Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  14. “Governor Dedicates Ciba States Building,” Asbury Park Press, June 5, 1953.

  15. “ ‘Effluent Pure,’ Ciba Head Says,” Ocean County Sun, June 11, 1953.

  16. “Ciba Builds to Serve,” a promotional booklet published by the company in 1953, 22.

  17. Howard S. Pratt, “Rod and Gun,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 24, 1953.

  18. “Tour of Ciba Disposal Plant Dispels Rumors of Pollution,” New Jersey Courier, April 2, 1953. Leading the tour that day was the Swiss company’s public face in Toms River, a Hungarian émigré and chemical engineer named Philip Kronowitt. After World War II, the U.S. government sent Kronowitt back to Europe to study the advanced manufacturing techniques of the I. G. Farben cartel, which the Allies were dismembering with the enthusiastic support of competing firms in Switzerland and America. Returning home the following year, Kronowitt went to work for Ciba and took charge of the search for a new factory site in America. Moving to Toms River to supervise the plant’s construction, he served as president of the Ocean County Boy Scouts Council and the Red Cross and led the drive to establish the county’s first hospital. See “Philip Kronowitt,” a profile in the Fall 1957 edition of TRC Color, a company newsletter.

  19. Nicholas P. Cheremisinoff, Handbook of Pollution Prevention Practices (CRC Press, 2001), 238.

  20. A 1953 article in Chemical and Engineering News typified the cheerleading coverage of the era. “Ciba Solves Water Pollution Danger at Toms River Dye Plant” was the headline. A relevant passage: “Actually, the water discharged into the Toms River will be a great deal more palatable for fish and humans than the river itself. The Toms River flows through such swampy land that by the time it reaches the sea it contains a high percentage of organic matter and has a fairly high pH.” The article did not carry a byline but was written by an editor at the magazine, Kevin J. Bradley, who was also the coauthor—with Ciba’s Philip Kronowitt—of a similarly glowing article on the plant published the following year in another publication of the American Chemical Society, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. The initial article’s final line noted that “Ciba’s relations with its neighbors have been very cordial.” See Chemical and Engineering News 31:36 (1953): 3691.

  21. June 30, 1949, memo by an unnamed Ciba executive to senior managers in Basel, page 2. The complete quotation is: “The sewage treatment area is deliberately located at considerable distance from the river. The treated effluent will be carried in an open ditch to the river and the cost of such ditch is low. Long line will help aeration of the effluent before it enters the river and we expect considerable seepage into adjacent area from ditch, which will reduce the volume of effluent carried into the river.”

  22. “Report: Consideration of Location of Vat Colors Project at St. Bernard and Toms River,” May 2, 1949, page 4. It was written by an unidentified Ciba executive. Similarly, in a “Report on Toms River Property,” dated December 30, 1948, Ciba executives Fritz Max and Philip Kronowitt wrote: “The acreage available is fairly level, sand and gravel soil, good for construction, easy to excavate, and level and very suitable for construction of sedimentation basins and filtration of such effluent which we do not want to dispose of into the stream.”

  23. January 19, 1949, letter to the New Jersey Department of Health from Philip Kronowitt. In a five-page report he prepared for the state two days earlier, Kronowitt asserted that “according to experience” from other dye factories, the Toms River plant’s wastewater discharges would be “clear and transparent,” “have no odor,” and “be free of substances harmful to fish, animal or wild life.”

  24. Memo from Morris Smith to Philip Kronowitt, November 25, 1955. See also report entitled “Waste Disposal Plant Operations: Year 1955.”

  25. Anthony Travis, a leading chemical industry historian, told the author: “Back in ’48 and ’49, [Ciba] felt Toms River was a good site because the ground was sandy, they could dig a long trench and most of the wastewater would be gone before it even got to the river, and there were lots of trees they could hide behind.”

  26. For a detailed description of the wastewater treatment process at the Toms River plant, see John J. Baffa, “Treatment of Waste from Dye Manufacture at the Ciba States Ltd. Plant at Toms River, New Jersey,” Proceedings of the Ninth Industrial Waste Conference, May 10, 11 and 12, 1954 (Purdue): 560–66. A consulting engineer who helped design the treatment process in Toms River, Baffa presented the paper at the industrial waste conference hosted annually by Purdue University.

