Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  In Toms River, however, Ciba-Geigy in early 1984 was still at the center of the community, with strong bonds to the political elite and, via its union, to the citizenry. So on the afternoon of April 12, when Ciba-Geigy belatedly acknowledged that its waste pipe was the source of the leak and a white-suited crew from the factory arrived at the corner of Bay and Vaughn to take over the effort to repair the breach and clean up the mess, Roden Lightbody and the other public officials at the scene were happy to give way and let the trusted experts take over. The leak was quickly traced to a corroded hole the size of a golf ball in the waste pipe. The factory’s highly acidic wastewater had chewed through steel and two layers of supposedly leak-proof enamel, made from coal tar.

  By the end of the second day, the crew from Ciba-Geigy had finished the repairs and was carting away the soaked soil. In a few more days, the road could be repaved, and life would be back to normal on the corner of Bay and Vaughn. Another bit of unpleasantness would be buried and forgotten in Toms River. Any other result was too far-fetched even to contemplate. Certainly no one could have imagined that a two-inch hole would eventually be the undoing of mighty Ciba-Geigy in Toms River.

  Don Bennett’s desk was always the most cluttered in the offices of the Ocean County Observer, which made sense because he was, by decades, the longest-serving employee in the newsroom. The heaping piles of paper on his desk were the strata of small-town news: charity auction notices, county legislative agendas, press releases touting high-achieving middle-schoolers, and the like. The longer he stayed at the Observer, the more space there was in the newsroom for his piles and files, because his colleagues often were not replaced when they departed. When new reporters were hired, they were often young enough to be his grandchildren.1

  In 1984, Don Bennett was already an anachronism in the newsroom, but that did not bother him. He and his wife raised six sons in Toms River, and he never dreamed of moving on to a bigger newspaper in a bigger town. He was a proud member of the community, a former officer in the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the son of the former superintendent of schools. Although his ambitions never extended beyond Ocean County, he took his job very seriously. He wanted to uncover news, not just cover it. “I wanted to keep this community informed. If I left to work somewhere else, then the community wouldn’t be getting important information it needed,” he recalled. “I felt I was needed here.” On his desk he kept a quotation from investigative reporter Bob Woodward: “All good work is done in defiance of management.” That quotation, he explained, “has just sort of been my spirit.”

  Not far from the clutter of his desk Bennett kept two large file cabinets crammed with material on the Ciba-Geigy chemical plant, a place that had fascinated him ever since he arrived in Toms River in 1958, when he was seventeen, just six years after the factory began operating. As a teenager, Bennett swam in the cloudy, smelly river water just downstream from the factory’s outfall pipe. As a young father, he coached hockey at a nearby ice rink and watched his skaters struggle to breathe through the evening stench. And as a reporter, he had occasionally heard stories from union employees about dangerous environmental practices at the plant.

  Turning that information into articles in the Observer, however, was very difficult. The factory “was like a closed empire out there in the woods. It was thirteen hundred acres, and the production area was in the middle of it, so there were these buffers on all sides,” Bennett remembered. Company executives generally refused to answer questions about health and safety at the plant. The county legislators and town committee members never talked about Ciba-Geigy except to extol its contributions to the economy and to local charities. The plant’s blue-collar workers were potentially the best sources for stories about conditions there, but the only time Bennett ever heard from them was when it was contract negotiation time and the union was trying to put pressure on the company. As soon as there was an agreement on a new contract, his phone stopped ringing. For all of Ciba-Geigy’s power and influence in Toms River, its factory remained somewhat of a mystery, rarely appearing in the pages of the Observer, the Asbury Park Press, or any of the local weekly papers unless it was for sponsoring a Boy Scout troop or a golf benefit or some other charitable act.

