Times Beach, like many Midwestern river settlements, had a tang more Southern than latitude alone could explain and a small-town coziness that is rare these days. People who liked it really liked it, and stayed. Land enough to build a house could be bought for $800, even after the local boom of the 1970s.

It was during the early 1970s that Times Beach, looking to keep down the summer dust, hired a fellow to spread oil on ten miles of unpaved streets. Unfortunately, the oilman also filled his truck with waste sludge from a downstate chemical factory, and so for at least a couple of summers, he sprayed tens of thousands of gallons of a dioxin-laced goo all over town. The agent of the town’s destruction was a man named Russell Bliss. “Do I blame Bliss?” asks Joe Capstick, who lived in Times Beach 14 years and, after the town’s demise, moved down the road. “Sure. Hell, yes. Hell, yes.”

Medical science is not sure what a decade of daily dioxin exposure has done or will do. Cancers and genetic damage are the most fearsome possibilities. But one obvious effect of the dioxin discovery has been the rearrangement of townspeople’s memories: in retrospect, that purplish coating on the streets has become the paradigm for life in Times Beach. They remember, now, all the dead birds around town, and the stillborn kittens and puppies. Michael Reid, 19, remembers that he and other children loved to bicycle behind the dioxin truck, skidding and sliding in the thick oil slick. Joe’s wife Penny Capstick remembers falling down in it. They all remember the children tracking it in. “I can remember Jeri Lynn as a child sitting by the road just kicking her feet in the stuff,” says Marilyn Leistner, who lives near by. “Just kicking and kicking in the stuff.” The richest memories have become images of menace. “That was a very nice home there,” says Leistner, the town’s final mayor, as she drove through Times Beach recently. “That whole wing was a game room paneled with imported teakwood.” Suddenly her tour-guide tone changes: “The man who lived in that home has had a lung removed. I remember the minister’s wife who lived next door there had a miscarriage. The lady who lived here, she had two miscarriages. Kidney cancer over there, and the home here, the wife died in childbirth. This next family, the dog had a seizure disorder, and their little girl had terrible stomach and bladder problems.” Leistner has four children, all in their 20s. “One of my daughters has a seizure disorder; she tried to commit suicide in 1983. Another daughter, she’s hyperthyroid; we almost lost her to cancer of the cervix at 21. My former husband has a liver impairment.”

Even before the disaster, Times Beach people often felt ostracized, were called river rats and worse. But once the news of the town’s contamination was out, some uplanders began treating them like white trash from hell. Dry cleaning was refused, at least one restaurant emptied out when a Times Beacher came in, out-of-town friends stopped calling. Now, says Leistner, “when you say Times Beach to people, I think they look you up and down to see if you’re green or glow in the dark.” If you lived in Times Beach, says Rose Eisen, “you’re the scuzz of the earth.”

At least they had a sort of solidarity in Times Beach, a tight-knit community. “If I was weaving down the road,” recalls Clyde Adams, “they’d call my wife Butch and say, ‘Clyde’s loaded again.’ ” In just a few weeks, that social foundation was yanked apart. Says Adams, a resident for 36 years: “I have to drive by there every day to get here, and that’s the toughest thing. I get home all melancholy.” Perhaps half of the refugees live in the area, and several say they sometimes take the old Times Beach interstate exit by mistake.

“Down in the Beach,” says Joe Capstick, “everybody knew everybody’s business.” The Capsticks have moved to Hilltop Village, an assertively middle-class subdivision. “Up here it’s a totally different life-style. They barely say hi. I swear to God, I’d be surprised to find 20 people around here at 10 in the morning. Back in Times Beach, why, you could go down at 10 in the morning and find half the town fishing. It was fun.”

