Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  What Hesse and Härting did not know was that the mineshafts of Schneeberg were veritable shooting galleries of high-energy gamma rays and fast-moving particles emitted by the unstable nuclei of radioactive elements like radon, bismuth, cobalt, nickel, and uranium in smaltite and other local minerals. Experimenting in the 1890s with minerals from the Erzgebirge, Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie, among others, identified the basic processes of radioactivity. Soon after, researchers returned to the mines with photographic plates, Geiger counters, and other tools to measure radiation. Most of the sources of radioactivity in the mines, it turned out, were metallic elements, but one—radon, formed by the radioactive decay of uranium and radium—was a gas that could be easily inhaled. Soon after the Nazis occupied Bohemia in 1938, they discovered that lung cancer was an epidemic among miners in Joachimsthal as well as Schneeberg. The Germans launched an ambitious study of the two mining centers, conducting autopsies on dead miners, experimenting on animals, and taking extensive radon measurements in the tunnels.8 By 1939 they were certain that radon was the cause of the lung cancer epidemics in Schneeberg and Joachimsthal, and they were right. That knowledge, however, did not end the abusive conditions at both locations, especially after the prospect of atomic weaponry made uranium the most precious natural resource in the world. After the war, Joseph Stalin used slave labor at Joachimsthal to build the Soviet Union’s atomic stockpile. The U.S. government, meanwhile, downplayed similar evidence of widespread lung cancer among miners on the Colorado Plateau as it rushed to secure fissionable uranium for nuclear weapons. Even now, radon remains one of the few environmental carcinogens over which there is little debate—it is second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer in the United States, responsible for an estimated twenty-one thousand deaths each year thanks to its ubiquity in many types of soil.9

  Using every technique and tool he could think of, Walther Hesse had managed to find a cancer cluster in one of the most obvious places in the world to look for one. His successors even succeeded in identifying its cause. For the nascent science of cancer epidemiology, it was a misleadingly promising start.

  The slow awakening on Cardinal Drive in the early 1980s was not happening in a vacuum. The world was changing, too, and some parts of it were changing much faster than Toms River. In 1977, a Niagara Gazette reporter named Michael Brown began investigating reports of illnesses and pollution in a working-class neighborhood of his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. The neighborhood came to be known as Love Canal for its namesake feature, a never-completed canal that from 1942 to 1953 was used as a clay-lined dumpsite for drummed and uncontained waste chemicals, including aniline derivatives and benzene. In 1953, Love Canal was covered with dirt and sold by the Hooker Chemical Company to the local school board for the token sum of one dollar, plus the inevitable liability waiver. The members of the Niagara Falls Board of Education knew what was in the canal and had even toured the site with Hooker officials, who drilled holes into the clay so that school officials could see the chemicals beneath. But the school board members, like their counterparts in Toms River ten years later, were intent on finding cheap land for another school to serve their fast-growing community, so they built an elementary school right beside the old dump. Hundreds of new homes soon followed, in an area that had been mostly open land during the years when Hooker was dumping. Homebuyers were not told that they would be living beside (and in some cases on top of) an old hazardous waste dump.

  By the 1970s, the Love Canal neighborhood was rife with reports of strangely colored water in basement sump pumps, dead backyard vegetation, foul odors, and illnesses including miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer. In some parts of Love Canal where the earthen cap atop the old landfill had collapsed, the tops of fifty-five-gallon drums poked through the surface, especially after heavy rains. Michael Brown’s stories in the Niagara Gazette galvanized the community, prompting a charismatic young housewife named Lois Gibbs to organize street protests and attempt some do-it-yourself epidemiology, including mapping the locations of homes where there were health problems. Her son, Michael, had developed epilepsy and a low white blood cell count shortly after beginning kindergarten at the elementary school beside the dump. In the summer of 1978, after studies confirmed high levels of airborne chemicals in dozens of nearby homes, New York State took the unprecedented step of declaring a health emergency at Love Canal, closing the school and evacuating the residents of 239 nearby homes. Five days later, President Jimmy Carter followed with a federal disaster declaration—the first one ever prompted by a non-natural disaster.

