In the 1970s, the small town of Times Beach, Missouri, situated along the Meramec River, used a mixture of used motor oil and dioxin to control dust on its dirt roads. This dioxin came from a chemical plant in Verona, about 240 kilometers southwest of Times Beach, which produced 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, a chemical used in Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The production of this chemical created a highly toxic byproduct that was sold as a dust suppressant. The contamination was discovered when a local horse breeder, Judy Piatt, noticed her horses dying and she and her daughters fell ill. She reported the issue to the Centers for Disease Control, which found dioxin in the oil spread on her property. Federal investigators later identified up to 41 contaminated sites in Missouri, including Times Beach. A historic flood of the Meramec River in December 1982 submerged the town, spreading the dioxin beyond the roads and covering the entire area. Subsequent testing found dioxin levels 300 times higher than the CDC considers safe. On December 23, 1982, authorities declared the town unsafe and ordered residents not to return. The town had a population of nearly 2,500 people, and the community was divided between those who wished to return and those who wanted the federal government to buy their homes through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program. In February 1983, EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford announced that the federal government would purchase the town. The EPA transferred funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to organize the permanent relocation of residents and businesses, a process that concluded in 1986. Times Beach was added to the national list of priority Superfund sites in 1983. However, the actual decontamination work did not begin until the mid-1990s. A mobile incinerator was installed on-site to destroy more than 265,000 tons of contaminated soil from Times Beach and 27 other sites in eastern Missouri. The entire cleanup, from the initial evacuation to the final site closure, took fourteen years and cost $110 million. The site was officially declared clean in 1997. In September 1999, the state of Missouri purchased the land and transformed it into the Route 66 State Park, a 165-hectare area along the Meramec River. The visitor center now occupies a 1935 roadside motel called Steiny's Inn, one of the few buildings that survived the demolition. The site was removed from the list of priority Superfund sites in September 2001, and EPA tests in 2012 found no significant health risks for visitors or park employees. Beneath the park’s lawns and hiking trails lie hundreds of homes, four churches, and even the former town’s water tower, all buried in place rather than relocated. For the EPA, Times Beach remains a significant event that helped shape the Superfund law, which is still used today to fund the cleanup of contaminated areas across the United States.