Cindy Reid lived in the Beach from childhood. Now, she says, “we’re not allowed back there.” “You have to have a good reason,” explains her friend Ruth Yarborough. “My mom wanted to go down and take pictures of our old houses,” says Reid, “but they told her, ‘That’s not a good reason.’ ” The Reids, the Yarboroughs and three other families were neighbors in Times Beach, and they are neighbors today. To the west, on 15 acres of virgin forest, they have put up four big log houses. It is the march of history in reverse: displaced by the backsplash of modern technology, Americans head for the wilderness and build with logs.

The checkpoint at which the unspoiled world meets Times Beach has the no- monkey-business aspect of an international border crossing: warning signs, unsmiling uniformed guards, papers to be signed. Former Mayor Leistner remains as the state’s trustee and keeps an office in the trailer at the checkpoint. There are loose ends to oversee. The Kleins, for instance. An older couple who still live on the less contaminated southern edge of Times Beach, they have refused the Government’s offer of $47,500 to clear out.

The dead town is not altogether useless. Two particularly poisonous blocks have become a valuable research plot; five companies, working on methods of detoxifying dioxin, have paid some $80,000 to rent out bits of Laurel Street for their experiments. The state of Missouri has no plans for the land. Some former residents would like it to become a park. Not Rose Eisen. “I wish they’d blow it off the face of the earth,” she says.

In fact, the earth seems to be reclaiming this abused chunk for its own purposes. The maples and sycamores look healthy, grasses and wild flowers are thick and high. Grasshoppers hiss. A flock of wild turkeys has moved in, as well as a pack of coyotes and some deer. “It’s amazing,” says the former mayor, “all these yellow flowers! They were never here before.” The wild growth, however, poses a problem: vandals, looters and arsonists can hide from the security patrols more easily. But that may be remedied. “I believe the state of Missouri,” says Leistner, “is looking into defoliating.”

Holbrook, Mass.:

Waiting for Results

Every town ought to have a place like the Pastures. For as long as anyone in Holbrook can recall (“For ages and ages,” one mother says), the children of this Boston suburb have used the expanse of vacant land as their exclusive preserve, a wild place, slightly apart. It is all-purpose terrain, perfect for many kinds of serendipity, a place where kids can build a secret fort, practice daredevil bike riding over hillocks called the Camel Humps, share the painful silences of adolescent romance or even read a book alone.

Until a couple of years ago the Pastures also offered some singular special effects. Sometimes there was a strange gelatinous gunk–“green slime” or “moon glob”–that could be picked up and hurled in lieu of snowballs. There were also acres of empty metal drums, industrial barrels just sitting around; it was hard for any self-respecting young thrill seeker to resist climbing inside and tumbling downhill. Parents seldom ventured into the area. So the town fathers and mothers did not know enough to fear that the moon glob and the barrels might have come from the Baird & McGuire factory, the plant at the Pastures’ edge that produced pesticides and insecticides. Then in ( 1982 the EPA ranked the land near the top on its national list of high- priority hazardous-waste sites. The following year the town government forced the plant to close. “Two years ago I thought it was over,” says Leah Abbott, one of the homemakers in Holbrook (pop. 11,140) who has found herself transformed into an environmental activist. “But it’s not.”

No. Every few months, it seems, there is another frightening bulletin. First the EPA found the soil and water around the factory laced with arsenic, DDT and chlordane, among other contaminants. The most pressing concern was the danger to drinking water. Three town wells had been adjacent to Baird & McGuire; the last one was closed only in 1982. Running by the factory is the Cochato River, which for years flowed to Holbrook’s water supply. But in 1983 the river was sluiced away from drinking water, and the most intensely contaminated ground near the factory covered with a clay cap. The wastes were contained. Holbrook could relax.

But no. Earlier this year chemicals were found to be oozing into adjacent wetlands and into the Cochato–and leaching Lord knows where else, say the minority of townspeople who are upset. A water main that runs right under the site still supplies a thousand homes. Last spring the Cochato’s sediment was found to include arsenic and naphthalene. Then last summer even the EPA seemed jolted: high concentrations of dioxin were discovered at Baird & McGuire.