  Seemingly overnight, the long-slumbering issue of hazardous waste became a national crisis, with Love Canal its epitome. In Niagara Falls, the ensuing maelstrom of heavily publicized protests and worrisome medical studies—at one point, panicked residents briefly held two Environmental Protection Agency officials hostage at the headquarters of the local homeowners’ association—eventually forced the state and federal governments to expand the evacuation zone to include up to nine hundred additional homes in 1980.

  Love Canal had laid bare the limitations of the EPA’s clout on hazardous waste cases, and Congress resolved to do something about it. Four years earlier, it had passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which gave the agency authority to compel emergency investigations and cleanups at waste sites. But the law’s reach was limited, and the short-staffed EPA used its authority only at the most egregious dumpsites. In most cases, the old dumps were left to the states to address or ignore as they saw fit. After the Love Canal crisis, however, Congress rushed to enact a powerful new law designed specifically to deal with hazardous dumps. Signed into law by President Carter in December of 1980, it was called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, but everyone knew it as Superfund. It directed the EPA to compile and rank a list of the most dangerous toxic waste sites in the country and then oversee their cleanups, which would be funded by the dumpers or, if they could not be found, by a special “superfund” raised from fees on the chemical and petroleum industries and from general tax dollars. Under the doctrine of retroactive liability, companies could be held responsible for cleanup costs even if their dumping was legal at the time. If a dumper refused to comply with a cleanup order, the EPA could tap the Superfund to pay for the remediation and then take the company to court and recoup up to three times as much as the agency had spent on the cleanup.

  The EPA set to work compiling its list of the worst waste dumps. Finalized in 1983, the first “National Priorities List” included 406 dumpsites (later additions would eventually quadruple that number). Sixty-five sites on the original Superfund list were in the undisputed capital of hazardous waste dumping in the United States: New Jersey, which had twenty-four more sites than its closest rival, Michigan. With nine dumps on the list, Ocean County alone had more Superfund sites than thirty-six states. Two of them were in Toms River: Reich Farm and Toms River Chemical, which ranked 105th and 134th, respectively, on the nationwide list. (Love Canal ranked 116th.)10

  As far as the people of Toms River knew at the time, Reich Farm and the chemical plant were merely potential threats, but many local residents were already becoming aware of the actual perils of living near a Superfund site for other reasons. Just a few months after Love Canal became national news, in November of 1978, state officials notified 150 families living near the Jackson Township Landfill that their well water was unsafe to drink; most had to use bottled water for almost two years. The landfill, which was just ten miles northwest of Toms River Chemical, was an old strip mine that had been used as a municipal landfill since 1972, after pollution problems forced the closure of Jackson’s previous dump. When a state health survey found that residents were suffering from rashes due to the contaminated water, the families sued the town, winning a $16 million jury award in 1983 that was reduced on appeal. The case was one of the first to establish that a polluter could be forced to set aside funds to be awarded later if a vi
ctim developed cancer or some other latent disease—a precedent that would later be important in Toms River.

  The advent of Superfund, and the lawsuits it helped to spawn, was bad news for Toms River Chemical—and for Union Carbide, too, since it was on the hook for the Reich Farm contamination. (Nicholas Fernicola certainly could not afford to clean up the mess he had made dumping Union Carbide’s drummed waste.) Until then, both companies had been managing quite nicely in their dealings with the New Jersey departments of health and environmental protection. Except for the partial cleanups at the Reich Farm site, the state agencies had done very little to require Union Carbide or Toms River Chemical to remove waste from the soil or pump it out of groundwater. Instead, the state’s efforts had been focused (without much success) on the much less ambitious goals of preventing new spills and keeping existing pollution out of drinking water wells. But the federal EPA was less susceptible to political pressure than its state counterparts, and the Superfund law gave the agency broad discretion to insist on comprehensive cleanups even if a dumpsite did not pose an immediate health threat. Before Superfund, a corporation responsible for a leaking dump might face a liability of a few hundred thousand dollars, or perhaps several million dollars for the largest spills. After Superfund, those costs would multiply tenfold or even a hundredfold for the biggest and most complicated cases, including the two in Toms River. Love Canal was exhibit A. Thanks to retroactive liability, Occidental Petroleum, which bought Hooker Chemical in 1968, ended up paying the state and federal governments $227 million to cover the costs of cleaning up the dump and relocating more than one thousand families. Occidental also paid slightly less than $20 million to settle a lawsuit filed by more than thirteen hundred residents of the neighborhood, including Lois Gibbs.

