I can remember as a young kid growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, every summer the county would come by with a tanker truck of old used oil that they would spray on the dirt roads to keep the dust down.
It seems no one, the public especially, realized early on what damage was being done...until people began to die at night from air pollution excursions; lakes and rivers caught on fire, and asbestos, radon and Mercury began to kill people.
Oiling the roads was common practice. I heard of one case where old transformer oil was used; turns out it contained PCB's (polychlorinated biphenyls), really bad stuff. The clean up was expensive.
In 1972, Times Beach hired Bliss to oil its twenty-three miles of dirt roads (due to lack of funding, Times Beach was unable to pave its roads). For $2,400, Bliss sprayed approximately 160,000 gallons of waste oil in Times Beach over a period of four years. The release of the leaked EPA document in 1982 was the first time that Times Beach had learned of its contamination. Residents felt betrayed and publicly criticized the EPA for not informing them of the toxic hazards around their homes. Since Times Beach had the largest population out of the listed sites, Times Beach became the subject of national media and attention. With pressure from the public, the EPA soon began investigation in Times Beach. Soil sampling was fortuitously completed on December 3, 1982, a day before Times Beach suffered its worst flood in history when the Meramec River breached its banks and rose over fourteen feet above flood stage. The residents of Times Beach were evacuated, and by the time the waters began to recede, the EPA had concluded its analysis. Results revealed dioxin concentrations as high as 0.3 ppm along the town痴 entire network of roads.
Buyout and cleanup efforts
On December 23, 1982, the CDC publicly recommended that Times Beach not be re-inhabited. Officials were uncertain about the health effects of extensive dioxin exposure, and even more uncertain of how to rid an entire town of dioxin. Because the town was situated on a flood plain, officials were further concerned that subsequent flooding would spread the contamination beyond control.
Discussions of a federal buyout commenced on January 7, 1983 when President Ronald Reagan created the Times Beach Dioxin Task Force, which consisted of representatives from the EPA, CDC, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Army Corps of Engineers. During a press conference on February 22, 1983, the EPA announced that the federal government would pay $33.0 million of the estimated $36.7 million cost to buy out the eight hundred residential properties and thirty businesses of Times Beach. The remaining $3.7 million would be the responsibility of the state.
Times Beach, Missouri - Wikipedia
However, in the same article is this:
Several months after the evacuation, the American Medical Association (AMA) publicly criticized the news media for spreading unscientific information about dioxin and the health hazards associated with it. The AMA stated that there was no evidence of adverse consequences from low-level dioxin exposure. Subsequent studies of potentially exposed people from Times Beach and some other contaminated locations in Missouri have revealed no adverse health outcomes that can be directly linked to dioxin. In a study conducted by the CDC and the Missouri Division of Health, no cases of chloracne, a common symptom of acute dioxin poisoning, were observed in Times Beach residents.[15] By May 1991, Dr. Vernon Houk, the director of the CDC痴 Center for Environmental Health, had come to the same conclusion as the AMA. Although he had made the official recommendation to permanently relocate Times Beach residents in 1982, by 1991, he no longer believed that evacuation had been necessary.
