by Dan Fagin
The Swiss factories were not isolated in the countryside; they were in the middle of a busy city with a long tradition of close attention to public health. In May of 1863, a chemist who worked for the city of Basel, Friedrich Goppelsröder, inspected the two Müller-Pack factories, as well as Alexander Clavel’s, and concluded that working conditions were dangerous and the disposal practices unsanitary. (Goppelsröder did not tell the companies in advance that he was coming—a sharp contrast to what would happen more than a century later in Toms River.) Nine months after Goppelsröder’s inspections, the city council ordered Müller-Pack to stop dumping into the canal and banned Clavel from making any aniline dyes at all. Clavel ignored the order for a while and then built a new factory (still used by Ciba almost 150 years later) that was outside the city limits and, most importantly, next to the Rhine. As an official company history put it, “The immediate proximity of the river as a direct outlet for effluents and also for the disposal of rubbish had become a vital necessity of colour manufacture.”12 But when Müller-Pack, stuck inside the city limits, proposed discharging his factory’s waste into a tributary of the Rhine, the city rejected his idea because the tributary was too dry. Desperate to resume full production, he then suggested putting all of his waste in barrels and emptying them directly into the river. This scheme, too, was rejected.
By then, Müller-Pack had even bigger problems: His waste was making some of his factory’s neighbors seriously ill. The citizens of Basel got their water from shallow wells, and some of those wells were very close to a factory where Müller-Pack had been dumping waste into an unlined lagoon for two years. In 1863, a railway worker became sick after drinking contaminated water from a nearby well. The following year, a gardener and maid who worked in a home next to the plant fell ill after drinking tea made from water pumped from a tainted well. The owner of the home was a wealthy man, and he summoned Goppelsröder to investigate. The chemist analyzed the well water and reported to city health officials that arsenic levels were “so high that the water must be designated as poisoned, which thus clearly explains the attacks of vomiting, etc.”13 He also noticed that the water was yellowish and had an “indefinable, peculiar, and somewhat repulsive odor”—one that was indisputably awful but difficult to describe (similarly vague terms would be used a century later in Toms River). Goppelsröder then tested the factory’s lagoon and soil and even the sediment at the bottom of a nearby canal, finding contamination everywhere he looked. Based on his report, the city in 1864 ordered the older Müller-Pack plant closed. The city also sued Müller-Pack on behalf of the poison victims (by then there were seven). In March of 1865, after eight months in court, he was found guilty of gross negligence. Müller-Pack was ordered to pay a large fine and compensate the victims as well as nearby landowners for the loss of their property values. He even had to deliver clean drinking water to the neighborhood. The humiliation and expense were too much to bear, so a few months after the guilty verdict, he moved to Paris.
Aniline dyes were still a booming business, however, and the Geigys, as the landowners, were not about to let Müller-Pack’s factories sit idle. They took over dye production, and soon Johann Rudolf Geigy-Merian convinced the city to let him deal with the waste by building a pipeline, six thousand feet long, to the Rhine. When the pipeline proved inadequate, Geigy workers began to make clandestine nighttime visits to Basel’s Middle Bridge to dump barrels of waste into the fast-moving current in the center of the river.14 Since the Rhine flowed north and Basel was a border city, Geigy’s waste, and Clavel’s, too, became Germany’s problem, not Switzerland’s. From that point on, chemical manufacturers all over the world would follow the same strategy for getting rid of their waste. They would dump on their own property first, since that was always the cheapest alternative, and then if the authorities foreclosed that option, they would instead discharge their liquid waste into the largest and fastest-flowing body of water available. It was no coincidence that the great chemical companies of Switzerland and Germany built many of their factories beside one of the widest and swiftest rivers in Europe and that Perkin made sure that his much smaller factory was next to a canal that led to the Thames.15