Half a mile away is the Grove, a neighborhood surrounding Lake Holbrook. The lake is murky; people who live around it say that sometimes it looks orange. Joanne O’Donnell has lived in the Grove since 1964. All five of the O’Donnell children spent time at the Pastures, she says, and four have had endocrine problems. One daughter had a pituitary tumor; another daughter’s spleen was removed last year. Mark, her eldest son, at 27 came down with “some virulent, crazy pneumonia that nobody could figure out.” Then a large tumor was found on his pancreas. In 1980 he died.

Mark O’Donnell had been a sociable, rambunctious sort: he and his pals at the Pastures used to have epic moon-glob fights, and apparently he was always up for a roll in those big metal drums. He had also worked one teenage summer at Baird & McGuire, according to his mother. Two years after he died the EPA made Holbrook infamous. “The night it came across on the news that Baird & McGuire was the 14th worst site in the nation,” says O’Donnell, “it was like lightning. I thought, ‘I have an answer!’ ” The same answer, she thinks, explains why Mark’s best boyhood friend now has Hodgkin’s disease. It might be coincidence, a professionally skeptical out-of-towner suggests. She looks wounded and incredulous. “With a toxic site as impregnated with the yuckos as this one?”

Baird & McGuire is just this side of the border with Randolph, a town that has shared water supplies with Holbrook. Esther Ross, a Randolph resident, says she got worried in 1981 when she found herself going to a lot of funerals. There is a certain Times Beach ring to her recitation. “The people who owned the house next door were stricken by cancer,” she says, “and the people next door to them, and next door to them. We had a six-year-old pass away from cancer in the neighborhood, and a 20-year-old.” Ross started mapping the victims’ homes. After Leah Abbott learned of the poison, she became an amateur epidemiologist too, putting dots on a map of Holbrook, drawing up her own geography of death.

The women may be on to something. According to the Massachusetts department of public health, certain kinds of cancer do seem to be appearing too frequently, at least in Holbrook. Between 1979 and 1983, the town lost 24 men to lung cancer; 15 such deaths would be expected in a town with Holbrook’s age distribution and population. During the same period, Holbrook men were dying of bladder cancer at a rate more than three times the average, and fatal uterine, cervical and ovarian cancers occurred at more than twice the normal rate.

But the people are not panicking. Says O’Donnell: “Most of them have no interest whatsoever. I know people who have health problems, and even they refuse to get involved.” Many seem troubled less by threats to health than by threats to property values. Especially since O’Donnell, Ross and Abbott formed a group called People United to Restore the Environment, the women have been attacked as kooks and cranks.

Abbott is hardly a rabble-rouser. Says she: “I’m real Suzy Homemaker–Cub Scouts, baseball, sewing.” In the living room a pair of Cabbage Patch dolls sit in a rocker, and a crucifix is on the mantle. The big, office-style water cooler is the one unorthodox fixture. Nodding in the direction of her daughter, she jokes, “When she’s bad, she gets tap water.”

Abbott figures that her housewifey style has been a tactical advantage. “They weren’t scared of me.” One day when Baird & McGuire was still operating, she arrived at the executive office unannounced, went in to see Cameron Baird, the head of the company, and got a firsthand look at the contamination from him. A public meeting last June with EPA officials at Holbrook High School, Abbott says, “was a real lynch mob. And I think I led it.” She sounds both abashed and proud. The EPA had intended simply to present its latest findings. Instead its representatives faced the point-by- point anger of 300 people who demanded to know why, three years after contamination had been discovered, Baird & McGuire had not yet been cleaned up. The Government shortly agreed to all five of PURE’s demands.