  27. As late as the 1950s, “low costs and technological simplicity made lagoons a common, although when used in improper geological settings, highly inadequate chemical waste treatment.” Craig Colten, “Creating a Toxic Landscape: Chemical Waste Disposal Policy and Practice: 1900–1960,” Environmental History Review 18:1 (Spring 1994): 85–116, 105. Ciba’s waste lagoon was designed by a professor of sanitary engineering at Rutgers University, Willem Rudolfs, who had written a textbook on waste treatment.

  28. Opinion of New Jersey Superior Court Judge Lawrence Weiss, Ciba-Geigy vs. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company et al., January 28, 1998, 1–36.

  29. Ciba-Geigy’s witness, Richard Dewling, a former chief of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, testified that two industrial plants in New Jersey “provided a level of treatment in the ’60s that were beyond what most industries were doing. One was American Cyanamid up in Bound Brook, and the other was at [CIBA’s] Toms River facility.” Ciba-Geigy vs. Liberty Mutual Insurance et al., 20.

  30. As far back as 1914, a New Jersey appeals court held a Newark gasworks liable for discharging coal tar wastes that contaminated groundwater used by a brewery next door. The case is Ballantine & Sons vs. Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, New Jersey Law Reports 86 (1914): 331.

  31. The textbook is Chemical Engineering Plant Design, originally published in 1934 by Frank C. Vilbrandt, who chaired the department of chemical engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The relevant passage is on page 400 of the third edition, published in 1949 by McGraw-Hill: “Chemical plants often dispose of their waste by locating on a stream, river, or at tidewater. Disposal by tidewater is often satisfactory if there are no bathing beaches nearby. Disposal of waste into a stream or river is no longer satisfactory, for there is a growing list of states that have instituted legislation against such pollution by industrial wastes. Another method of waste disposal is by seepage through the ground. If such a method is to be used, soil tests should be made to determine whether the soil is porous enough to permit the disposal of considerable quantities of liquor without accumulation. It is also advisable to check the topography of the area to determine where the liquor will seep in order to avoid trouble from neighboring plants or the local authorities. Towns lower down the valley may draw their water supply from the drainage shed upon which the plant is situated.”

  32. In “A Historical Perspective on Industrial Wastes and Groundwater Contamination,” Geographical Review 81:2 (April 1991): 215–28, author Craig Colten wrote: “By the early 1950s, governmental agencies, professional organizations, and industry-trade associations, drawing on three decades of experience, all publicly recognized the hazards posed by the surface disposal of liquid wastes. This generalization does not mean that the use of lagoons or infiltration ponds ceased, but it clearly illustrates the existence of sufficient understanding of hydrologic processes to argue that such waste-treatment methods were unsafe and irresponsible in most environmental settings.”

  33. This quotation is from the first chapter of the third tractate of Von der Bergsucht und anderen Bergkrankheiten. Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus, 67.

  Chapter Three

  1. The close cooperation among the three major Swiss dye manufacturers in Cincinnati and then in Toms River helped set the stage for a series of later mergers. The Toms River factory was initially constructed by Ciba and in its initial years was known formally as the Toms River division of Ciba States Limited. In 1955
, Geigy and Sandoz purchased minority shares, and the plant was renamed the Toms River–Cincinnati Chemical Corporation. (That name was rarely used in Toms River, where the company was known as Toms River Chemical or sometimes simply “Ciba” because Ciba always held a majority interest.) When the joint venture completely closed down its two Cincinnati factories in 1959, the Toms River Chemical Corporation name became official. In 1971, it would be changed again to Ciba-Geigy Toms River after those two companies merged. The last of the three major Swiss dye manufacturers joined in 1996 when Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy to form Novartis. The following year, Novartis spun off Ciba-Geigy’s dye and chemical business into Ciba Specialty Chemicals, which was then acquired by BASF in 2009, marking the end of Ciba as an independent chemical manufacturer 150 years after Alexander Clavel began making synthetic dyes in Basel.