  Don Bennett wrote those good-news stories, too; it was part of the job. But he always kept an eye out for other kinds of articles, stories about the safety of the Ciba-Geigy plant and the impact of its smokestacks, discharge pipes, and landfills on the surrounding community. Over the years, Bennett managed to get a few of those stories into the paper. In the mid-1960s, he covered the controversy over the construction of the ten-mile ocean pipeline, for example. But his reporting never seemed to have much impact; memories were short, and Ciba-Geigy was very important to the local economy.

  In early 1984, however, Bennett managed to find a story that he figured would make a splash. His tipster this time was his own mother. She was in the beauty salon one morning and heard some wives of Ciba-Geigy employees talking about an interesting piece of information their husbands had brought home: The factory’s wastewater treatment plant was not only treating its own effluent, it was also taking in waste from other factories around the region and had done so for years. That was news, Bennett thought, since the company was pumping all of that wastewater through the pipe and into the ocean just three thousand feet off Ortley Beach, a popular area for swimming.

  The story got even better when Bennett spoke to Edward Post, who worked for the state Department of Environmental Protection and was in charge of enforcing industrial wastewater regulations around the state. Ciba-Geigy, it turned out, had been violating its state-issued ocean discharge permit by taking in all kinds of outside wastes: caustic soda from the Nestlé instant coffee plant in Freehold, cleaning wastes from Sandoz in East Hanover, aluminum salts from the Wickhen antiperspirant factory across the border in Huguenot, New York. In all, at least a dozen companies were trucking liquid waste to Ciba-Geigy’s wastewater treatment plant. Post and his state colleagues believed that the company was in clear violation of its discharge permit, and in 1983 put Ciba-Geigy on notice that if it continued to import waste it would be subject to prosecution. The company’s lawyers deflected the state’s demand by arguing, without any apparent irony, that none of the outside waste was as toxic as what Ciba-Geigy was sending to its own treatment plant and that mixing in the outside waste was actually helpful because it neutralized the company’s own highly acidic dye and resin wastes.

  Bennett knew it was a juicy story. It was one thing for Toms River to tolerate discharges from a company that employed several thousand locals, sponsored scout troops, and owned the country club. It was quite another for the local shoreline to be a dumping ground for factories from all over New Jersey. So on the morning of April 12, when he heard that the company’s waste pipe had ruptured at the corner of Bay and Vaughn, Don Bennett was already prepared to make life uncomfortable for Ciba-Geigy.

  The presence of a television news crew at the site of the leak on that first morning was the first clue that this cleanup might not go as smoothly as usual for Ciba-Geigy, even before Don Bennett had written a word about its waste-handling practices. Toms River was no hotbed of environmentalism, but by 1984 local attitudes were beginning to evolve. Publicity over Love Canal had raised awareness about the risks of toxic chemicals, and so had the forced closure of many local backyard water wells, in Pleasant Plains and elsewhere, that were legacies of the town’s rural past. Linda Gillick was not yet an activist—she had her hands full coping with five-year-old Michael’s unending medical crises—but she and her neighbors were starting to pay attention to the town’s water problems, and they did not like what they were hearing. In 1983, New Jersey newspapers had also been filled with stories about an unfolding scandal at the Environmental Protection Agency over mismanagement of the new Superfund program. Agency chief Anne Gorsuch Burford was forced to resign; her subordinate Rita Lavelle was convicted of lying to Congress. The scandal was a big issue in New Jerse
y, the state with the most Superfund sites. One of Burford’s chief antagonists was James Florio, a tough-talking congressman from South Jersey who had coauthored the Superfund law in 1980 and now pursued Burford with a prosecutor’s zeal.

  There was an even more important reason why the rupture of the Ciba-Geigy pipeline was a big story in Toms River. For the first time, a pollution problem in town was literally impossible to overlook. In the past, the community’s environmental fiascoes had always occurred out of sight: in the back corner of an egg farm, or on the grounds of a hidden factory screened by a thick forest of oak and pine, or forty-five feet below the surface of the Atlantic at the end of a pipe. This time, it was at a busy intersection smack in the middle of town, just down the road from the new Ocean County Mall, which had displaced the riverfront downtown as the true hub of Toms River and the entire region.

