Toxic chemical waste keeps getting dumped in Missouri.
In St. Louis County, radioactive waste has polluted the Westlake Landfill and Coldwater Creek. And famously, the 2000-person town of Times Beach was turned into a ghost town after it was flooded with Dioxin, toxic chemicals that can cause cancer and developmental problems.
But less well-known is the story of the town of Berger, Missouri, where in 2013 millions of pounds of hazardous material were trucked in and stored in a warehouse for years.
KBIA’s Harshawn Ratanpal and The Beacon’s Ceilidh Kern have a preview of their series Dumped in Berger.
Harshawn: Every year, thousands of people visit Hermann, Missouri, for wineries, Oktoberfest and scenic tours of the Missouri River.
15 minutes down the road is the lesser-known town of Berger, home to just 250 people.
Ceilidh: Drive past the abandoned buildings and onto the unpaved Zero Road, and you’ll see a warehouse that stands apart from the acres of corn and soy.
It used to house factories that employed the townspeople, before the last one closed in 2002.
Harshawn: And from 2013 to 2019, it housed millions of pounds of hazardous material containing toxic, heavy metals.
Ceilidh: The company behind it was called U.S. Technology, owned by a man named Raymond Williams. The company created something called a sandblasting material. Basically, little plastic pellets used to strip paint off of machinery, vehicles and, in this promotional video, an airplane engine.
Promo video: “This is an MD80 engine cowl, and we have stripped half the paint off it … at about a half a square foot per minute."
Harshawn: The company's clients included the U.S. government and defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin. One of the company’s selling points — dating back to the 1980s — was that the blast material is an environmentally better option than the alternative: chemically stripping off the paint.
US Tech loans out the blast media, it's used a few times, and then given back to the company to recycle it. That’s important because now the plastic comes back mixed with heavy metals from the paint. Environmentally, recycling sounds like a great plan…
Ceilidh: If it ends up getting recycled. Which the millions of pounds in Berger weren’t.
Harshawn: The government says company owner Raymond Williams didn’t really have the ability to properly recycle the material, he just needed to get rid of it. By 2013, the waste had been stored in Mississippi for more than a decade and the clock was ticking. The state environmental department said Williams had until the end of the year to get it out of there.
Ceilidh: So, he reached out to Daryl and Penny Duncan, who owned a warehouse in Berger, Missouri.
Over the course of several months, 13 million pounds of the spent blast material were trucked to Berger in sacks and drums. They would sit there, unrecycled, for five years as state and federal officials investigated the site, and unsuspecting Berger residents came in contact with it.
Harshawn: U.S. Tech has been in business for decades. So why didn’t the waste in Berger get recycled? That depends on who you ask. We talked to the EPA —
Joe Davis, EPA: “They had this, this great plan to recycle it all, well, that didn't happen."
Harshawn: We talked to residents of Berger —
Glenn Vollersten, Berger resident: “They kept it under wraps because of whose it was."
Ceilidh: But the key players seemed to be in the wind. We couldn’t get in contact with the Duncans, who had pleaded guilty to accepting the waste.
And US Tech’s owner, Raymond Williams, had just finished a stint in prison for a different, but related, crime that we’ll get to later.
On a whim, we searched for his number on those seedy sites that have personal information about random people. And on our third call:
Harshawn: "Hi, is this Raymond Williams? My name is Harshawn Ratanpal, and I’m a reporter with KBIA."
Ceilidh: And that’s when the story got a lot more complicated.
Raymond Williams: “I’ll fly to you, I’ll bring all the documents, I have mountains and mountains of documentation."
Ceilidh: Listen for that and much more in our new series, Dumped in Berger. I’m Ceilidh Kern for the Beacon,
Harshawn: and I’m Harshawn Ratanpal, KBIA News.
Read and listen to Part 1 of Dumped in Berger now on KBIA and The Beacon.