  2. Among the beneficiaries of the Garden State Parkway project was the all-powerful Mathis family of Toms River, which received a lucrative state contract to insure a portion of the more than $300 million in bonds issued for the project.

  3. This chapter’s brief account of the contamination in Kimberton, Pennsylvania, relies on Environmental Protection Agency documents and an interview with James E. Etzel, a professor emeritus of environmental engineering at Purdue University who investigated it in 1957 and 1958 as a private consultant.

  4. In 1981, twenty-four years after the initial discovery of carbolic acid and salts in streams near Kimberton, the Chester County Health Department found solvents in more than a dozen private water wells near the factory site. As a result, the site was placed on the federal Superfund list. After an investigation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded that Ciba’s abandoned waste lagoons were the source of the solvent contamination. In 1991 the agency negotiated a consent order with Ciba-Geigy and the owner at the time, The Monsey Company (an asphalt manufacturer), requiring both companies to pay the cost of pumping up and treating the contaminated groundwater and of extending public water lines to replace the contaminated wells. The companies also had to pay the EPA $200,000 to reimburse prior expenses. The pump-and-treat system began operating in 1993 and is likely to run for several decades before solvent concentrations decline to a level the EPA considers acceptable.

  5. While its acute dangers to the lungs and skin were very well known even in the 1950s, epichlorohydrin was not officially considered a possible carcinogen until a 1976 assessment by the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that laboratory rats that inhaled the chemical developed nasal tumors. There has been inconclusive evidence since the early 1980s that epichlorohydrin may cause respiratory cancers in humans, based on studies of factory workers. The U.S. National Toxicology Program now classifies epichlorohydrin as a likely human carcinogen.

  6. Until 2004, no government agency in the United States had officially classified anthraquinone as a carcinogen, although it had been suspected for many years. In a 2004 report, the National Toxicology Program found “clear evidence” of liver carcinogenicity in rats that ate anthraquinone-laced feed. The report also found evidence of noncancerous lesions in other organs and possible endocrine system effects.

  7. J. Hohl, “Final Report on Explosion in Building 102 on December 22, 1960,” January 30, 1961, 1, 5.

  8. John A. Ross, “Percivall Pott 1714–1788,” Paraplegia 24:5 (October 1986): 287–92.

  9. Percivall Pott published his famous 725-word essay on “chimney sweeps’ cancer” in 1775 as a chapter in his Chirurgical Observations Relative to the Cataract, Polypus of the Nose, the Cancer of Scrotum, the Different Kinds of Ruptures and Mortification of the Toes and Feet. The excerpt quoted here is from page 178 of The Chirurgical Works of Percivall Pott, by James Earle, Pott’s son-in-law. It was originally published in London in 1808 by Wood and Innes.

  10. Thanks in part to the public outrage engendered by Percivall Pott’s description of “chimney sweeps’ cancer,” the British Parliament in 1778 restricted the job to older boys and in 1845 banned it altogether.

  11. For more information about the plight of London’s chimney sweeps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Percivall Pott’s identification of testicular cancer as an occupational disease of the “climbing boys,” see H. A. Waldron, “A Brief History of Scrotal Cancer,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 40:4 (November 1983): 390–401. See also Meyer M. Melicow, “Percivall Pott (1713–1788),” Urology 4:6 (December 1975): 745–49.

  12. Childless women and women who give birth at an advanced age are now thought to face a slightly higher risk of breast cancer because their lifetime exposure to estrogen is higher.

  13. Chirurgical Works of Percivall Pott, 180–81.

  14. A May 9, 1962, memo from Morris Smith described the accidental discharge of three thousand pounds of “arsenicals” into the sewer system seven days earlier. By quickly raising the pH level in the initial treatment lagoons, according to Smith’s memo, the company managed “to prevent the discharge of [arsenic] into the Toms River in quantities which might otherwise have resulted in a fish kill.”

  15. “We have not been able to meet State standards with our present treatment plant,” Emerich Varkony wrote in a March 14, 1962, memo to fellow Toms River Chemical manager Morris Smith.

  16. The smelly drinking water at the factory was described in a memo Morris Smith wrote to his superiors on July 14, 1954; the well contamination was described in a memo from Smith dated September 27, 1954.