  Thanks to Superfund, toxic liability was now a major debit on the balance sheets of even the largest corporations. For more than a century, hazardous waste had generally been left wherever it was dumped, whether in Basel or Toms River or thousands of other places. The passage of Superfund and its counterparts in other countries at last raised the prospect of meaningful cleanups. But the potential costs were so vast that Superfund sites became legal battlefields, attracting legions of pugnacious lawyers, engineers, toxicologists, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and other advocates-for-hire whose conflicting assertions slowed cleanups to a crawl and made health studies vastly more contentious and complex. Environmental epidemiology had always been an extremely difficult pursuit, rife with uncertainty. Now, with tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars hinging on each outcome, it would be even tougher.

  There was no storybook ending on Cardinal Drive for the Lynnworths. In 1986, they sold their house of eighteen years and moved to a different part of town. Their new home was on a large lot, and its backyard was so lushly landscaped that they no longer had to rely on someone else’s forest for the privacy and space they craved. The family needed a change of scenery because Randy Lynnworth was dying. A few months earlier, he had woken up unable to feel his leg, which had gone numb. After more than two years of remission, the medulloblastoma was back. This time, the tumors had spread from the base of his brain to his spine. The year that followed was an extended nightmare of agonizing chemotherapy and inexorable decline, but Randy continued to write poems when he had the strength. One was read at his funeral in the spring of 1987, the year he should have celebrated his high school graduation (he was awarded a diploma posthumously). The boy who loved to run never regained the ability to walk more than a few steps, despite all of his hard work on the parallel bars and in physical therapy. Instead, more than six hundred residents of Toms River walked for him, behind his casket.

  By the time Randy Lynnworth died, Toms River Chemical and its successor, Ciba-Geigy, were no longer revered names in Toms River. A company that had been venerated for so long had fallen fast and far, thanks to a series of shocking events starting in 1984 that no one could have predicted. Through it all, the Lynnworths were interested but uninvolved observers. They were not comfortable in the public eye the way that Linda Gillick was. They had met the Gillicks at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center shortly after Randy’s cancer returned and had gratefully joined the network of families Linda Gillick was building. A few weeks before Randy died, the Lynnworths filed a lawsuit against Ciba-Geigy and eventually got a modest settlement from the company, which did not admit any liability.

  Unlike many Toms River parents who lost their children to cancer, Ray and Shelley Lynnworth never claimed to be certain that pollution was to blame. In fact, the more Ray Lynnworth learned about the complexities and controversies associated with health studies, the more convinced he was that no one would ever be able to find out why Randy had gotten sick. “I can’t base something like that on intuition or what’s in my heart, you have to be more scientific about it,” he explained. “I’m not a political activist, that’s not where my heart and soul are. For me, it’s not about waging a battle for justice or revenge. There are others who feel differently, and that’s fine. It’s a very personal choice.” What the Lynnworths wanted most of all was to honor their son’s memory in their own quiet way. They did so by turning their do-it-yourself summer camp into a formal organization, called Team Randy. More than twenty-five years later Team Randy was still organizing summertime travel activities for Toms River teenagers, with a special emphasis on serving those who are physically disabled or in financial need.

  The Lynnworths never went back to Cardinal Drive. If there was going to be a battle for justice or revenge, others were going to have to wage it.