Among other things, townspeople wanted a barrier around the site. In August the EPA finished a new chain link fence, topped with three strands of barbed wire and hung with warning signs. (Some days, however, its gate has stood wide open.) The source of all the trouble is a ratty compound of cinder blocks and sheet metal, pink clapboard and silver tanks. One large white building is marked only by a tiny skull-and-crossbones label on the door. A few yards outside the site one afternoon in September, four men and a woman in boots and rubbery white suits used a huge tread-mounted pump to dig out a 10-ft. plug of earth for testing by the EPA. Their gas masks hung nearby, just above the spot where a dark little stream flows from the toxic site under the fence and away into the forest. For now, the locals who are worried are waiting. They await the results of more soil and water tests, and the results of more precisely targeted health studies. Most of all, naturally, they await results at the site itself. They want a permanent cleanup, says Ross, “so that we can all go back into Sleepy Hollow and rest assured that nothing is wrong.” Curiously, not even the local activists plan to move away. “Where am I going to move,” asks Abbott, “that it’s not going to crop up in my backyard again? Where is safe?”

Casmalia, Calif.:

Fumes and Fears

First you tear up 250 acres of California ranchland. Then you fill the holes with tons of sewage, cyanide, Nair hair-removal cream, spoiled Coca-Cola syrup, winery dregs, rocket fuel, rat carcasses, nitric acid, paint chips and fish organs. What do you get? A state-of-the-art toxic-waste-treatment facility.

The site north of Santa Barbara run by Casmalia Resources is supposed to be a model of its kind. It is equipped with monitoring wells, its own laboratory, a dozen government permits and a full-time public relations manager. “We do not view ourselves as part of the problem,” says Jan Lachenmaier, the p.r. woman. “We view ourselves as part of the solution.”

The dump may indeed be part of the solution. The federal Superfund pays Casmalia Resources to take wastes collected in the cleanup of the notorious Stringfellow Acid Pits near Los Angeles. But even this up-to-date site is a problem for the 300 people who live just over the hills in the town of Casmalia. A little more than a year ago, it seems, fumes started drifting down over the town. Jim Postiff has lived in Casmalia for 20 years, and the odor was new to him. “The first few times we smelled it,” he remembers, “we called the fire department. We didn’t know what it was.” It is a strange, foul odor, not unlike the stench from a sodden box of cat litter. It reminds many of the women of home-permanent solution. Karen Wickham, who teaches at the town’s elementary school, thinks the smell is like “fecal matter, but also sweet and fruity,” and Mary Lou Smith detects an onion aroma. “What it is,” says Kenneth Vaniter, “is a take-your-breath-away smell.”

Casmalia is not far from the Pacific, and the stink usually rolls in at night with the fog, often strong enough to wake people. But it also comes during the day. People are driven indoors; windows are shut tight in balmy weather; the Hitching Post, a local steakhouse, has occasionally been forced to close. “There is no other topic,” says Postiff’s wife Paulette. “It seems that’s all you talk about or think about.”

Conversation is the only regular public entertainment in Casmalia. The town is a few dusty blocks set in the middle of spectacular golden foothills. The bright, bright sunlight is not flattering to Point Sal Road, the main street. Just off Point Sal stands a TV satellite dish nearly as big as its owners’ trailer home. On the lot next door, a slack-bellied black horse eats greens. Early on a weekday afternoon, Casmalia is quiet but not silent: somewhere chickens crow, a toddler yelps, and Linda Ronstadt sings. “A lot of people don’t like a town like this,” says Phyllis Vaniter, “but we do.” They may like it, but they hate the smell. During the past year, FOR SALE signs have appeared up and down Point Sal.

Because Casmalia is unincorporated, the school is the only government outpost in town, which is one reason it has become the rallying point for antidump % activity. Another reason is Kenneth McCalip, the school’s principal, who has become the town’s toxic-waste spokesman and organizer. Last fall, says McCalip, “it would get really yucky in the lunchroom.” Nauseated children were being sent home early. One day in November he evacuated the whole school, all 21 students. “The wind died down, and the odors got so darn bad. The fumes started rolling into our classrooms, more than we’d ever experienced before. Mrs. Wickham, the other teacher here, said she couldn’t continue, I was already sick, and it was hard to breathe.” School was closed for two days.

