This morning’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch carried a story which is all too familiar for fans of The Lost Scrapbook. Reporters unearthed documents showing that 13 million pounds of hazardous waste—”bead waste,” containing cadmium, chromium, lead and other heavy metals used in paint pigments—had been illegally stored in a weed-choked warehouse on a flood plain within eyeshot of the Missouri River.
This poisonous depot is located in Franklin County, in the small town of Berger, which sits adjacent to Crawford County, the home of Isaura and the Ozark Corporation in TLS. And as was the case with Mother Ozark, the provenance of these toxins is purposely difficult to trace. Nine million pounds of its insidious inventory was originally dumped in Mississippi, before it was dug up and shuttled to Missouri, in loads of roughly 300,000 pounds a day for 20 days back in 2013. It’s a massive feat of logistical coordination, but, of course, in 2017, nobody knows anything.
One could splice some of these quotes into Dara’s masterpiece without raising any suspicion that they weren’t original to the novel.
A lawyer for Penny Duncan, owner of Missouri Green Materials, said Duncan was unaware the material was hazardous. She was told by her husband, Daryl Duncan, that the material was recyclable and could be used as a concrete additive, attorney Paul D’Agrosa said.
[…]
U.S. Technology leased the blasting materials to clients and was supposed to dispose of the waste, the indictment says, adding that the waste is not “hazardous” if 75 percent of the blasting materials are recycled within one year.
The indictment claims that on 20 days in 2013, as much as 300,600 pounds of waste a day was shipped from Mississippi to the Missouri Green Materials warehouse in rural Franklin County, near the tiny town of Berger. The indictment says no permit was obtained to move the material to Missouri.
[…]
The potential health risk of the waste isn’t clear. An email message left with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources on Tuesday was not immediately returned.
A September 2016 consent agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls for U.S. Technology and Williams to come up with a plan to properly remove the waste from the Missouri facility and test for any soil contamination.
But federal prosecutors said in the April indictment that the waste was still there. D’Agrosa said he had not been informed of any leaks or contamination.
The lack of a period at the end of the novel just reminds us that this story doesn’t end. It just goes on and on and on…
The Evan Dara Affinity 