Times Beach Case Study

I. INTRODUCTION Located just southwest of St. Louis, and 2 miles east of Eureka in an old flood plain used for farming, lies a ghost town called Times Beach, Missouri. Originally being marketed as a summer hideaway, one could purchase a 20 x 100 ft. lot for $67.50 in 1925 and even receive a six-month newspaper subscription. After the Great Depression and gas rationing during World War II, the town became a small community of low-middle-class economic citizens. In 1983, due to a dioxin contamination that was widely covered by the national media, the town’s citizens were completely evacuated, becoming the largest civilian exposure to dioxin in the history of the United States of America (Leistner, 1995). Two short years after the evacuation