by Dan Fagin
10. In Building 108, more than one thousand pounds of epichlorohydrin were “run to the sewer” every day, James Crane wrote in a January 14, 1964, report entitled “Technical Report No. 2—Water-Borne Waste Treatment,” sent to twenty-four senior managers at Toms River Chemical. In Building 102, more than two thousand pounds of nitrobenzene were going into the sewer daily—and had been since the 1950s.
11. James Crane, “Appropriation Request No. 2327-4: Force Main to Ocean—Justification,” November 27, 1964, memo to Robert Sponagel.
12. Offshore dumping of sewage sludge by New Jersey municipalities ended in 1991, but as of 2012 there were still fourteen ocean outfalls in the state (three operated by the Ocean County Utilities Authority) discharging municipally treated wastewater into the ocean. Many cities around the world, from Miami to Melbourne, do the same.
13. “Toms River Chemical Pollution Suit,” Ocean County Sun, August 12, 1965.
14. A. Bruce Pyle, “Toms River,” September 23, 1965, memo to New Jersey Division of Fish and Game division director Lester G. MacNamara.
15. One of the local newspapers, the New Jersey Courier, on August 19, 1965, ran a cartoon showing a dartboard labeled “Toms River Chemical” being pierced by darts labeled “Philip Maimone” and “Beachfront Mayors.” An accompanying editorial was sympathetic to the company it described as a “whipping boy” for opportunistic local politicians.
16. Kathy Wright, “Fischer Defends Flag of the United Nations,” New Jersey Courier, June 24, 1965.
17. The term epidemiology was derived from three Greek words: epi (upon), demos (people), and logos (discourse). It could thus be defined as the “study of what is upon the people.” Unsurprisingly, considering the primacy of infectious diseases in epidemiology, the new word was chosen because of its similarity to epidemic, which has a much older origin. Hippocrates used the Greek form, epidemios (“on the people”), to refer to groupings of similar symptoms or diseases occurring in a particular place and time.
18. John Ayrton Paris, Pharmacologia, Volume 2 (W. Phillips, 1825), 96.
19. For a brief description of the contributions of Pierre Louis and Siméon Denis Poisson to epidemiology, see pages 358–59 of “Environment, Population and Biology: A Short History of Modern Epidemiology” by Alessandra Parodi, David Neasham, and Paolo Vineis, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49:3 (summer 2006): 357–68.
20. This chapter’s account of the confidential negotiations between the Toms River Chemical Corporation and the Toms River Water Company over the contamination of the Holly Street wells and the subsequent actions of the two companies is based on memos and correspondence that were secret at the time they were written, in 1965, 1966, and 1967. Some of those documents became public more than thirty years later, after the two companies turned them over to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. Other documents became part of the public record in Ciba-Geigy Corporation vs. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company et al. Ciba-Geigy also described the Holly well episode in a December 3, 1993, letter from Ciba executive Daniel McIntyre to the EPA’s Stephen Cipot.
21. According to the March 23, 1965, memo, “Water Analysis Record, Toms River Water Company, Well No. 13,” the water company added a huge amount of chlorine to the well to remove the color: eight parts per million. A standard level at the time would have been less than one part per million, which is also a generally accepted safety level for chlorine dioxide today. The 1965 “Water Analysis Record” is cited on page 15 of Public Health Assessment: Ciba-Geigy Corporation, prepared in 2001 by the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services.
22. Philip Wehner, “Water Supply Situation,” March 21, 1966, confidential memo to Robert Sponagel.
23. “Toxicological Profile of Benzidine” (U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 2001), 7.
24. James K. Mitchell, “Adjustment to New Physical Environments Beyond the Metropolitan Fringe,” Geographical Review 66:1 (January 1976): 18–31, 26. “Ocean County residents act alike in at least one respect. Most regard the planting of trees, shrubs and flower gardens around individual homes as a prerequisite for living in the area.… Creating lawns and gardens, where they do not already exist, is an immediate priority for most newcomers.”
25. The details of the talks between Toms River Water and Toms River Chemical are contained in a series of confidential letters from lawyers, consultants, and managers of the companies dated March 2, March 21, April 7, April 19, and September 6, 1966.
