BERGER, Missouri — When he walked into the warehouse on Zero Road, Jason Eaklor had no idea the sacks of powder stored inside were contaminated with heavy metals.
A contractor and Berger city alderman, Eaklor had been asked by a solar company interested in buying the property to tour it and evaluate how much work would need to be done before it could move in.
Despite being a city official and the owners knowing he was coming to tour the building, Eaklor said he heard nothing from Missouri regulators, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the Duncan family — the building’s owners — about the true nature of the material inside.
He toured the building in 2013 with nothing more than “a tape measure and notebook.” He wore no mask or other equipment to protect him from the toxic powder that, according to a Missouri report, had begun to spill out of its containers by the end of the year.
Eaklor was far from the only person to unknowingly expose himself to the material and its contaminants, including lead, chromium and cadmium — heavy metals linked to cancer and other health problems. Local children were known to sneak onto the property to play or vandalize it, Eaklor said.
Around the time the material was shipped to the warehouse from Mississippi, “there were some kids out there trying to set the side of the building on fire with pine needles and stuff that was laying around there, and we had to run them off,” said Eaklor, who is now Berger’s city clerk.
Children might have also been able to get into the building, according to a 2015 report from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.
“They found lights on (in) there and a BB gun was found inside. A Daisy BB gun. My guess is kids,” said Sheriff Steven Pelton.
In addition to local children, “it was common for people to be down there stealing copper wire and plumbing parts,” Eaklor said.
‘That place was like a homeless encampment’
Berger, once a thriving rural community, had seen businesses and residents leave after the factory — which produced rubber stripping for car doors — shuttered its doors in 2002. They left behind abandoned stores and homes scattered across town.
For years after that, homeless people stripped the abandoned buildings of copper wiring and pipes to sell, according to Glenn Vollertsen, a longtime Berger resident whose wife, Chris, is a city alderwoman. He said the factory was also a target.
Joe Davis, an EPA on-scene coordinator, said he’d heard stories about the regular break-ins at the facility even before the material was stored there.
“There was a story of a chase that occurred when these people had hooked up a chain to some wiring in the building and were ripping it out with a pickup truck,” Davis said. “The police showed up and they chased them all around the county roads while they were pulling like 100 feet of cable behind them.”
Vollertsen said he also knew people who lived in the building for days at a time.
“Believe it or not, for a while, that place was like a homeless encampment,” he said.
Asked whether people were living there between 2013 and 2019, when the hazardous material was stored there, he said: “Oh, absolutely.”
“They were all just staying there. You might’ve had 10, 20 people down there at a time,” Vollertsen said. “They’d spend days down there, pulling copper out. There was a lot of copper in there.”
Through a public records request, KBIA and The Beacon obtained reports from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department’s visits to the site between 2013 and 2019.
Four reports were made about the Zero Road facility during that time. One of them, filed a month after the BB gun was found inside the building in 2015, was created when Penny Duncan reported that five propane gas canisters had been stolen from a locked cage inside the warehouse.
According to the report, Penny also informed an officer that she had “been having more recent problems out at her warehouse.”
“She believes young adults are partying there, mentioning that alcohol, tobacco and used condoms were located inside the warehouse,” Deputy Darrin Jones wrote in the report.
In February 2016, another deputy, Brandon Erisman, filed a report that a passerby had found the glass front door to the building shattered. Erisman said he found “a rock about the size of a baseball laying on the floor just inside this door.”
“The doors were also unsecured, and I was able to gain entry,” he wrote. “It should be noted that I have checked this building in the past on routine patrols and know the 100,000 sq ft facility is not kept very well secured.”
The building had been vulnerable since the material was moved there — two years earlier, in March 2014, Penny Duncan requested extra patrol from the sheriff’s department after a “No Trespassing” sign and cones in the driveway had been stolen.
Penny went back to the sheriff’s department shortly after to report that a week after she’d requested extra patrol, two AC units had been stolen from the outside of the warehouse.
Pelton, who has worked in the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department for almost 35 years and has been sheriff for nine, said the building’s alarm system was known to trip regularly.
“We’ve had quite a few alarms sounding down there over the years,” he said. “Critters are getting in there, birds set the alarms off, and sometimes we meet with the (owner) out there, but nothing other than that.”
“Sometimes we don’t take reports of alarm soundings if it’s a repetitive alarm,” he added. “I know there’s a lot more (than the four reported visits), because I’ve responded a couple times.”
Vollertsen said it’s sometimes hard to get a sheriff’s deputy to drive the 40 minutes from the county seat in Union to Berger, even in emergency situations.
“We are all the way on the wrong side of Franklin County and they will not respond out here,” he said. “We had gunplay in town the other day, but they weren’t going to come.”
