Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  The conquest of communicable disease that began in earnest in 1837 with William Farr’s scrutiny of the London mortality lists not only gave birth to modern epidemiology, it also clinched the case that waste in all forms, including sewage, was too important a problem to be left solely to private enterprise. Yet the necessity of regulating waste also created unexpected opportunities for canny entrepreneurs like Nick Fernicola, whose actions would pose health risks that Farr and John Snow could never have imagined.

  A simple pecking order has always characterized mankind’s relationship to waste: The wealthy throw out what they do not want, the poor scavenge what they can, and whatever remains is left to rot. A few ancient civilizations were adept at reusing excrement, ash, and other waste as fertilizer. The more common waste disposal technique, however, was simple dumping, which is why heaps of midden—shells, feces, bones, pottery shards, and other refuse—are conspicuous features of archaeological sites.

  As cities emerged from nomadic and agrarian societies, however, vermin and odors made open-pit dumping a problem. Rulers responded with the first waste-management laws, ordering the burning or burial of waste—preferably out of town. The oldest known landfill, a series of earth-covered pits in the Cretan capital of Knossos, is about five thousand years old. Ancient Jerusalem’s dumpsite was beyond the walls of the Old City in the Valley of Hinnom. In the days of the Judaean kings, according to the Bible, cults would go to the valley to sacrifice children to the pagan god Moloch. By Jesus’ time, Hinnom was a foul dump full of rotting garbage, animal carcasses, and smoky, acrid fires. It was, in a word, hellish, which is why the valley’s other name, Gehenna, came to stand for the place where sinners were tortured in the fires of eternal damnation.

  In the centuries that followed, Gehenna’s successors arose at the edges of many major cities, with little oversight or interference from governments. They were lawless places where only criminals and the poorest of the poor would go. The culture of scavenging that arose there, and also in the back alleys and fetid waterways of the great cities, was both intricate and dangerous; its desperate practitioners faced occupational risks that rivaled those of Percivall Pott’s chimney sweeps. Variants survive today in slum-ridden megacities like Cairo, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires, but the epitome was early nineteenth-century London, where a scavenger army of tens of thousands of impoverished men, women, and children, each with a defined specialty, scavenged the dregs of the metropolis. There were toshers in the sewers and mudlarks on the riverbanks, rag-pickers atop rubbish heaps and bone-pickers behind kitchens. “Pure-finders” scooped up dog manure for tanneries, dustmen collected ash, and night-soil men emptied cesspools. Even coarse dust was sieved at the dumps and reclaimed for the manufacture of bricks. Teeming cities like London and Paris could not have functioned without the ad hoc scavenging system, but the cost was very high. The scavengers worked in filth, and as the investigations of William Farr and John Snow demonstrated, filthy conditions were crucial in the spread of communicable disease.

  The solution most cities chose was to transform waste collection into a public function overseen by government officials instead of an unregulated private enterprise that depended on legions of poverty-stricken scroungers.16 Cities built their own waste-collection systems, financed by taxes and fees. Waste handling became a mechanical task, instead of one performed by hand by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. There were unforeseen consequences, however. Under the old scavenger system, waste was spread throughout the metropolis, but the new publicly owned works concentrated an entire city’s sewage and garbage in just a few places where conditions were especially awful. Governments became the largest polluters in their own jurisdictions, having built colossal landfills, incinerators, and sewage treatment plants to replace the thousands of refuse piles and drainage pipes that had speckled major cities. Dependent on unpopular taxes and fees, these waste behemoths were expensive to build and maintain and tended to operate far beyond their design capacities as city populations boomed.17

  On top of those dilemmas came the explosive growth of industries that generated tremendous volumes of liquid and solid waste. The Great Depression and shortages of raw materials during the First and Second World Wars temporarily masked the problem by stimulating reuse of discarded material, but the postwar economic boom ended that. The City of Cincinnati’s experience with the Cincinnati Chemical Works, in which a resentful city government eventually imposed large fees on the company for dumping hazardous waste into the municipal sewage system, was repeated throughout the industrialized world in the 1950s and 1960s. Some cities went further and closed their gates entirely to factory waste. Suddenly, manufacturers needed to find new places to dump and new people to do the dumping. They needed Nick Fernicola.