Even the mighty Rhine, however, could not sufficiently dilute all the hydrocarbon waste that the dye companies were pouring into it. In 1882, a chemistry professor at the University of Basel placed fish in cages at various points in the Rhine to prove that they were being harmed by dye waste—perhaps the first example of a controlled experiment involving wildlife and industrial pollution.16 By the 1890s, Geigy, Bayer, Ciba, BASF, and others were dumping benzene, toluene, naphthalene, nitrobenzene, and other toxic distillates of coal tar into the river at volumes that would have made Müller-Pack blush. Meanwhile, in the countryside just outside of Basel, the neighbors of Ciba’s huge dye works continued to complain bitterly about the “disagreeable steam or vapours escaping into the atmosphere” that had destroyed the gardens of their country homes. No one was in a position to make the companies stop. The chemical industry was a crucial component of rising German power and Swiss prosperity. When hundreds of Basel residents downwind from Ciba’s smokestacks tried to block a planned factory expansion in 1900, their protest was rejected on the grounds that “pure Alpine air could not be expected in an industrial area.”17
The rapidly expanding factories, meanwhile, were becoming extremely dangerous places to work. They were booming in every sense of the word, since explosions were a constant threat. So many powerful acids and volatile solvents were used in the dye manufacturing process that Ciba engineers developed an ingenious potential solution: the first wearable respirator, a breathing apparatus designed to protect laborers as they mixed vaporous chemicals by hand. The device was so hot, heavy, and bulky, however, that workers shunned it. Instead, most laborers simply held cloths over their faces—an action that provided almost no protection. Supervisors generally did not insist that the respirators be used because their employees worked much faster without them. Washup rules also went unenforced; not only did Basel’s creeks turn bright blue and red with dumped dye waste, the city’s aniline workers added to the polychromatic spectacle by walking the streets “with their hands and sometimes faces and necks colored in all hues of the spectrum.”18 Accidental poisonings were frequent, with the most common symptoms being convulsions, bloody urine, and skin discoloration. As a result, extremely high rates of worker attrition were considered normal in the dye industry, with one American commentator noting in 1925 that superintendents in aniline factories “considered that their duty had been properly performed if they were able to get out the required production without more than ten percent of their men continuously on leave and if such men as were left were able to at least stand up.”19
Even more ominously, physicians were noticing a new kind of illness they called “aniline tumors.” The man who coined the term was a Frankfurt surgeon named Ludwig Wilhelm Carl Rehn. In 1895, he diagnosed bladder cancer in three of the forty-five dye workers he examined who were engaged in the production of fuchsine magenta. By 1906, he had documented thirty-eight similarly stricken workers in Frankfurt, and other doctors in Switzerland and Germany were making similar observations. Within four years, a leading Swiss medical professor was calling bladder cancer in aniline factories “the most noticeable occupational disease that made a most terrible impression on all who came in contact with it because of its awfulness and malignancy.”20
The growing evidence of harm did nothing to slow the industry’s growth. Like its competitors, Ciba expanded all over Europe after the turn of the century, building factories in Poland, Russia, France, and England. By 1913, Ciba had almost three thousand employees, most of them making products for export or working overseas. The German companies grew even faster. In fact, dyes and pharmaceuticals were the two biggest sources of export revenue for Switzerland and Germany until World War I, when many of the German factories switched over to making explosives and poison gas for the Kaiser’s armies. The neutra
l Swiss eventually picked up the slack and thrived. In 1917, Ciba’s revenues topped fifty million Swiss francs (equivalent to about US $180 million today)—and 30 percent of it was profit.21
In the aftermath of the lost war, and the forced abrogation of many of their prized patents, Germany’s chemical companies embarked on a new survival strategy. The formerly fierce competitors began to work very closely with each other to try to stay ahead of newly strengthened foreign competitors, especially in the United States. Their efforts would climax in the 1925 merger of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and others into the conglomerate Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie (Community of Interest of the Dye Industry), or I.G. Farben, which would gain infamy during World War II as the patent holder of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based poison gas used at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. In the years after the First World War, however, the German companies were still admired for their technical prowess.
