Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  The union leaders at Ciba knew nothing about the healthy worker effect, but when they took a close look at the study results, they were disturbed nonetheless. For one thing, many now-dead workers who the leaders knew had been treated for cancer were not included. The study was of deaths, not cancer incidence, so if cancer was not listed on a worker’s death certificate, he was not classified as a cancer case. “We’d say, ‘What about Frank Scarpone? What about John Jaczkowski?’ We knew a lot of names, and not all of them were listed as dying of cancer,” John Talty remembered. He and Woolley were also frustrated that the Alabama researchers, in their initial presentation to the union, did not subdivide the overall death rate into specific buildings, which meant that there was no way to gauge the risk faced by those workers who handled the most dangerous chemicals.

  What worried them most were brain and central nervous system cancers. The Ciba-Geigy worker study had confirmed five such cases, higher than the expected three. But at the briefing, Woolley was told that the case totals were low enough that the apparent excess was probably a statistical fluke. This was exactly the type of excuse that Wilhelm Hueper had anticipated a generation earlier: Case-control studies gave reliable results when huge populations and common diseases were studied, but for a rare cancer at a single factory—even one as large as the Toms River plant—unsettling findings could almost always be explained away as random flukes because the case numbers were so small.

  Not until the Alabama study was published in the Journal of Occupational Medicine in 1989—after the factory’s fate had been sealed—did a more disturbing picture emerge. In that article, Elizabeth Delzell briefly mentioned that she had subsequently found at least eleven brain cancer cases—including four nonfatal cases and two deaths that were not included in the original study because they had occurred in Toms River dye workers who had moved to Europe. “This analysis confirmed that rates were relatively high among men employed in the azo dye and [plastics and resins] areas, and suggested, in addition, a relatively high rate among men employed in the laboratories,” she wrote.8 Delzell also noted that there were unusually high numbers of cancer deaths in several job categories, including azo production (sixteen cases instead of the expected eight) and maintenance (thirty-seven cases instead of the expected twenty-five).

  Later, George Woolley and others in the union would be bitter about not getting the full story in 1987. For now, however, they had only their suspicions—and the company’s assurance that there was nothing to worry about. “We didn’t trust the study, but we didn’t know the facts,” Woolley said. The worries over the Alabama study further corroded morale at the factory, but the union leaders continued to support the company publicly as they geared up for a climactic showdown with Ciba-Geigy’s critics in the spring of 1988. After months of delay, the state announced plans for three public hearings on the company’s application for the permits it would need to build the pharmaceutical plant. Hundreds of people were expected to attend. Both sides promised a lively show. “We’re not looking for a confrontation,” explained the union’s blustery president, James McManus, at a press conference. “If we need to be reasonable people, we’ll be reasonable people. If we need to be wild men, we’ll be wild men.”9

  Despite all the sturm und drang it was generating, the Ciba-Geigy factory was not the most serious water pollution threat in Ocean County. The larger risk in the 1980s came from the plume of contaminated groundwater from the old illegal dump at Reich Farm, which had been all but forgotten amid the tumult over the vastly larger chemical plant. While controversy raged over the theoretical possibility that Ciba-Geigy’s waste might make people sick if they swam near the ocean outfall or drank from a contaminated irrigation well, tens of thousands of unknowing Toms River residents were almost certainly drinking tap water tinged with industrial waste, some of it carcinogenic. The waste had leaked from the five thousand Union Carbide drums that Nick Fernicola, back in 1971, had dumped on two acres in the rear of the now-abandoned egg farm. Still owned by Samuel and Bertha Reich, the Pleasant Plains property was now being used for storage by a stone-crushing business.