  The Toms River Chemical Corporation, of course, did not have to worry about finding a dumping ground. By the late 1960s, the factory was generating enough hazardous waste to fill several thousand drums every year, but the company had no need for someone to haul it away. The factory property was pockmarked with pits, ditches, and lagoons after a generation of dumping, but there was still plenty of additional space available. Just as the Swiss had envisioned way back in 1949 when they had selected the huge and secluded site, the sponge-like sandy soil seemed to have an infinite capacity to absorb whatever was placed on it. In 1966, for example, six open-pit dumps were operating at the factory, plus a primitive incinerator that accepted twenty-five truckloads of waste every day. There was also an open area that held several thousand drums filled with toxic waste. For liquid waste, meanwhile, the ocean pipeline was turning out to be a boon, just as company managers had hoped. There was enough unused capacity in the pipe for the company to sell space to other manufacturers, which paid Toms River Chemical to take their waste and pump it into the Atlantic. The company even began accepting solid waste drums from other Ciba facilities around the country and burying them on the factory grounds. More than ever, Toms River Chemical was not just in the chemical manufacturing business; it was very much in the hazardous waste disposal business, too.

  After the river pollution controversies of the early 1960s, company managers were careful not to talk about all the out-of-town waste they were accepting, just as they never disclosed that dye chemicals had contaminated the town’s drinking water in 1965. Even after the ocean pipeline opened in 1966, Toms River Chemical still faced a “staggering number of problems associated with our effluents and/or water supply,” as one company manager put it in a memo.18 Ground-water beneath the plant was so contaminated that it was harder than ever for the company to find drinking water clean enough to use at the factory. The river smelled better now that direct dumping had ended, but toxic chemicals were still seeping into the Toms through the sandy soil, and the factory’s neighbors still sometimes complained about the “terrible stench” from the ten-acre holding pond where wastewater was stored before it was pumped to the ocean.19 Worried about public reaction, company officials made sure that the plant’s tepee-style incinerator burned its smokiest materials only at night and told outside contractors not to talk about any of the work they were doing on the factory’s waste-handling systems.20

  Toms River Chemical was so worried that its mistreatment of the river had damaged its reputation that in 1967 the company commissioned a poll of town residents. The results were a relief. Eighty-six percent said Toms River Chemical was a community asset, while just 6 percent called it a liability (the other 8 percent said it was both). Thirty-four percent said the factory was the major cause of water pollution in the region, but only 4 percent would object if it expanded.21 “You came out smelling more like a rose than a chemical plant,” the pollster said in the company newsletter.22

  There was only one important note of caution: The town was full of newcomers who did not regard Toms River Chemical as the irreplaceable heart of the community. Sixty percent of residents questioned in the poll had lived in the area less than ten years, which meant that very few people remembered ho
w weak the local economy had been before the Swiss arrived in 1952. Potentially more troubling for the company, only 10 percent of those polled worked at the plant or had a close relative who did, a significant change from the late 1950s when, by some accounts, one household in three had a direct connection to Toms River Chemical. Toms River was not quite the company town it had been in the 1950s. Toms River Chemical was still liked, but it was no longer venerated; mostly, it was ignored. If its environmental practices ever again became a focus of public interest, the company would have relatively few friends it could count on.

