by Dan Fagin
The registries proved to be much easier to create than to use, however. Even if a government agency managed to get all of the hospitals, clinics, and physicians in its jurisdiction to report the cancer information as required, analyzing those statistics was a nightmarish process. Diagnoses were frequently ambiguous, varying greatly from clinic to clinic. Metastatic cancers were often improperly double-counted when tumors showed up in a second bodily organ, and so were recurrences. The same legislators who were eager to take the credit for establishing cancer registries were far less enthusiastic about staffing them adequately, so it was a Sisyphean task to keep up with the torrent of reported data that poured into the cancer registry offices.
New Jersey’s registry was especially overwhelmed. In 1975, the National Cancer Institute had singled out New Jersey for having the highest cancer death rate in the United States. For men, the annual toll was twenty-nine deaths per ten thousand; for women, eighteen deaths per ten thousand.9 Those rates were about 10 percent higher than the national average. Speculation about the cause of the excess focused on pollution, but death rates were not a very good way to identify possible causes of cancer. The key statistic for causation research was incidence—the frequency of diagnosed cases, regardless of whether the patients died. So the state legislature responded in 1977 by creating a cancer registry that collected incidence data, for the first time in New Jersey.
By the time Chuck Kauffman asked for an incidence study in Toms River in 1986, however, it was clear that the registry was a failure. The office administering it was so understaffed that there was already a backlog of more than two years, which meant that in 1986 the most recent complete set of data was from 1983. (By the mid-1990s, the backlog would rise to three years.) By law, doctors and hospitals were supposed to report cases within six months of diagnosis, but they almost never did. The worst offenders were the huge cancer hospitals in New York City and Philadelphia, which treated thousands of New Jersey residents every year. Children like Michael Gillick or Randy Lynnworth might not be included in the registry at all if they were treated out-of-state at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, New York Hospital, or the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—three of the largest pediatric cancer centers in the world.
Even though he knew about the cancer registry’s limitations, Michael Berry wanted to be as responsive as he could to Kauffman’s request. He decided to conduct what the state health department called an “incidence analysis” of childhood cancer in Dover Township, the official name of Toms River. The process could not have been simpler. First, Berry called the registry office and asked for a computer printout listing all of the cases of cancer diagnosed between 1979 and 1983 in children under age twenty who lived in the township. He found fifteen cases. Then, he determined the total number of cases that “should” have occurred in the town if pediatric cancer in Toms River was as prevalent as it was in the state as a whole. Based on the township’s population, he came up with an “expected” rate of 14.7 cases. In other words, the actual number of childhood cases was almost exactly the same as the expected number. Childhood cancer incidence in Toms River was neither unexpectedly high nor low. It was average. As far as Berry could tell from his crude analysis, there was no childhood cancer cluster in Toms River.
Berry reported his results to Kauffman, but neither was satisfied. For one thing, Berry’s analysis did not include totals for specific types of cancer, and even if it had, the numbers would have been so small that it would have been hard to draw any significance from them. In addition, the final year of the analysis was 1983. Through his informal network at the county health department, Kauffman had heard of some recent cases, diagnosed since 1984, but they were not included because the registry was running two years behind. Finally, Berry’s analysis did not include at least some local children who were treated solely in New York and Philadelphia. If it turned out that an unusually high number of Toms River children with cancer were being treated out of state—as Linda Gillick’s recent experience at Memorial Sloan-Kettering strongly suggested—then the registry-based analysis was misleading.
“There’s no indication according to records that cancer in the township is elevated,” Berry told the Asbury Park Press when word of the study leaked out in November.10 But the article, which carried the unnerving headline “Toxic Waste, Cancer Incidence Raising Unanswered Questions,” was anything but calming. It noted that patients treated out of state were not included, quoting a lawyer and a neuro-surgeon who each said that they knew three Toms River children recently diagnosed with brain cancer. Just as unsettlingly, the same Sunday newspaper included a small notice in the television guide for the upcoming week: The WNET-Thirteen documentary Chemical Town USA would air in prime time in three days, on November 19, 1986.11
The executives at Ciba-Geigy were on high alert; they were expecting to be pounded in the program. The writer and co-producer of Chemical Town USA, Michael Rosenblum, had attended college with factory spokesman Thomas Chizmadia and had convinced him to make plant manager Victor Baker available for questioning and to lead a tour of the factory. (“I told my cameraman, just shoot every drippy pipe you can find,” Rosenblum recalled years later.) By the time the tour and interview were over, it was clear that the documentary would be critical of the company, especially because Rosenblum had asked about a possible brain cancer cluster in town. Ciba-Geigy’s lawyers dashed off a letter to WNET president John Jay Iselin claiming that Rosenblum had misled Chizmadia about the content of the story. Iselin had special reason to pay attention, since Ciba-Geigy’s pharmaceutical division had just bankrolled a major science documentary series for WNET (ironically, it was called The Brain). The station’s lawyers insisted on reviewing a transcript of an early version of the documentary. Somehow, Ciba-Geigy also got a copy of the same transcript. That prompted another letter from the company’s lawyers, this time demanding script changes.
