Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  In that single groping sentence, Percivall Pott’s son-in-law presaged the next two centuries of research into the carcinogenic effects of organic (carbon-based) chemicals. Chemists would spend the next two hundred years sorting out the components of soot and other byproducts of incineration. They would first separate those components into broad groupings like “coal tar” and “soot,” then smaller families such as “amines,” “phenols,” and “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” and finally a galaxy of specific molecules such as anthraquinone, benzidine, and benzo(a)pyrene. Most of the scientists engaged in those tasks would do so in the hopes of creating new manmade hydrocarbons—initially for dyes and then for medicines, plastics, and thousands of other uses. But a few unconventional researchers would choose the harder path, taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Paracelsus and Pott by searching for the “peculiar acrimonious quality” that made some of those manmade compounds so dangerous to the humans who handled them.

  In the early years of the chemical plant in Toms River, it had been easier for managers to ignore or at least downplay signs that the factory was polluting groundwater and the river. But as the company expanded, the uncomfortable reality could not be avoided. The waste basins sometimes overflowed, and even when they did not, huge volumes of wastewater percolated down into the aquifer because most of the holding ponds were unlined. Some of the worst chemicals used at the plant—including arsenic acid, which was supposed to be kept out of wastewater at all times, were sometimes poured directly into sewer drains in incidents the company invariably would later describe as mistakes.14 The wastewater system was not meeting the standards laid out in its permit, though there was still no indication that the state would enforce those standards.15

  More ominous for Ciba were the signs that it had fouled its own water supply after just two years of operation. As early as the summer of 1954, employees complained that the water in the drinking fountains smelled and tasted awful. A few weeks later, the factory’s newly hired supervisor of waste disposal, Morris Smith, discovered the reason: Chemicals seeping out of an unlined wastewater basin had contaminated one of the wells that supplied the factory with fresh water.16 The well was 100 feet deep and 850 feet north of the closest wastewater lagoon—a startling indication of how quickly the liquid waste was moving through the porous soil. By 1956, Smith had determined that the chemical plume had spread more than two thousand feet from the lagoons and was expanding in all directions, including toward the river.17 Two years later, a consulting firm brought in by the company confirmed that all of the wastewater basins were leaking, even the lined ones; their supposedly impermeable asphalt bottoms had “become porous because of the corrosive nature of the waste water.”18 Worst of all, test wells at the eastern edge of the property showed that the plume of contaminated groundwater had spread beyond company-owned land and was creeping southeast toward the fast-growing Oak Ridge Estates neighborhood. The Toms River Water Company was gradually extending its mains into the subdivision, but some Oak Ridge families still got their drinking water from shallow wells in their backyards.

  Just seven years had passed since the chemical plant had opened for business, but it was already obvious that even two square miles of land was not enough to contain its colossal waste flow. Something was going to have to change, especially after Ciba decided to close the Kimberton and Cincinnati plants in 1958 and shift more production to Toms River. If the company could not cope with the waste byproducts of anthraquinone vat dye manufacturing, how could it possibly deal with the additional waste from azo dyes, epoxy resins, and all the other specialty chemicals that would soon be made at the newly renamed Toms River Chemical Corporation? The wastewater from azo dyes would be brightly colored and highly acidic, and the resin operation would add many new toxic compounds to the effluent. It could not be hidden or ignored.

  The company could have responded to this challenge by redesigning its processes to reduce the amount of waste or by building a modern wastewater plant to provide more than rudimentary treatment. One of Ciba’s competitors, American Cyanamid, in 1958 had built an activated sludge treatment plant at its factory in Bound Brook, sixty miles north of Toms River. Ciba had considered building a similar one in Toms River as early as 1955, but building a modern treatment system would have been expensive.19 Even merely lining all of the existing basins with asphalt would have cost $100,000 and would have required shutting down the entire plant for three weeks.20

