Russell M. Bliss, the hauler whose spraying of waste oil contaminated with a highly toxic chemical called dioxin led to the abandonment of a St. Louis-area town and nationwide attention, has died.
Bliss, of St. James, Missouri, died April 7 in his sleep, according to an obituary on the website of the Eaton Funeral Home and Cremation Center in Sullivan. He was 90.
In the 1980s, Bliss drew heavy news coverage after it was found that his company had sprayed contaminated oil at Times Beach, a town in southwest St. Louis County, on unpaved streets to keep down the dust.
Bliss’ firm in the 1970s also had sprayed the oil on roads, parking lots and horse arenas at other locations in eastern and central Missouri.
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The toxic mix in Times Beach spread beyond the streets in a 1982 Meramec River flood. By late 1982, test results of soil indicated high levels of the material in streets and yards throughout the town.
That spurred the federal and state governments to spend $36 million to buy out all homes and businesses in the town of more than 2,000 residents.
From 1995 to 1997, some 265,000 tons of rubble and soil from Times Beach and 26 other contaminated sites were burned in a temporary incinerator at a cost of $200 million.
A federal Environmental Protection Agency recap published last year called the Times Beach situation “one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history.”
The EPA report also said it helped spur creation of the federal Superfund law that helps clean up hazardous waste sites nationally.
Bliss, who said he thought the waste oil was harmless, was never held criminally liable in the dioxin cases. In 1983, he was convicted of federal tax fraud for overstating his business expenses and served a year in prison.
Bliss grew up in the St. Louis area and left Ritenour High School to marry and work fulltime as a driver for his father’s salvage oil business.
He took over the business when his father retired and operated the firm from his home near Ellisville. A 1983 article on Bliss in the Post-Dispatch said then that he had a 200-acre farm at Rosati near St. James in Phelps County.
The funeral home website said a celebration of life will be held at a later date.
View life in St. Louis through the Post-Dispatch photographers’ lenses. Edited by Jenna Jones.
Read More: Russell Bliss, waste oil hauler at center of the Times Beach dioxin saga, dies