In the end, Rosenbaum made only a few of the changes the company demanded. But he and Kathleen Hughes, the associate producer who had done most of the original reporting, both felt that the pressure from Ciba-Geigy’s lawyers changed the overall tone of the documentary by the time the final cut was approved by station executives. They had hoped to feature Randy Lynnworth and emphasize the cluster allegations, but the final version instead stressed the tradeoff between jobs and pollution. Randy and his family did not appear until the tenth minute, long after the story of a Ciba-Geigy worker who was facing a layoff as a result of the planned downsizing. “I thought that it would be a much tougher story than it actually ended up being,” Hughes remembered. “All the major points were still hit upon, but overall it was softer.”
Softened or not, the documentary disturbed many in town when it finally aired. They saw an obviously ill Randy Lynnworth—he would live only a few more months—paging through a family photo album, supported by his mother’s embrace. The Lynnworths could have been anyone’s family, and Randy anyone’s son. “Science today still cannot prove whether the tumor was caused by their proximity to the plant,” the narrator intoned as Ray Lynnworth lifted his teenage son out of his wheelchair and placed him gently into bed. “But for the Lynnworths, the fear that cancer might have been environmentally induced haunts them continually.” In case anyone had missed the point, Shelley Lynnworth added: “You really have to be aware of what goes on around you, because we never ever dreamed that our bubble would burst and our lives would change so drastically. And my God, I hope it doesn’t happen to any of you but you really can’t sit back and say it’s the person across the street, because it’s not. It’s you and it’s me.”
By the end of 1986, it seemed like almost everyone in town was inclined to agree. It was obvious that the cancer issue was not going to go away anytime soon.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Friends and Neighbors
Even after the noisy protests of the previous three summers, no one on the New Jersey shore had ever seen anything like August of 1987. This time, the instigator was Mother
Nature, not Greenpeace or the Save Our Ocean Committee. Each incoming tide seemed to deposit a new horror on the beaches of Ocean County. On August 13, just in time to ruin a peak weekend, a massive slick of medical waste—probably dumped by a passing barge—washed ashore on a seventy-five-mile stretch of beachfront. The debris included syringes and needles, blood bags, and bandages.1 On Long Beach Island, a boy stepped on a hypodermic needle; so did a mother in Point Pleasant, north of Toms River. The county beaches stayed closed for three days, at the height of the tourist season. The following week, dead crabs washed ashore at Barnegat Light, and high bacteria counts from seagull droppings closed the beaches in Seaside Heights—right next to the Ciba-Geigy pipeline terminus. Most disturbing of all were reports of dead bottlenose dolphins covered with bloody sores. Eighty carcasses were found that summer on New Jersey beaches, apparent victims of viruses and a toxic algae bloom of unknown origin.
None of those plagues was new to the region—there were actually fewer beach closings in 1987 than in the previous summer—but their cumulative impact in a single month was shocking. Tourism was Ocean County’s largest industry by far, contributing more than a billion dollars a year to local businesses. For merchants, the summer of 1987 was an unmitigated disaster. The New York Times described children roaming nearly deserted beaches, collecting tampon applicators to use as sand castle turrets.2 Shore tourism was not only New Jersey’s second-largest source of income (after petrochemicals), it was at the core of New Jerseyans’ self-identification—the best retort to outsiders who derided the state as a putrid industrial wasteland. The economic damage from the pollution was bad enough, but the ridicule was worse. It prompted outrage that was widespread and deeply felt. At two o’clock on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, at the close of the nightmarish summer season of 1987, thousands of beachgoers joined hands in an unprecedented protest that stretched for miles on Long Beach Island.
For Ciba-Geigy, the timing was miserable. In April, the company had applied for six state permits it would need to build the pharmaceutical plant and stay in business in Toms River. For the plant’s critics, on the other hand, the hellish August was a boon. On Labor Day weekend, while beachgoers were grasping hands down on Long Beach Island, one thousand people gathered at Ortley Beach for a protest rally organized by Frank Livelli’s group, Save Our Ocean. Speaking through a bullhorn, Livelli urged the crowd to boycott Ciba products and tried to link the company’s wastewater discharges to the washups of floatable waste. “What the hell is the difference if they’re dumping it off a barge or through a pipeline under the water?” he asked.3
Actually, there was no connection at all between Ciba-Geigy’s discharges and the dolphin deaths, beach closures, or medical waste washups. The company had been dumping wastewater into the Atlantic for more than twenty years; its effluent had never been cleaner than it was in 1987. In September, the factory’s new manager, John Simas, sent out a “Dear Neighbor” letter to the entire town touting the results of a million-dollar study funded by the company and conducted by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The agency had found no traces of industrial chemicals in water samples taken from the beaches of Lavallette, Ortley Beach, and Seaside Heights. In fact, the only places the chemicals were detected were within three feet of a pipeline discharge vent, a half-mile from the closest beach.