  The farms of Pleasant Plains gave way to subdivisions at a leisurely pace during the 1970s and 1980s, even as other parts of town were growing feverishly. Underneath the fields, however, there was plenty of activity. Struggling as usual to keep up with demand, the Toms River Water Company was still very dependent on its Parkway well field, which was about a mile south of Reich Farm. There were six Parkway wells operating in mid-1987, providing one-third of the town’s overall supply. The thick layer of saturated sand beneath the Parkway well field was a rich source of groundwater, and it was continually replenished by a natural north-to-south flow. Groundwater seeped southward at a brisk pace of about sixteen inches per day. Then, when it entered the huge “capture zone” of the Parkway field, the water would start moving much faster—zipping along at more than nine feet per day as it was pulled toward the intake screen of one of the six wells. The Parkway field was essentially a perpetual water source, a bottomless cup—the perfect resource to match Toms River’s grow-now-worry-later ethos. The water company made the most of it. Back in 1974, when the Parkway field was new, Toms River Water extracted two million gallons per day. By 1987, the daily draw averaged nearly three million gallons—closer to four million on hot summer days.

  A mile away at Reich Farm, meanwhile, there was also action underground. The chemicals Nick Fernicola had dumped in 1971 were on the move. There had been three attempted cleanups at the dumpsite—two in 1972 and one in 1974—involving the removal of about five thousand waste drums and eleven hundred cubic yards of soil. But the remediation was anything but thorough. Instead of testing the soil to look for chemicals, Union Carbide contractors carted dirt away only if it looked or smelled contaminated. If the dirt looked okay—whatever that meant—they left it alone. But the soil was not okay at all. Almost as soon as Fernicola dumped the leaky waste drums, globules of benzene, trichloroethylene, styrene, and other wastes began trickling down through ten feet of sandy soil and into the aquifer zone, where they hitched a ride with the groundwater seeping south. Within a year, the edge of the chemical plume had already moved beyond the Reichs’ land. It kept going south, tainting dozens of private wells as it spread like a fat, uncurling finger—pointing right at the Parkway field and its six huge and very thirsty public-supply wells.

  No one will ever know when the fingertip of that toxic plume first reached the intake screen of a Parkway well. The timing of that fateful event would eventually be a matter of great debate in Toms River. Whether it happened as early as 1978 or as late as 1986, from that moment onward, thousands of customers of the Toms River Water Company were drinking low levels of toxic chemicals from Reich Farm. There had been signs of possible contamination as early as 1974, but the water company declined to install filters or order advanced tests on the Parkway wells. Instead, Toms River Water worked the wells harder than ever during the 1980s. The passage of the federal Superfund law finally broke the cycle of neglect. Along with the Ciba-Geigy factory, Reich Farm was placed on the original National Priorities List in 1983, and by 1986 contractors for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were busy at both Superfund sites conducting “remedial investigations” to determine how extensive the groundwater contamination was and what kind of health risks it posed.

  An EPA contractor started testing the Parkway wells in May of 1986 and immediately found something that did not belong there: trichloroethylene. TCE, as it is known, was and still is a jack-of-all-trades for the chemical industry: degreaser, solvent, and key ingredient in hundreds of products, including Ciba-Geigy’s resins and Union Carbide’s plastics. The TCE concentrations in the three affected Parkway wells were relatively low—between three and fourteen parts per billion. But by the mid-1980s, evidence of TCE’s hazards was building. Unlike benzene or toluene, TCE often could not be smelled or tasted in water unless levels were high, yet even low concentrations of its vapors could cause
liver, kidney, lung, and heart damage—as well as cancer, at least in rats. As a result, the EPA had started enforcing a limit of five parts per billion of TCE in water, and New Jersey was about to set a limit of just one part per billion that would take effect in 1988.10 The Toms River Water Company definitely was not ready to comply.

  Was Reich Farm the source of the contamination that had struck the Parkway wells? There was still no way to know for sure. TCE had been dumped at the farm, but it also could have come from a machine shop, garage, or some other illegal dump. It could even have come from Ciba-Geigy—though that was extremely unlikely because even though the chemical plant was only a mile west of the Parkway wells, the river was a natural barrier and the groundwater flowed south, not east. On the other hand, there were many reasons to suspect that the source was Fernicola’s illegal dump, since the EPA contractor had found not just TCE but also more than a dozen other industrial chemicals in the groundwater beneath Pleasant Plains, including several used in plastics manufacture.