  Toms River Chemical found a much cheaper solution: The company added a second liner to its initial holding basin and then dug a new set of unlined lagoons at the eastern border of its property, right beside the Toms River. Unlike the old settling lagoon, chemicals seeping out of the five new lagoons would not threaten the company’s remaining water wells, which were a half-mile away. Instead, waste leaking out of the new lagoons would go straight into the adjacent river.21 The riverside location was ironic, because the new lagoons were dug on the site of the “fish pond” that had been touted as an environmental showpiece in 1952 but had never been stocked with fish because of doubts that anything could survive. Now the pond was being bulldozed, enlarged, and transformed into yet another dump for barely treated waste. The State Department of Health could have insisted on a more effective treatment system, just as it could have back in 1952. But state officials did no such thing; instead, they rubber-stamped the company’s plan, concluding that it was consistent with the prevailing industry standard, and issued a new permit.

  With the completion of the new lagoons by the river in 1959, virtually all of Toms River Chemical’s liquid waste was now ending up in the beleaguered Toms. By now, the narrow stretch of river by the factory was little more than “a handy receptacle for chemical wastes left over from our manufacturing processes,” as a company newsletter candidly put it in 1961.22 The company had found a way to protect its own water supply, but more chemical pollution than ever was heading downstream toward the riverside wells on Holly Street that supplied the town with its public drinking water. It was a nice arrangement for Toms River Chemical, but not for the citizens of Toms River.

  Wastewater was only the most obvious of the company’s pollution problems. Solid waste dumping and smokestack emissions, both relatively minor issues in the factory’s early years, suddenly were big concerns starting in 1960, now that the plant was making azo dyes, epoxy resins, and a slew of arcane specialty chemicals. The types of waste were familiar: gummy distillation residues, solid chunks of unreacted chemicals, solvent-soaked filter cake, and chalky earth mixed with waste. Instead of just a few drums each day, however, the company was now filling dozens of fifty-five-gallon drums every shift. The azo dye manufacturing process was not as wasteful as vat dye production, but it did generate a half-pound of filter cake and two-thirds of a gallon of mother liquor (a concentrated liquid residue) for every pound of azo.23 There were two new waste sludges to deal with, too.24

  All that sludge and all those fifty-five-gallon drums would have to go somewhere; once again, Toms River Chemical selected the cheapest possible destination: an open pit. This time, company managers could not claim to be ignorant about the environmental consequences. By 1960, they knew that the company had wrecked several of its own water wells by dumping liquid waste into unlined lagoons, and they also knew that the plume of underground contamination was expanding in all directions. Similar incidents elsewhere had prompted Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont to experiment with new treatment processes and off-site transfers of highly toxic wastes instead of relying entirely on open-pit dumping on their own properties.25 Not in Toms River, however. Toms River Chemical would not build a modern, lined landfill until it was finally forced to do so in 1977.

  The company did not bother digging a new pit for its newest dump. Instead, it used the leaky settling lagoon, which was dry now that the wastewater had been re-routed to the new lagoons by the river. Now azo sludge and a stream of drums from Building 108 would be carted to the shallow basin and dumped. To conserve space, workers
used earth moving equipment to mash the drums before burying them. The drum-crushing operation extended the life of the dump, which was used until 1977, but it also ensured that the chemicals inside the drums would leak even faster into the water table—just as liquid waste had leaked during the site’s previous incarnation as a settling lagoon.

  As laboratory assistants in the 1960s, John and Ray Talty and George Woolley visited the dump frequently, usually lugging five-gallon cans filled with potent solvents and mother liquor residues. Their destination was the southern edge of the basin, where several cylindrical concrete tubes, or standpipes, had been embedded in a newly poured concrete slab. The standpipes (the workers called them the Smudge Pots) were open all the way to the ground, which meant that whatever was tossed inside would go straight down to the sandy soil. At least once a day, someone from the lab would make the long trek to the Smudge Pots. More than 120,000 gallons of undiluted chemicals were dumped this way until the practice finally ended in 1970.