None of that seemed to matter. There was only one company in New Jersey allowed to dump treated industrial waste into the Atlantic through its own pipeline: Ciba-Geigy. So many of the ocean’s problems seemed utterly beyond control: toxic algae, disease-carrying bacteria, and slicks of medical waste came and went at their own inscrutable whims. But Ciba-Geigy’s discharge was entirely controllable. The factory’s future depended solely on the decisions of public officials who had to answer to a roused electorate. “By the end of that summer, people were just fed up,” remembered John Paul Doyle, the town’s state assemblyman at the time. “The cancer fears were definitely out there, but what made the difference was what was happening with the ocean. After that summer, it was all downhill for Ciba-Geigy.” Over the next three months, thirty-three bills aimed at curbing ocean pollution were introduced in the state legislature, including several that would ban discharges like Ciba-Geigy’s.
In search of political muscle, Ciba-Geigy hired a local real estate lawyer who had rapidly become one of the most powerful men in New Jersey: Lawrence E. Bathgate II. If the acquisition of wealth via rising property values was the secular religion of Ocean County, then Larry Bathgate was its chief apostle. He owned a Rolls-Royce, an airplane, a small airport, and five homes, including a beachfront mansion in Bay Head and an estate in Rumson near Bruce Springsteen’s. Bathgate was on intimate terms with Governor Tom Kean and soon-to-be-president George H. W. Bush, who appointed him finance chairman of the Republican Party in 1987 after Bathgate raised $600,000 for him at a single dinner. Not bad for a carpenter’s son who still practiced law in his hometown of Lakewood, just north of Toms River. Bathgate had made his fortune buying up farms and turning them into subdivisions. Now, at forty-eight, he was at the peak of his power as New Jersey’s preeminent fundraiser and one of the leading political moneymen in the United States.4 While lesser fundraisers toiled for candidates in the hopes of being rewarded with government contracts, Bathgate moved in much more rarefied circles. His talent was forging relationships with public officials and using those contacts to assist his friends, who were often also his clients and investment partners. With Governor Kean not scheduled to leave office until 1990, Bathgate was perfectly positioned to assist Ciba-Geigy in securing the permits it would need to stay in business.
But Larry Bathgate was not the only power player in Ocean County. Democrats controlled the State Senate, and its president was Toms River’s own John F. Russo, a longtime friend of the chemical plant whose support was wavering as public opposition grew. Russo had unexpectedly won his seat in 1973 (a horrible year for Republicans because of the Watergate scandal) and had never felt entirely secure in office, even after becoming one of the most powerful Democrats in the state. “I paid a lot of attention to my district. They’re conservative in Ocean County, but that doesn’t mean they wanted to have a health risk in their community,” Russo remembered. “Once people became aware that there was a leak in the pipeline, and possible toxic emissions that may cause cancer, it wasn’t hard to go from there to saying let’s just shut the whole thing down.”
Besides the newly hired Bathgate, the only local counterweight to this army of newly stirred voters was the badly outnumbered factory workforce, and many of those dispirited workers were already getting layoff notices. By 1987, there were only about five hundred union workers left, and in another year the total would shrink to three hundred and fifty. Ray Talty by now was working at Ciba-Geigy’s newly upgraded sewage-treatment plant, where he would occasionally take a sip of the treated wastewater, just to satisfy himself that it was as clean as the company claimed. “The stuff was very clean, it looked just like our drinking water,” he remembered. But his brother John, the union vice president, knew the improvements had come too late to save the company’s reputation. “After a while, we figured out that it wouldn’t have mattered if you had nothing but distilled water or milk in the pipe, the pipeline was going down,” said John Talty. “It had become a symbol.”
The workers were increasingly focused on their own health worries. In 1988, Ciba-Geigy had to post danger warnings on sixty-two water fountains at the factory due to contamination from the plant’s aging lead pipes.5 More importantly, employees were hearing the initial results of the worker cancer study being conducted by Philip Cole and Elizabeth Delzell of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Management called the union leadership up to the meeting room to hear the results of Doctor Cole’s study and told us, ‘This is great news—we don’t have a problem,’ ” recalled George Woolley. “Then they gave us information packets about what we were supposed to say about the study out in the community.” The messa
ge Ciba-Geigy hoped to communicate to its employees and to the public was that the plant’s workers were healthier than the general population. Based on an analysis of medical records of 2,642 current or former male employees, the Alabama researchers concluded that the death rate among male workers was almost 20 percent lower than the overall rate for white American men of the same age. Deaths from cancer, meanwhile, were only slightly higher than expected: 106, compared to 97 expected. Many of the cancer victims were Cincinnati veterans who might have been exposed there, not Toms River.6
What the company did not say was that industrial workers, even at chemical plants, were almost always healthier than the general population because of a well-established concept called the “healthy worker effect.” Simply put, factory workers are less likely to die prematurely because they are healthy enough to be hired in the first place and to hold on to their jobs. That is why the death rate among long-term factory employees is only 60 to 90 percent of the rate for the general population, which has more sick and disabled people.7 Despite this well-known bias, many factory-based epidemiological studies made the same questionable comparison because obtaining mortality statistics for the general population was much easier than getting them for a more appropriate comparison group, such as workers at a different factory. For manufacturers, there was another advantage to this shortcut: Comparisons to the general population tended to make their factories seem safer than they really were.