The Germans’ new cartel strategy had a predictable impact across the border in Basel, the manufacturing hub of der Räuber-Staat, with its long tradition of appropriating foreign ideas. Swiss profits were falling as German companies reentered world markets, so Ciba, Geigy, and Sandoz, the three largest Swiss dye manufacturers, decided to form a “community of interest” of their own. It was a partnership, not a merger (the mergers would not come until 1971 and 1996), and it was aimed in part at breaking into the biggest market in the world. American tariffs were high. The only way around them was to buy or build a plant in the United States to make products for the American market. In 1920, the three Swiss companies did just that, buying two old factories in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The dye makers of Basel were nothing if not consistent. If the Ohio Valley was America’s Ruhr, its industrial heartland, then the Ohio River was its Rhine and Cincinnati its Basel. The Ohio was wide and deep with a brisk current, and Cincinnati was full of factories, which meant that the newly named Cincinnati Chemical Works would not stand out. Best of all, the factories the Swiss bought were already hooked up to the city’s sewer system, which “treated” waste only in the loosest sense. As in Basel, the city pipes simply channeled it into the creeks and canals that emptied into the concealing waters of the Ohio. At the time, no one seemed bothered that the river was also the principal source of drinking water for more than seven hundred thousand people who lived in Cincinnati and in fourteen other cities farther downstream. After more than a half-century of dumping hazardous chemicals into the Rhine, the Swiss companies were not interested in changing the way they did business now that they had arrived in America.
Subsequent events unfolded like a movie sequel. By the mid-1920s, the Cincinnati Chemical Works was generating steady profits for the Swiss, who responded by expanding into resins and specialty chemicals as well as dyes. Both factories—one in the city’s Norwood neighborhood and the other nearby in St. Bernard—grew quickly, and so did their smokestack emissions and wastewater discharges. The growth reached a fever pitch during World War II when the Cincinnati Chemical Works made dyes for military uniforms and smoke grenades and also became the country’s biggest producer of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), the “miracle chemical” whose potent insecticidal properties had been discovered in 1939 by a Geigy chemist named Paul Hermann Müller. Amid the prosperity, few people paid attention to the appearance of what seemed to be an unusual number of bladder cancer cases among the St. Bernard plant’s dye workers, who were handling the same chemicals that had triggered bladder tumors back in Europe.
As in Basel, however, there were limits to what the local government was willing to tolerate. Cincinnati municipal officials, and business leaders, too, were embarrassed by the condition of the Ohio and the ruination of the small streams that carried so much toxic sewage into the river. The St. Bernard plant, for example, was responsible for nearly one million gallons of wastewater per day. Exactly what was in that wastewater remained as much of a mystery as it had been in Basel, but company chemists knew that it contained high volumes of sulfuric acid, which along with nitrobenzene had replaced arsenical acid as a major pollutant in almost all types of dye manufacture.22 Once it reached the Ohio River, the acidic wastewater from the two Cincinnati Chemical Works factories mixed with effluents from dozens of others enterprises that were, in some cases, even more noxious. Collectively, all that waste made the stretch of river near Cincinnati the most polluted section of the entire thousand-mile Ohio.23 When long-overdue testing confirmed that disease-carrying bacteria were thriving in the foul mixture of untreated sewage and chemical waste, the fouling of one of America’s great rivers became a regional scandal and the subject of four congressional hearings between 1936 and 1945.
The Swiss owners of the Cincinnati Chemical Works, in which Ciba was the senior partner, had been through all this before in Basel and elsewhere: the talk of cancer among employees, the pollution complaints from neighbors, and the government crackdowns that would inevitably follow. The Swiss could see what was coming, and they reacted in time-honored fashion: They made plans to skip town. By the time the City of Cincinnati finally built three large sewage treatment plants in the 1950s and passed a law requiring manufacturers to either pre-treat their waste or pay huge fees to the city, Ciba had already shifted most of its production elsewhere.
Instead of moving to another big, boisterous city like Basel or Cincinnati, Ciba found a much more remote location, a sleepy town where hierarchies were respected and authority trusted, a place where the Swiss could do coal tar chemistry on a grand scale without interference from outsiders, where the river was theirs for the taking. The new property was virgin territory, deep in the New Jersey pinelands, virtually untouched but for a single tumbledown farm along the river. That farm was known as Luker Farm, and its former owners claimed to be descended from a legend named Tom Luker and his Indian princess bride, who long ago had shared a wigwam a few miles away, alongside the same river, according to the old story.