  17. In a series of plaintive memos to his supervisors, including one dated August 14, 1956, and entitled “Seepage from Waste Disposal Basins,” Morris Smith was explicit about the threat to the company’s own wells and to those of its neighbors: “High seepage losses from the waste disposal basins, accompanied by continued heavy pumping from the deep wells, must inevitably result in contamination of all the deep wells. In addition, it is highly probable that ground water contamination will spread to foreign property to the east and southeast.”

  18. The consulting firm’s report, “Ground-Water Conditions at the Toms River–Cincinnati Chemical Corporation Plant Near Toms River, New Jersey,” was completed in February 1959. It was prepared for the company by the New York–based groundwater consultant Leggette, Brashears, and Graham and was not publicly released. Years later, Ciba-Geigy turned the thirty-six-page report over to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, from which the author obtained a copy via a Freedom of Information Act request.

  19. O. B. Grant, “Design Considerations for the Expansion of Toms River Waste Disposal Facilities,” August 31, 1955, 3.

  20. “Seepage from Waste Disposal Basins,” 2.

  21. “Design Considerations,” 5. The 1959 report was equally explicit about the purpose of relocating the seepage basins. Page 27 of that report recommends the following: “If the treatment basins are relocated, they should be constructed at a site near the Toms River so that infiltration from them will almost immediately be discharged into the river, rather than migrate into production wells or move beneath neighboring properties.”

  22. A profile of Morris Smith in the Spring 1961 edition of TRC Color, the company newsletter, begins this way: “The Toms River provides a handy receptacle for chemical wastes left over from our manufacturing processes. As a responsible neighbor, however, our Company cannot spoil its waters with unwholesome waste materials. Before it enters the river, the residue must be treated to remove potentially harmful substances. The man in charge of this operation is Morris Smith.”

  23. David C. Bomberger and Robert L. Boughton, Wastes from Manufacture of Dyes and Pigments, Volume 1: Azo Dyes and Pigments (SRI International, 1984, under contract to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), 34.

  24. The new azo sludges were iron oxide sludge and a mixture of sulfuric acid and limestone called calcium sulfate.

  25. “Creating a Toxic Landscape: Chemical Waste Disposal Policy and Practice: 1900–1960,” 102–9.

  Chapter Four

  1. D. B. Dyche, “Alleged Pollutio
n of the Toms River,” September 9, 1963, memo, 4–5.

  2. The minutes of the company’s board meeting in November 1960 note that Toms River Chemical was getting complaints about the “distinct smell of the Toms River after our effluent has been added” as well as a “slimy deposit, containing solvents” just below the outfall pipe. “Report for the Board of Directors Meeting,” Toms River Chemical Corporation, November 23, 1960, 4.

  3. James Crane, “Progress Report on Liquid Waste Treatment Problems,” March 14, 1961, memo.

  4. J. A. Meier, “Waste Water Treatment Problems,” August 9, 1961, memo.

  5. Morris Smith, “Waste Disposal—Study of Fish in Toms River by Division of Fish and Game,” April 15, 1963, memo.

  6. Transcript of prepared remarks delivered by Robert Sponagel, general manager of Toms River Chemical, at a May 20, 1963, press conference.

  7. In a September 30, 1964, memo to Toms River Chemical general manager Robert Sponagel, an engineer hired by the company named John C. Fellows Jr. recounts a meeting he had the previous day with Ernest Segesser, the supervising engineer of the state health department’s stream pollution control program. In the memo, Fellows quotes Segesser as saying that New Jersey governor Richard Hughes “has become personally concerned” about public criticism of the company. “Off the record, he [Segesser] gave me his personal advice and opinion. He stated that apparently our news releases are only agitating people and supplying them with information. He felt that complete silence would improve our position.”

  8. Robert Shaw, director of environmental health at the New Jersey Department of Health, was quoted in a May 23, 1963, article in the Ocean County Sun headlined “Doubt Cast on River’s Future as Development Seeps South.”

  9. James Crane and J. Zahuta, “Report on Analyses of T.R.C. Effluent and Waters of Toms River,” a May 18, 1965, memo to ten senior managers at Toms River Chemical.