  The Toms River Water Company reacted to all of this information with a characteristic combination of lethargy and secrecy. Sixteen months after the EPA contractor found TCE in three Parkway wells, the water company finally closed down the well where the contamination was highest. But as soon as pumping stopped in one well, TCE levels began rising in two others. (This problem, which resembled the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, would haunt the water company in the 1990s too.) Unwilling to close all three wells, the water company—with the state’s permission—decided to reopen the most heavily tainted well and mix its water with water from the five other Parkway wells before distributing it around town. The dilution reduced the overall TCE concentration in the blended Parkway water to two parts per billion, still slightly above the new limit of one part per billion that would take effect statewide in 1988.

  The water company’s customers knew nothing about any of this—just as they never knew about the contamination of the Holly Street wells in the mid-1960s. Back in 1974, water customers had learned about problems at the Parkway well field only because of a belated story in the Asbury Park Press. Something similar happened this time, in late 1987, when a copy of a well-testing report was sent to the county board of health, apparently by mistake.11 The Observer jumped all over the story, especially after the water company tested water fountains at two schools served by the tainted Parkway wells and detected TCE at concentrations of three and two parts per billion, respectively. Facing more public outrage in a town that was already anxious about pollution, the water company finally shut down the three most affected wells. By then, it was November; the extra water would not be needed until next summer, when it would be needed very badly.

  It was 1965 all over again. Back then, the Toms River Water Company had been rescued from a similar squeeze by the completion of the chemical plant’s ocean pipeline, which diverted chemical waste away from the river and the Holly Street public wells. Now, twenty-two years later, the water company’s Parkway wells needed a similar rescue—and it would have to come before the following summer, when the people of Toms River would be demanding more water than ever. They always did.

  In early 1988, as the dates of three climactic public hearings approached, Ciba-Geigy’s terrible luck continued. In mid-February, at a construction site across the street from the Ocean County Mall, a bulldozer ripped a four-foot gash in the company’s waste pipeline. This time, about two hundred thousand gallons of wastewater spilled, an event the Observer marked with the headline, “Oops!” The next day, just in case anyone had forgotten that Ciba-Geigy was still in criminal jeopardy, a grand jury issued a new set of indictments on the familiar charges of conspiracy, illegal dumping, filing false reports, and misconduct. (The original charges had been dismissed on procedural grounds and then restored on appeal.) The new indictments targeted only two executives—William Bobsein and James McPherson—plus the company. Ominously for Ciba-Geigy, there were reports that the other two previously indicted executives, David Ellis and Robert Fesen, who were now out of legal jeopardy, were cooperating with prosecutors.12 Ciba-Geigy was trying to look to the future, but events kept dredging up the ugly past.

  The long-awaited public hearings were the circus everyone had expected. At Toms River High School North, the eighteen hundred students were sent home at noon; by then, hundreds of adults were already milling outside in an unruly mass. There was some shoving among the warring parties: union workers in white baseball caps, placard-waving environmentalists, and a dozen police officers trying to preserve order as state officials collected the names of the people who wanted to speak. By the time the hearing started, at one o’clock in the auditorium, all but a handful of the twelve hundred seats were full. Sentiment was divided—several hundred white baseball caps were visible in the crowd—but the environmentalists were louder. They booed and heckled plant manager John Simas and Larry Bathgate, the first speakers, but fell silent when a woman most of them had never seen before approached the microphone and began talking.