  PART II

  BREACH

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Water and Salt

  The first cracks in the long peace between Toms River and its chemical plant appeared on the morning of April 12, 1984, at the intersection of Bay and Vaughn avenues, right in the middle of town. Overnight, the road surface had buckled, and a county road crew was sent to investigate. The crew used a backhoe to dig out the cracked asphalt and discovered that the soil underneath was deep black instead of sandy brown and saturated with a liquid that had a strong chemical smell.

  Roden Lightbody drove over to take a look, too. He went because he was a traffic engineer for Ocean County, but that was not the only reason. Red-faced and gruff, Lightbody was an important political figure in the county, and also in Toms River. In the grand tradition of the Ocean County Republican machine, he was both a public employee and a public official. In fact, he was the mayor of Toms River (officially, of Dover Township). By the time Lightbody arrived at the scene, a television news crew was there, and the reporter was asking questions the mayor could not answer.

  “When they dug out the road surface, they found all kind of mucky black material. I thought maybe it came from Ciba-Geigy, but at first we didn’t know,” Lightbody remembered many years later. “We called them and said something’s happening here, and Ciba-Geigy at first said, ‘It’s not our problem.’ ” Lightbody knew that the company operated a pipeline that ran through Toms River, but he was not sure where, and it did not appear on the town’s utility maps. The pipeline was not quite a secret, but it was close. It had been in the local newspapers in 1965 and 1966, when Ciba completed its construction and started pumping five million gallons of partially treated wastewater every day into the Atlantic Ocean instead of the river. But that was a generation earlier, and the leaders of Toms River had long since perfected the art of forgetting unpleasant nuggets of local history, especially those that concerned Ciba-Geigy. Like everyone who mattered in Toms River, Lightbody had strong connections to the factory. His brother had worked there since the 1960s. The mayor had heard plenty of stories over the years about burial pits, strange smells, and unexplained illnesses—who in town had not? But it was not the job of local government to check up on Ciba’s environmental practices, in Lightbody’s view. After all, the company seemed to know what it was doing. “We were not in a position to demand anything from Ciba-Geigy,” he remembered. “We didn
’t have the knowledge.”

  In many ways, the company had never been more popular in Toms River than it was at the beginning of 1984. The factory’s environmental problems seemed to be in the rear-view mirror, growing ever distant with the passage of time. Its solid waste was finally going into a lined landfill and its wastewater to a new treatment plant and then the ocean. Moreover, there was less waste overall than there had been during the peak 1970s because of a shift in the factory’s product mix. Starting in 1983, the company no longer made anthraquinone vat dyes, its original product, and concentrated instead on more profitable azo dyes, resins, and specialty chemicals. The 1972 indictments were ancient history, the river pollution of the early 1960s was forgotten entirely, and the secret contamination of the town’s drinking water in 1965 was still a secret. There was a bitter labor strike at the factory in late 1980—several strikers were arrested for throwing nails under managers’ cars—but tempers had since cooled. With one thousand workers and managers and a $35 million payroll, the chemical plant was still the largest private employer in Ocean County, even if the total workforce was a few hundred below the peak employment before the strike. As if to formalize a clean break with the past, in late 1981 the Swiss changed their factory’s name. Henceforth, it would be known as the Ciba-Geigy Toms River Plant, instead of the name that had meant so much to the town for so long: Toms River Chemical.

  The name change also symbolized the company’s aspirations to move beyond chemical manufacturing in Toms River. Its plans became public in January of 1984, when Ciba-Geigy announced with great fanfare that after a two-year transition period it would move its United States pharmaceutical manufacturing operations from Cranston, Rhode Island, to Toms River. What Ciba-Geigy did not announce was the reason for the relocation: a decade-long battle with Rhode Island environmental officials over the company’s wastewater discharges—one and a half million gallons per day—into the Pawtuxet River and Narragansett Bay. The discharges ended in 1983 when a new municipal treatment plant opened, but by then the company had become deeply unpopular in Cranston and was the target of protests and lawsuits.