  “Until the leak, many of these residents never even realized there was a pipe behind their houses,” Jorge Winkler, the Ciba-Geigy executive, would ruefully recall years later. “It somehow brought the pipeline and the company into the public eye, that’s what the leak did. And that’s when the whole climate changed.” A local lawyer who became a prominent opponent of the chemical plant, Dan Carluccio, agreed. “So many people were new in town that there was no inherited knowledge about the area. People just came here and assumed that everything was fresh and clean and nice. They were so shocked to find out there was a pipeline leaking chemical waste,” he remembered. That the waste was being dumped into the Atlantic—the wellspring of Ocean County’s identity and the keystone of its economy—was especially galling. “People would come down to the Jersey shore and they’d say, ‘You have a chemical plant here? You find those in Linden [near Newark], not here in paradise,’ ” Carluccio said. “It was a shock to many people.”

  A steady stream of negative news stories began to erode Ciba-Geigy’s virtuous public image. What made the stories so devastating was not the news of the leak itself but the opportunity it created for reporters like Don Bennett to bring up broader issues. Even after tests showed that the effluent had not contaminated any water wells near the site of the rupture, there were plenty of other avenues for reporters to explore. Bennett was writing unflattering articles about Ciba almost every day, including stories about its leaking landfills and disputes with state regulators as well as its acceptance of wastes from other factories. Many in Toms River were shocked to learn that Ciba-Geigy and Reich Farm were on the Superfund list of the country’s worst hazardous waste dumps, alongside Love Canal and the industrial sites that local residents associated with decaying cities like Newark and Camden, not their own shiny hometown.

  An even bigger shock, especially to residents of the beach communities, was that Ciba-Geigy had been pumping its treated wastewater into the ocean for almost twenty years. The economies and identities of shore towns like Lavallette and Seaside Park were wholly dependent on clean beaches and a clean ocean. Few people there worked at Ciba-Geigy; summer tourism, not the chemical industry, was the engine of the shore economy. After losing their fight in the mid-1960s to prevent the construction of the ocean pipeline, the leaders of the beach communities stopped talking about it because they were worried about driving tourists away. But the flurry of articles about the leak in the spring of 1984 made it impossible to keep pretending that the pipe did not exist. Ortley Beach was part of Dover Township—its mayor was Roden Lightbody, who was close to Ciba-Geigy—but the community just to the north of it, Lavallette, had its own government and an outspoken mayor named Ralph Gorga. Now that the pipeline was back in the news, Gorga started attacking the company as an out-of-control polluter.

  Ciba-Geigy was suddenly facing its first all-out public relations crisis in a county where it had always gotten its way. The company responded with all the finesse and humility of Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution. Ciba-Geigy’s designated spokesman, at first, was Jorge Winkler, who by now was director of production and environmental affairs at the Toms River plant. An engineer, Winkler had a strong German accent that to American ears made him sound even more arrogant than he actually was. As he would explain years later: “I had an excellent education in science; I never had a course in public relations.” He told reporters, politicians, and anyone else who would listen that the leak was a trivial matter and that anyone who claimed otherwise should not be taken seriously because only Ciba-Geigy’s chemists were qualified to assess the risk. And then Winkler made an assertion that would become notorious in Toms River. The five million gallons per day of treated waste that the company was pumping into the ocean, he declared, were harmless because the effluent was composed of “ninety-nine percent water and a little salt.” In other words, all the company was doing was putting salt and water into a saltwater ocean.

  The statement was not only misleading, it was self-defeating. A frank explanation—that the treated wastewater contained relatively low levels of toxic byproducts of the factory’s dye and resin manufacturing operations—might have tamped down the controversy before it could explode into a full-blown conflagration. Instead, Winkler’s preposterous description and his refusal to spell out exactly what was in the “salt” (Ciba-Geigy claimed that the identities of the chemicals in its wastewater were trade secrets) only served to motivate people like Don Bennett at the Observer and Mayor Gorga of Lavallette. They zeroed in on the obvious questions: Which chemicals were in the company’s waste? What harm were they doing? A company so secretive and disingenuous, they figured, must be hiding something important.