  She was Linda Gillick, and she had carefully choreographed her five minutes of allotted time for maximum effect. First, she motioned for a group of children to walk to the front of the room; each carried a red rose with a black ribbon tied to the stem. “I represent the families of Ocean County children with cancer. Some are with me today,” she began. Ciba-Geigy, she said, was not the only polluter in town, but the company should be forced to clean up its waste before producing any more. As she spoke, her message became increasingly dramatic, her voice louder and more insistent: “Ciba-Geigy helps sell flowers—daffodils, to be exact—for the American Cancer Society to raise money for research. Keep your daffodils; most of our children are pushing them up from their graves, or will be. You may think I have no facts and figures to substantiate the high incidence of cancer in Ocean County. I do.”13

  Gillick then told the hushed crowd that she would recite the ages, hometowns, and cancer types—but not names—of forty-one Ocean County children diagnosed since 1983, including ten now dead. The children at the front of the room would hand out their roses as she read. “Watch your rose as its beauty fails slowly, silently and continuously, because you are watching my child and all the others around you slowly, but not silently or painlessly, die,” she said, as the children began giving the black-ribboned flowers to the state officials on the stage and to members of the audience, including several very uncomfortable Ciba-Geigy employees. “I leave their destiny and the destiny of each and every child here, and those still to be born, in your hands.”

  And then, as Linda Gillick prepared to read her list, the small boy beside her—he was nine, but looked closer to five—asked to speak. He had not filled out a request card, but it made no difference. No one would have dared to tell Michael Gillick he could not speak. As he began, the television cameras scrambled for a clear shot of the boy whose face seemed the very personification of cancer’s torments. “If you have a child, picture him with cancer because of this water,” he said. “Think of what it could do to him. He could die at any second, any minute, so please stop!” As he spoke, there was no other sound in the huge auditorium but the clicking of cameras. Michael Gillick’s voice broke, and he began to cry. “What Ciba-Geigy is doing is really wrong, but you guys keep going on and on doing your stupid job and making people sicker,” he continued. “Please stop!” And with that, the boy ran up the aisle and out of the auditorium. His mother ran after him, after first remembering to hand the list of sick children to another parent and instructing her to finish reading it.

  It lasted just thirty seconds, but Michael Gillick’s speech was long enough to sear the memories of the hundreds who heard it. Amazingly, it would be reprised eight years later at an even more emotional public meeting in the same high school auditorium. For those who heard it, Michael Gillick’s 1988 speech was a Rashomon moment, open to many interpretations. Michael remembered it with a child’s simplicity: “I gave them the rose, I gave them the lecture, and I ran out of there.” Ci
ba-Geigy’s opponents remembered it as deeply moving and immensely powerful—the ultimate expression of what was at stake in their crusade. “It was amazing. I can still picture it,” said Sheila McVeigh, who still lived on Cardinal Drive. “The room was packed, and the Ciba people just kept quiet. Everyone cheered for the little children when they finished. It was spellbinding, really, and very sad.” Many of the factory employees had a different interpretation. They could not deny young Michael Gillick’s sincerity or ignore his pain. But they thought his mother’s tactics were terribly unfair. John Talty, who had been handed a black-ribboned rose, knew the long war was lost. “When Linda Gillick’s son gave me that rose, I just looked up and said to someone, ‘How do you beat that?’ ”

  Having lost what little was left of its support in the community, Ciba-Geigy had one last hope: that Larry Bathgate could convince his good friend, Governor Tom Kean, to issue the permits the company needed, no matter what the people of Ocean County wanted. For a while, it seemed possible that Bathgate might succeed, especially after Christopher Daggett came to town. A former top aide to Kean who still played tennis with the governor, Daggett was the regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He came to Toms River in June to announce that the EPA did not want Ciba-Geigy’s ocean pipeline closed. Instead, the agency wanted to use the pipeline to assist in the long-awaited cleanup of the site. There were billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater beneath the factory property, and the EPA wanted the company to pump it all up (a process that could take thirty years), treat it at the factory’s newly upgraded wastewater plant and then send it through the pipeline into the ocean. The only feasible alternative, Daggett added, would be to discharge the treated groundwater into the river. Either choice, he said, was a “very low risk” to public health—and fully compatible with the planned pharmaceutical plant. That last point was crucial because he would soon have the authority to decide whether the pharmaceutical plant would be built; Governor Kean had just announced that Daggett would be leaving the EPA to become commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.