  “We would take these cans out there and pour the stuff in,” Ray Talty remembered, “and then my responsibility was to try to burn off all of the solvent.” Talty would light a piece of paper with a match and toss it inside the standpipe. Often, however, the mixture was too watery and would not ignite. “When that happened,” he said, “you’d just leave it alone, because it would go right into the ground anyway.”

  Elsewhere at the plant, other chemicals were burning on a much larger scale. The newly expanded factory was not just polluting water and soil; it was now fouling the air too. That was a change from the years when vat dyes were the only product. Explosive solvents were such important ingredients in vat dyes that it was too dangerous to try to incinerate leftover waste. Now, however, the factory was making a much wider variety of products, some of which did not use so much solvent. As a result, there was a large smokestack on top of the new Building 108, and a smaller one on top of one of the azo buildings. At a glance, experienced employees could look up at the sky and tell what kinds of chemical reactions were occurring based on the color of the smoke rising from the various stacks. Yellow smoke from the azo complex signaled a bromination reaction. Reddish brown smoke from Building 108 meant that a resin nitration was under way.

  The factory’s neighbors in Oak Ridge and other nearby neighborhoods could not read the smoke signals, but they could see the smoke—and smell it. Almost as soon as the new production buildings were finished, Toms River Chemical started getting complaints about odors, and the complaints increased whenever a plume of colored smoke was visible. It was the first negative attention the company had received since coming to Toms River, and its managers responded by making the pollution less visible without actually curbing it. Instead of adding expensive pollution-control equipment, Toms River Chemical merely adjusted its round-the-clock production schedule so that, as often as possible, the colored smoke would only emerge at night. Jorge Winkler, the Swiss chemist who came to the plant in 1967 and eventually became its director of production, explained the practice this way: “When it was feasible, it was better to do these reactions in the evenings or at night because of the visual pollution.”

  Not everything, however, could be camouflaged. By the 1960s, the Toms River Chemical Corporation was generating too much and too many types of chemical waste to escape notice. That was why George Woolley’s attempt at a nostalgic river swim in 1962, after a three-year absence from the shady pool that had been his summer hangout as a teenager, had gone so badly. The river water looked different and smelled different because it was different. By 1962, the company was discharging twice as much wastewater into the Toms as it had in 1959, and azo dye waste was now a major component. Azo dyes were soluble in water and could color a slow-moving stream almost as easily as they could color a silk blouse or a woolen suit.

  The tinted river water was an early and indistinct fingerprint. It was one of the first signs—along with the contaminated water wells, the colored smoke, and the foul smells—that the people of Toms River, and the employees of the Toms River Chemical Corporation, might come to regret their unquestioning support of the fast-growing company that was reshaping their town so quickly and in so many ways, not all of them yet apparent.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Secrets

  The river ran low during the parched summer of 1965, the driest in Ocean County in a century. It was so low that about one-sixth of the flow under the Route 37 bridge originated not as rain or groundwater but as wastewater discharged by the Toms River Chemical Corporation two miles upstream. Below the factory’s outfall pipe, the river was tinted and frothy, and a strange dark-brown fungus clung to its banks. The stench was obnoxious, but that was nothing new. The Toms had stunk for the previous four summers, too. What was new was that the odor no longer came solely from the river and the waste lagoons at Toms River Chemical. When residents of the nearby Oak Ridge neighborhood turned on their kitchen taps, they could smell it in their household water now too—the water that was piped to them by the Toms River Water Company, which operated three shallow wells (two newly dug) beside the river on Holly Street, two and a half miles downstream from the factory.

  The first people to make the connection between the malodorous tap water and Toms River Chemical were plant employees, many of whom lived in Oak Ridge. For them, the smell was nauseatingly familiar. They knew it from the factory’s own drinking fountains, which drew from company wells that had been tainted with dye wastes since the mid-1950s. Almost no one drank from the fountains at Toms River Chemical—not more than once, anyway—and now the familiar smell was in their water at home, too.