At the direction of the school board, McCalip, who has a law degree, asked the county attorney to seek an injunction against the waste dump. “The county counsel told me that I wasn’t playing ball, that I had teed off all the county officials. He said, ‘Hey, Ken, this isn’t the way we do it in Santa Barbara County.’ ” There was little sympathy from county officials who investigated. “The wind kicks up,” McCalip explains, “and the fumes are gone. They think you’re crazy.” Out-of-town acquaintances were dubious too.

Tests to reckon whether the people of Casmalia are endangered have proved inconclusive. In 1984 a county consultant found some chemical pollutants in water from Casmalia’s town well, and concentrations of arsenic and lead were detected in a sample of private well water taken in town last spring. Traces of benzene, 1,4-dioxane and other chemicals were found in air samples taken around Casmalia last December, but all were at levels below those the EPA considers dangerous.

Nonetheless, people in Casmalia say they feel unwell. Many children seem to have developed bronchitis. McCalip discovered he had high blood pressure late last fall, as did the Vaniters. “I just been so dizzy,” says Phyllis. “And our chests hurt.” Paulette Postiff has kidney disease, she and her son get sore throats, and her husband has headaches and eye irritation. “Everybody in Casmalia has a runny nose,” says Ruthanne Tompkins. “Dave and I are not very health conscious, but if my husband gets cancer because somebody was nasty . . .” The talk almost always turns to carcinomas. “You may not see a growth right now,” says Smith. “It’s the long run that worries me.”

“I didn’t tell you all the deaths, did I?” asks McCalip late one day. “In the past six years,” he says, “there have been four or five lung- cancer deaths in Casmalia. The young woman who used to teach here with me was ! in perfect health when she came, and she died of leukemia two years later.” Not until last month, after well-to-do neighborhoods in Santa Maria got a strong chemical whiff one day, did the county government finally admit the dump was a problem. People in Casmalia are sure they have the official reluctance figured: revenues from the dump this year will be $40 million, with the county taking 10% off the top. “Money talks,” says Phyllis Vaniter.

But even the rich family in Casmalia shares the concerns. Dave Tompkins came to ranch in 1937, after college, and he now has many hundreds of cattle, many hundreds of acres, and oil leases. Mature olive trees and enormous pink roses line the front yard of his splendid hacienda. “Something’s wrong,” says his wife. Dave nods. “There is something funny going on,” he says.

He does not mind so much if property values get depressed. “We intend to live here until we die,” Tompkins says. “But the poor people in town, all they have are their homes.” Rather, his fear is that waste chemicals might percolate through the ground into his cattle’s drinking water. “If that stuff ever gets into the water, we’re through.” As for the odor, it burns his sinuses and gives him headaches. “If you see a lot of trucks come in,” says Tompkins, who lives close to the dump entrance, “you can pretty well bet there’ll be a smell by the end of the day.”

Casmalia Resources is open 24 hours, and every day about a hundred trucks roll in and out. The vast site could be on Mars. Hills and canyons are denuded. The great dirt expanses where steel drums are buried dwarf the bulldozers and moon-suited workers. Dozens of deep pools of dark, still liquids, interconnected by a web of white pipes running uphill and down, pock the landscape. Oily sludge is stirred into the ground. A tanker truck squirts full blast into a waste pond. With its tidy system of interlacing roads and sharply etched contours, the dump is as neat as a map and profoundly ugly.

No matter how carefully Casmalia Resources goes about its business, says Lachenmaier, the p.r. director, some of the people who live nearby will remain unhappy. “They have a provincial view of the situation,” she says. “They don’t want us to exist–and that’s the bottom line.” Toxic waste must go somewhere, she pleads. Why not here?

Which sounds reasonable. The site is remote. The geology is well charted. The facility has been designed to handle dangerous industrial poisons. But down in Casmalia, it still stinks.

ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9uaWxpaIJwsc2voKunnqKyr8CMpaCvoZ6ceqWtzaCcq6elqLm6edaiq6FlpKTFqq%2BMsJisrJWofA%3D%3D