‘Nobody here knew that’
In late 2013, the only indication that anything was out of the ordinary was the occasional semitrailer driving down Berger’s Market Street, detouring from the usual back-road route to the warehouse.
“I’m the guy that sits on the porch, and I watch everybody,” Vollertsen said. “Did we all know they were putting it in there and what it was? Nobody here knew that.”
They’d eventually find out through articles from a local newspaper, the Missourian out of Washington, Missouri.
“That was a surprise when it first came out,” Vollertsen said. “That was one of the articles that was in the Washington paper, that they did find all that stuff in there, and what it was.”
But the first article came out in 2017, after federal prosecutors announced charges against Raymond Williams, the then-CEO of U.S. Technology, and Daryl and Penny Duncan, the partial owners of the building, for illegally transporting hazardous waste.
Other stories followed as the Duncans, a well-known family in Washington, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of placing someone in danger of death or serious bodily injury from a hazardous waste. They were sentenced to probation in 2018.
That was years after the material was moved into the warehouse in 2013.
That year, after Mississippi notified Missouri about the shipments, Missouri Department of Natural Resources staff came to inspect the site and found used sandblasting powder spilled outside the building.
In their December 2013 report, inspectors also noted that “many of the super sacks were damaged and leaking (spent blast media) onto the floor.”
Missouri then referred the site to the EPA, which sent out its own inspectors, who found that the material was hazardous and the building had been “basically abandoned.”
“That’s when EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division got involved with it as well,” said the EPA’s Davis, who oversaw the cleanup of the facility. “In 2014, (EPA investigators) came out, did some sampling and started building a case against U.S. Technology.”
“It was just amazing when I first walked in. I tell people, if you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark),’ in the final scene with the warehouse, it was like that,” he added. “We were up on an elevated platform at one corner of the building looking out over thousands and thousands of bags.”
That investigation would go on for several years before the EPA and U.S. Tech finalized a RCRA settlement in 2016 that ordered the company to clean up the facility.
But according to a statement from the EPA, U.S. Tech “failed to submit an approvable work plan.” That’s when officials referred the site to the Superfund program — the part of the EPA that cleans up hazardous waste sites — which did its own inspection of the site before ordering a cleanup.
KBIA and The Beacon asked EPA officials about the extent of their public outreach efforts.
In an email, Shannan Beisser, an EPA spokesperson, said that under federal law, the EPA is required to create and make public an “administrative record” with information about sites being cleaned up.
The agency also published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the cost recovery settlement in March 2025, six years after the cleanup. That notice included a request for public comment, but no one submitted any comments, according to Beisser.
The administrative record and cost recovery notice “constitute the record of outreach efforts for the site,” Beisser wrote.
Davis told KBIA and The Beacon that, as part of the site evaluation and cleanup process, he also spoke with the Franklin County Local Emergency Planning Committee and the facility’s immediate neighbors, including a house and farmstead.
But no one from the EPA spoke with anyone from Berger, the town two miles down the road.
“We didn’t know nothing until (the newspaper) put it out,” said Shanell Hudson, a Berger resident. “Nobody came and told us. … We didn’t know about the chromium and all that stuff. We did not know what the hazardous material was.”
Lynelle Phillips, a former public health adviser for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the fact that Berger residents learned about the site’s contaminants through news articles “is not OK.”
“It seems like the community should hear from the government first before it’s out in the news,” said Phillips, who is now a public health professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
She said there are a few different ways to do public outreach about contaminated sites, but a critical piece is surveying the community and addressing residents’ specific concerns.
“You might get all the way through this thing and that community is like, ‘We’re really concerned about brain cancer. It seems like a lot of people have brain cancer,’” she said. “And we can say, ‘Well, none of these contaminants cause brain cancer, but you might have increased cancer risk, and with all cancers, there’s always a risk to metastasize to the brain.’”
“Something like that.”
‘All sorts of bad s—’
EPA testing revealed that inside the warehouse, sampled powder contained as much as 600 parts per million of lead, 1,200 parts per million of cadmium and 2,500 parts per million of chromium. A part per million is roughly equivalent to a drop of water in a large household bathtub.
All three are heavy metals. Exposure to this kind of material “is associated with learning deficits, behavioral problems, just a whole raft of health issues,” according to Mark Lipton, a professor at Purdue University who specializes in organic chemistry.
Lead, a probable human carcinogen according to the EPA, has been found to affect almost every organ and system in the body, but especially the nervous system. Its effects are particularly profound in children, who show reduced cognitive function even with very low blood lead levels.
Of the heavy metals found in the warehouse, cadmium is the only one for which the EPA has determined a safe lifetime exposure limit. The agency found that exposure to 0.005 ppm of cadmium over the course of one’s life is not expected to have any adverse effects.