Two hundred and fifty years later, something new was coming to Tom’s river.
CHAPTER TWO
Insensible Things
The monument to coal tar chemistry that Ciba raised in the New Jersey pinelands was like no manufacturing complex the company had built in Basel, Cincinnati, or anywhere else. For one thing, the property it purchased in June of 1949 was immense. The irregularly shaped parcel (it was vaguely triangular) consisted of almost two square miles, with a meandering mile-long stretch of the Toms River forming part of the eastern border. Except for the old farm near the river, Luker Farm, it consisted almost entirely of dense pine and oak forest. At 1,350 acres, the site was large enough to hold more than three hundred factories the size of the original Ciba plant that Alexander Clavel had built back in 1864 on the outskirts of Basel.
Normally, in order to reduce infrastructure costs, factory buildings would be situated as close as possible to existing roads and utility lines. But after almost a century of conflicts with neighbors, the Swiss executives directing the project took the opposite approach in New Jersey. They decided to clear thirty-five acres right in the middle of the vast property, leaving forested buffers of a half-mile or more between the buildings and the outside world. No matter how large the complex grew—and by the 1970s there would be twenty-two buildings, five waste lagoons, and more than a dozen dumps on the property—passersby would see nothing but the front gate and a solid wall of pine and oak. A careful observer might notice, in the middle distance, the top of the water tower and the roofs of the production buildings peeking over the concealing blanket of green. From the windows of a moving car, however, they would be practically invisible. For everyone who did not work there, the plant would be out of sight and out of mind.
The first three buildings were large and low-slung, totaling four million cubic feet (a bit less than the ocean liner Titanic). The Swiss had correspondingly expansive expectations for them.1 The buildings cost $18 million (roughly $150 million today), but Ciba executives thought that the potential payoff was worth the investmen
t. There was just one purpose for all the construction: to produce thousands of pounds of vat dyes every day, around the clock, as cheaply as possible. Ciba had been making vat dyes in Basel since 1907 and in Cincinnati for almost as long, but never at the scale the company envisioned in Toms River.
Vat dyes were an innovative product from a familiar source: coal tar. Their chief building block, a yellowish brown powder called anthraquinone, could be derived from three coal tar components: anthracene, naphthalene, and benzene. There was nothing new about that, of course. Chemists had been making dyes from the ubiquitous tar since William Henry Perkin first did it in his parents’ attic in 1856. What was different about the anthraquinone vat dyes was their durability. Vat dyes got their name not because they were made in vats (they were not), but because of their peculiar chemistry. The dyes would not dissolve in water, yet in the presence of a catalyst could perform the nifty trick of converting to a soluble salt, known as a vat, while coloring a fabric. When the fabric was dried, the dye would revert to being insoluble. That made vat dyes incredibly useful because they bound tightly to fabrics in just one immersion yet were highly resistant to water and sunlight. Almost anything they dyed stayed dyed—even cotton, the bane of dyers ever since the invention of the modern cotton gin in 1793 popularized the fabric.2
Military uniforms had been the dominant use for vat dyes during World War II—many khakis, browns, olives, and blues were anthraquinone-based colors—and now that the war was over, Ciba was sure that civilian demand would soar. Toms River, company managers decided, should become the center of vat dye production in the United States, challenging bigger rivals like DuPont and Allied Chemical. When the plant opened in 1952, it was capable of producing thirty-five colors and four million pounds of dye per year, about 10 percent of all vat dye production in the United States. That was enough to generate about $6 million a year in sales for Ciba, or $50 million in today’s dollars. Moreover, the company was careful to design the road grid and the rest of the plant infrastructure so that production could be doubled or even tripled if demand grew as much as Ciba hoped. Its predecessor companies, starting with Alexander Clavel’s, had been in the dye business longer than its competitors, but Ciba usually lagged behind BASF in Europe and DuPont in America in both innovation and production. Vat dyes were an opportunity to close the gap, and Toms River was the place to do it.