  Until the twentieth century, the evidence that industrial chemicals could cause cancer rested almost entirely on the wobbly pillar of observational epidemiology. These were the anecdotal reports of people like Bernardino Ramazzini, Percivall Pott, and John Ayrton Paris, later bolstered by the more methodical analyses of Walther Hesse and others. They noticed unusually high rates of particular cancers in certain groups of people—scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps, lung cancer in cobalt miners, bladder cancer in aniline workers—who also had been exposed to unusually high levels of hazardous compounds, usually in complex mixtures. But their reports merely demonstrated an association between exposure and disease—a correlation, not a causal relationship. And their observations provided almost no help in determining which particular chemicals might be responsible for triggering cancer, from the hundreds of possible suspects that a chimney sweep or a miner or a dye worker might encounter.

  To strengthen the case for environmental carcinogenesis, research would have to move from the outside world to the laboratory, from observation to experiment. For centuries, in dangerous places like the mines of Schneeberg, humans had been conducting uncontrolled experiments in the induction of cancer. The question now was whether those conditions could be replicated in the tightly controlled setting of a laboratory. Infectious disease research had made a similar transition in the late nineteenth century, and the results were spectacular. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were national heroes in France and Germany, respectively, for their microbiology work. Building on the real-world observations of John Snow and other epidemic-trackers, they grew pathogenic bacteria in Petri dishes and infected a menagerie of animals, from mice to chickens. Through his lab experiments, Koch isolated the microbes responsible for cholera, anthrax, and tuberculosis, laying the groundwork with Pasteur for vaccines and other strategies that would finally bring those ancient plagues under control in Europe and America. In the wake of Pasteur’s and Koch’s successes, many of their disciples turned their attention to cancer, hoping for similar results.

  Cancer had other ideas. As usual, what worked for infectious diseases did not work for cancer. Microbes like Vibrio cholerae could be cultured on a plate; cancer cells could not. (That would change in 1951, with the successful propagation of HeLa cancer cells into a perpetual cell line; until then, attempts to culture cancer cells had failed.) Koch and Pasteur had shown that some pathogenic bacteria could be transplanted from one mouse to another or eve
n from human to mouse without losing their potency, but tumors proved to be extremely difficult to transplant, despite many attempts.2 By 1900, it was clear there would be no “eureka” moment when the mysteries of cancer would be dramatically revealed in the laboratory of an indomitable hero scientist, as cholera’s mysteries had been revealed to Koch.

  The failure of the transplant studies cast doubt on the widely held belief that cancer was caused by living parasites in the human body, perhaps by the same bacteria implicated in infectious diseases. If not a mystery parasite, then what? Victorian-era scientists developed at least three alternative hypotheses for tumor formation, and all of them were linked to Rudolf Virchow, the pivotal figure in a great age of medicine—the “professor of professors,” as he was known.3 Virchow’s own “irritation” theory suggested that almost any kind of external trauma could induce a tumor as long as it occurred repeatedly over a long period. He asserted, but could not prove, that chronic irritation could lead to inflammation, cell damage, and then tumors in the epithelial cells that lined the cavities, organs, and other surfaces of the body—the cells where most cancers originate. A rival theory was advanced in 1875 by Virchow’s former assistant, Julius Cohnheim, who proposed that tumors arose from clumps of “embryonal rest”—fragments of embryonic tissue that persisted in adults and were composed of stem cells that never differentiated into mature cells capable of performing specialized functions. If those long-dormant cells were activated by an outside stimulus, tumors would follow, asserted Cohnheim, who based his theory in part on the fact that fetal tissue looked like cancerous tissue under the microscope. His idea was later modified into the theory of dedifferentiation, which suggested that cancer began when specialized cells abruptly regressed into their more primitive state and began dividing rapidly.