  There was certainly plenty of action to distract residents from paying attention to whatever was going on behind the thick curtain of oaks and pines at the factory site. It seemed inconceivable that Toms River and the surrounding communities in Ocean County could grow more rapidly than they had in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet they did. The deadly summer riots of 1967 in the predominantly black slums of Newark were both cataclysmic and catalytic. White flight from the urbanized northeastern corner of the state accelerated and then shifted farther south in 1970 after riots in Asbury Park, where there was a significant minority population just twenty miles north of Toms River. “After the riots, people were running down here in droves,” remembered John Paul Doyle, a Toms River attorney who served in the state assembly for eighteen years starting in 1974. “The expression was: ‘Riots and race gave them a reason, and the parkway gave them a route.’ ” Between 1960 and 1977, Ocean County’s population tripled to 320,000; the 1970 census listed it as the sixth-fastest-growing county in the entire United States. Ocean had been solidly Republican for decades, but the latest migration made it whiter and more conservative. (By 1980, Ocean was 97 percent white.)

  Among the flood tide of new arrivals was a young couple: Rusty and Linda Gillick. They settled into a comfortable home in the Brookside Heights section, near what would soon be the site of the town’s third high school. Rusty worked at a local bank; Linda was a schoolteacher who stopped working full-time after their oldest son, Kevin, was born in 1971.

  Like a fast-growing toddler whose shoes always seemed to be one size too small, Toms River was perpetually short of public services. Its roads and classrooms were overcrowded, and its water and sewer systems were operating at the edge of their capacities—and often beyond them. At first, the municipal sewage plants dumped their wastewater into the river, just as Toms River Chemical had. Later, with the assistance of engineers from the chemical factory, the sewer districts again followed the company’s lead by building their own discharge pipes and shifting to ocean dumping. The school board, meanwhile, was under constant pressure to build more schools. In 1964, the board had jumped at the chance to build an elementary school in Oak Ridge even though the playground backed right up to the edge of Toms River Chemical’s property. One of the board members, a physician, had objected—“We don’t know what’s back there,” he had warned—but was outvoted, according to Don Bennett, a longtime local newspaper reporter who heard the story from his father, John, the superintendent of the Toms River schools at the time. By the late 1970s, Toms River would be the largest suburban school district in the entire state.

  The soaring population growth diluted the importance of Toms River Chemical to the local economy, but the company’s connections to the local power structure were still impeccable. Its Swiss executives mainly socialized among themselves but compensated by throwing themselves into the work of community groups trying to cope with the region’s headlong growth. Company accountants even helped develop a formula that steered more state aid to local schools. The employee union was active in county politics, and several spouses or siblings of employees held local office, including mayor.

  Chemists and engineers at Toms River Chemical also kept up their longstanding practice of assisting the perpetually overwhelmed Toms River Water Company, which needed all the help it could get. Almost every summer, the water company struggled to meet peak demand, which soared from one million gallons a day in 1960 to five million in 1970. (By 1977, peak daily demand would top ten million gallons.) The shallow wells on Holly Street, despite their proven vulnerability to whatever chemicals were still seeping into the river from the factory, remained the source of more than half of the drinking water Toms River Water supplied to its customers. The water company needed more wells—in fact, it needed enough open land to drill many more wells. In 1970, it found what appeared to be a suitable site, a parcel just east of the Garden State Parkway. By the summer of 1971, Toms River Water was operating four wells at its new Parkway well field. It added two more wells there the following summer. By 1975, there were eight Parkway wells—six of them shallow—supplying almost half of the town’s water during the summertime peak.

  The town had gone from depending on one set of wells beside the river to depending on another set beside the parkway, but the exchange seemed to be a good one. The new wells were in the most rural part of town, safely uphill from Toms River Chemical and away from the river. Except for the parkway, there was nothing near the new well field except some houses and churches—and a few run-down egg farms.

