S10 Ep140: The Ghost Town (Times Beach, Missouri)

In 1971, Judy Piot’s horse stables in Missouri began collapsing after a mysterious plague killed her animals—birds, cats, horses, and eventually her daughter Andy—leading to a terrifying realization: the cause was dioxin-laced waste oil sprayed on the arena by Russell Bliss, a local hauler unknowingly transporting toxic byproducts from a former Agent Orange factory. Despite her relentless investigation, the government ignored her warnings. Decades later, the same poison reached Times Beach, a working-class river town that had unknowingly been sprayed with the same waste for years. When the truth emerged in 1982, the EPA downplayed the danger, then abruptly announced a $33 million federal buyout—just as the town flooded. The relocation, framed as a rescue, was widely seen as a political stunt by the Reagan administration, which was already under fire for environmental cover-ups. Even after the town was erased from maps and burned to the ground, the fallout continued: former residents were stigmatized, children were bullied, and the contamination followed them. A decade later, a CDC official claimed the evacuation was an overreaction—but his statement was later revealed to be funded by the very chemical companies being sued. The episode exposes a pattern of corporate negligence, government inaction, and systemic cover-ups, where the most vulnerable paid the price for a toxic legacy that refused to die.