Cadmium is “a heavy metal that causes neurological problems, developmental problems,” Lipton said. “It’s especially problematic for pregnant women and small children.”
And according to the EPA, breathing high levels of cadmium — a known human carcinogen — can severely damage the lungs, while long-term exposure to lower levels of the metal is linked to kidney disease.
The chromium in the sandblasting powder was hexavalent chromium, a more toxic variety of the element. Another known human carcinogen, it was the subject of a 1993 lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric over the poisoning of a California town’s groundwater supply.
The case — which charged that PG&E had knowingly exposed the community to hexavalent chromium, causing multiple cancers and other health issues — was later dramatized in the film “Erin Brockovich.”
“Hexavalent chromium is a slightly different kettle of fish,” Lipton said. “It’s a known potent carcinogen, and it’s very environmentally persistent, so once in the environment, it doesn’t go away.”
“If it’s packaged as a solid or powder, then the issue becomes breathing and respiratory exposure … (that’s) incredibly dangerous,” he added. “All sorts of bad s— can happen when that happens.”
Economic development
Federal investigators questioned whether Daryl Duncan and his wife, Penny, had created Missouri Green Materials for the sole purpose of accepting and storing the waste. But Duncan told them he had bigger plans.
He said he hoped to recycle the material and bring new life to the Zero Road factory — which his grandfather had built — and the city of Berger.
“We are trying to develop that into an industrial park … We are trying to put (a) railroad tie business in there,” Duncan said.
During that 2014 interview with investigators, Duncan said he had an interested customer, a company called Encell Composites that he said had an order from Union Pacific for railroad ties, supports that keep train tracks in place. The company hoped to make the concrete for those ties with Missouri Green Materials’ sandblasting powder.
Before Duncan and Williams agreed to ship the material to Berger, the Zero Road facility had been put up for sale. It had been vacant for years after its last tenant, GDX Automotive, moved to nearby New Haven in 2002.
When federal investigators asked why the property was still for sale as Duncan was trying to start a new business there, he said: “I am hoping (that now that) we got this business … it won’t be for sale anymore.”
But after state officials shut down Missouri Green Materials’ operation, the property stayed on the market and received some buzz, including from the solar company that asked Eaklor to tour it. It ultimately decided not to buy it because too many renovations would be needed to make it usable.
The cleanup
The building’s condition would keep getting worse.
“It started becoming clear that this probably posed a public threat, because this building was getting vandalized,” said Davis, the EPA employee. “It was becoming more and more decrepit.”
“Things were getting in bad shape. Bags were falling over, they were breaking open. People had been vandalizing them, knocking things down, cutting bags open, spilling the contents,” he added. “We could see where the contents of some of these bags were actually being released out through the cargo doors.”
He said the break-ins were one reason the site was referred to the EPA’s Superfund program for emergency cleanup. Another major factor was the fact that the warehouse is in a 100-year floodplain.
According to local residents and officials, that section of the Missouri River did not flood between 2013 and 2019, when the material was stored there.
It did have a history of flooding, however. During the Great Flood of 1993, Zero Road was engulfed by floodwaters, temporarily shutting down GenCorps’ operations at the facility.
“We didn’t want this to become a bigger incident,” Davis said. “If we had another big flood event and this was washed out, the Missouri River is within a half a mile and we didn’t want all the sediment getting out and the contaminated material getting into the river and washing downstream. That was a big threat.”
If it had flooded while the material was there, the contaminated water would have threatened the species that live in and around the river, as well as the humans who fish or hunt them, said Phillips, the former CDC employee.
Another concern would have been groundwater contamination, which she called “one of the biggest problems we have in this state.”
“A lot of people in rural Missouri have private wells, so you get a plume of contamination in the groundwater, and it migrates just like water does, and it intercepts private wells, and people are drinking this stuff, and they don’t know they’re drinking it,” she said.
While floodwaters never got inside the warehouse, other water did as the building’s condition deteriorated. In his 2016 report about the broken front door, Deputy Brandon Erisman said he did not venture far into the building “as the interior is in very poor condition and smells of moisture and mold.”
Between March and June 2019, more than five years after the first trucks hauling sandblasting powder arrived at the Zero Road facility, EPA officials rebagged and removed all of the material from the building and surrounding area and sent it to a disposal facility near Chicago.
That cleanup cost $4.2 million. It was done, in part, with money from Williams and U.S. Technology. But the federal agencies Williams worked with would eventually pay for it, too, years later, with taxpayer dollars.
Dumped In Berger is a collaboration between KBIA and The Beacon examining the U.S. Technology Superfund site in Berger, Missouri. Stories will publish daily the week of Dec. 15.