  Samuel and Bertha Reich were among the wave of Holocaust survivors who settled in Ocean County and took up egg farming after World War II. “It was a hard business, but it was the easiest business to do if you didn’t know any English,” Bertha Reich remembered. The small farm they bought in Toms River in 1952 was one of many that lined Route 9 in those days, in the neighborhood known as Pleasant Plains. Poultry farming was never a lucrative line of work, and the widespread use of refrigerated trucks starting in the 1960s devastated the local industry by making it possible for huge meatpacking operations in the Midwest to long-haul meat and eggs all the way to New York and Philadelphia. Many of the farms on Route 9 shut down, including the Reichs’ farm in 1965. Now that he was out of the egg business, Sam Reich found work as a construction manager in North Jersey, but the job did not pay particularly well, and the taxes on their property kept rising as the town grew. The Reichs’ biggest asset was their land, and they began looking for ways to generate income from it. “We wanted some renters,” Bertha Reich recalled.

  Reich Farm was not far from the town dump, so Nick Fernicola had driven by it for years, including on his evening forays to the Rustic Acres to shoot pool. Sam Reich was a friend of a friend, so when Fernicola heard that Reich might be amenable to a business proposition, he approached Reich, in August of 1971. Fernicola suggested that Reich lease him the former egg farm’s back two acres—conveniently out of sight from the main road—as a place to store the empty drums he was accumulating after emptying them in the town landfill.23 The two men quickly agreed on a rental price that was dirt cheap: just $40 per month, starting August 15. Sam and Bertha Reich would later insist that they had never consented to turning their land into a toxic dump and had agreed only to allow temporary drum storage while Fernicola looked for a permanent site. Fernicola, meanwhile, would claim that any chemicals that ended up on the ground at Reich Farm got there via incidental spillage, not deliberate dumping—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In any case, by September Fernicola’s three trucks were making two or three runs a day between the Union Carbide factory in Bound Brook and Reich Farm.

  Fernicola had arranged with Sam Reich to rent a building at the farm to store his fifty-five-gallon drums but soon outgrew that space. The drums started piling up outside—first by the dozen and then by the hundred. At first, Fernicola tried to find other places to empty the drums before taking them to the farm. The Dover landfill was no longer a friendly destination, so he briefly dumped waste at the nearby Whiting and Manchester town dumps. That arrangement ended in early November when a laborer in the Manchester landfill struck one of Fernicola’s drums with the blade of his bulldozer, setting off yet another explosion and injuring the driver. By then, Fernicola had hit on a novel, if illegal, idea: He would make his own mini-landfill in the back of Sam Reich’s farm. He used a front-end loader to scrape out a ser
ies of shallow trenches into which he and his haulers could dump drums that were too damaged to be recovered.24 Instead of using a ramp, Fernicola often would just roll the drums off the backs of the trucks and let them drop into the trench, where they often broke apart on impact. Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals splashed directly onto the farm’s sandy soil, with no barrier to prevent them from seeping down through the sand and into the groundwater that flowed beneath.

  By the end of November, Fernicola had dumped five thousand drums at Reich Farm—in addition to the fifteen hundred drums he had dumped that summer at the town landfill. Business was booming, and Fernicola’s spurned partners at the landfill resented it. Things came to a head one November night at the Rustic Acres, when Sharkey and Columbo confronted him. What happened next, according to Fernicola, was a scene that combined elements of The Godfather and The Three Stooges. In a court deposition years later, Fernicola claimed it happened this way: “They said I am taking bread out of their mouths.… They threatened me: ‘A match would cure all your problems. We know where you’re dumping.’ So I knocked both of them out cold.… I grabbed them in the back of the head and whacked the heads together and they went out, and I left.”25

  There is no way to know how much Fernicola embellished his description of the head-knocking incident, but what is incontestable is that a few days after the fight, the authorities started taking at least a vague interest in Fernicola’s operation at Reich Farm. Someone from the town government called the New Jersey Bureau of Solid Waste Management, an arm of the attorney general’s office, but that office—whose small staff was responsible for investigating dumping throughout the entire state—declared that it lacked jurisdiction, based on assurances from Fernicola that he was only storing drums on private land, not dumping them.26 There is no indication that anyone from the state bothered to take a look at the site to see if Fernicola was telling the truth.