  Jim Crane, the company’s manager of chemical engineering, lived in the neighborhood and was among the first to notice the odor at home, while taking a shower on a scorching July day in 1965. It must have been a supremely frustrating lavation for Crane; he had been trying to cope with an escalating series of pollution problems at the plant ever since 1959, when the production lines for azo dyes and resins shifted to Toms River. Crane had no special training in environmental matters; he had supervised DDT manufacturing in Cincinnati, and his main job at Toms River was to make the manufacturing process as efficient as possible. Because Toms River Chemical had no environmental department, however, coping with the manifold consequences of the plant’s burgeoning waste discharges was an unwelcome part of Crane’s portfolio.

  The Swiss had hoped that dilution would mask its pollution of the Toms River, just as they had hoped it would in the Rhine and the Ohio. But the natural flow of the Toms averaged just 120 million gallons per day (about five hundred times less than the Ohio) and dropped to only about thirty-six million gallons when the weather was hot and dry.1 That was not nearly enough volume for significant dilution. Toms River Chemical was now not only discharging five million gallons of wastewater directly into the river every day, it was also withdrawing at least five million gallons of clean upstream water to cool equipment (among other purposes) before returning it to the Toms. This “cooling water” picked up nitrobenzene and other chemicals during its labyrinthine journey through the plant. In addition, another two hundred thousand gallons of chemical-laced groundwater flowed off the property every day and seeped into the river through its sandy banks. The feeble stream was simply overwhelmed by the deluge of industrial waste.

  Signs of distress appeared almost immediately after full-scale production of azo dyes began in 1960. Unexpectedly high bacteria counts in the factory effluent (probably from sewage) forced the company to start adding chlorine to the wastewater, which increased the “medicine” odor in the Toms River. On one hot summer day in 1960, the chlorinator broke down and bacteria counts spiked in the river, forcing the closure of several bathing beaches miles downriver.2 The following spring, Crane warned his bosses that “this could be very obnoxious during swimming season”—and it was.3 That summer, inspectors from the state Division of Fish and Game paid the first of many visits to the factory. After accompanying the inspectors to view the brown fungus
below the outfall pipe, a company manager, Al Meier, wrote a candid memo to his superiors. “As much as I personally enjoy swimming in fresh water, I would not swim in the waters below our plant effluent even if I were paid a reasonable sum,” he wrote, adding that he expected the state agency to soon launch a formal investigation. “I feel that we are constantly skirting on the thin edge regarding our waste water treatment problems,” he concluded.4

  By the summer of 1963, Toms River Chemical was over that thin edge. After the local papers published reports of dead fish floating in the river, organized opposition to the company appeared in town for the first time, in the form of a new group called the Ocean County Fish & Game Protective Association. The group blamed the factory discharges for killing marine life, including perch and flounder found covered with sores seven miles downstream. The group found allies in one of the local papers, the Ocean County Sun, which publicized the fish kills, and in Philip Maimone, a developer who also owned a Cadillac dealership. Back in 1949, Maimone had sold Ciba most of the land for its factory complex. He still owned more than six hundred acres of riverfront property and now protested that the company’s pollution was wrecking his investment.

  Whether Toms River Chemical was really responsible for fish kills occurring miles downstream was unknowable, but there was no doubt that almost nothing could live in its undiluted effluent—especially during hot summers. Gill-breathing fish cannot survive without dissolved oxygen, but carbon-based liquid waste—including sewage and organic chemicals—contains microorganisms that are voracious consumers of dissolved oxygen. The bad news for local fish, and local fishermen, was that bacteria and other microbes thrived in Toms River Chemical’s effluent. By the summer of 1963, microbes downstream from the factory outfall were consuming oxygen at a rate more than ten times higher than in the unpolluted upstream stretches and more than three times higher than state rules allowed. The “BOD” rate, for biochemical oxygen demand, was equivalent to a city of thirty thousand people dumping their raw sewage into the river.