26. In its secret negotiations with Toms River Chemical in 1965 and 1966, the water company insisted on a backup plan in case chlorination did not work or the ocean pipeline was not finished in time. Toms River Water wanted a new water well immediately but also wanted the chemical company to dig it without applying for a permit from the state health department, which would have required public notice and thus broken the secrecy. Toms River Water’s proposed solution was for the chemical company to drill the well on factory property without telling the state. Toms River Chemical refused, advising the water company instead either to drill an unpermitted well on its own property or to apply for a permit “immediately, but in a normal ‘unhurried’ manner” to minimize public attention. Toms River Chemical executive Philip Wehner, in a confidential April 19, 1966, memo, wrote that his company “thinks that it is unwise to apply for this permit on a ‘rush’ or ‘emergency’ basis.” As it turned out, the backup well was not needed in 1966 because the chlorination worked and the ocean pipeline opened on schedule. Toms River Water got its new well in early 1967, without any public questions about why the water company needed a well in South Toms River at a location more than a mile south of Holly Street and the river.
27. James Crane, January 31, 1969, confidential memo to Philip Wehner. “Regular analyses of the Toms River since we started pumping to the ocean in 1966 show definitely that there is a discharge of our wastes to the Toms River to the extent of roughly 200,000 gals. per day. We have known of this seepage since 1960; it was of no importance until we started pumping to the ocean.”
28. Page 3 of the legal agreement dated February 21, 1967, between the Toms River Chemical Corporation and the Toms River Water Company.
29. According a brief article on the front page of the October 12, 1967, edition of the New Jersey Courier, the settlement included an acknowledgment by Philip Maimone’s development company that “the Toms River is not in a polluted state by reason of past operations of TRC [Toms River Chemical] and that TRC is in no way altering the condition of the Toms River since its ocean outfall pipeline has been in operation.”
Chapter Five
1. Frank Fernicola’s quotation and the subsequent statements from both Fernicola brothers come from sworn depositions they gave in Abbatemarco vs. Nicol, a groundwater contamination case involving a housing development in Manchester Township called Pine Lake Park. The Fernicolas were deposed because Union Carbide was initially a defendant in the case, but the company was later dropped from the suit because there was no evidence that any of the Union Carbide waste that Nick Fernicola hauled ended up contaminating Pine Lake Park’s drinking water supply. Instead, a local asphalt plant settled the case for $4 million. Although the Fernicola brothers were not implicated in the case, the Abbatemarco depositions are among the few surviving documents in which they spoke at length, and under oath, about their adventures in the waste-hauling business.
2. As a former Plumsted Township committeeman, Donald J. Knause, explained years later, “Goose Farm was the size of a football field, and the drums could be buried in layers. You could make a fortune.” Knause was also a former investigator for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. He is quoted in Caren Chesler, “Polluter of Plumsted Farm to Monitor Site,” Asbury Park Press, October 11, 1997.
3. Don Bennett, “Much Work Left to Do at County Waste Sites,” Ocean County Observer, February 15, 1991.
4. Manchester Township was a noto
rious location for dumping, especially for liquid waste. One site along Route 70 was owned by a drug company and was known to locals as the “Penicillin Dump,” according to the Abbatemarco deposition of Bruce Egeland, who was a detective in the Manchester Police Department during the 1960s and 1970s.
5. Abbatemarco deposition of Nicholas Fernicola, 24.
6. February 16, 1971, memo from Nicholas Fernicola to Union Carbide Corporation. The signed note is on stationery with “Nick Fernicola Dealer in Barrels and Drums” printed in block letters on the top.
7. “We are starting to use Nick Fernicola to dispose of leaking, damaged drums. Has anyone taken a look at his disposal site, etc.,” read the July 7, 1971, handwritten note from Joe Novak to Ed Moherek, both of Union Carbide’s Bound Brook factory. Except for an initial visit to the town landfill, there is no indication that anyone from Bound Brook checked to see where Fernicola was dumping the company’s waste drums.
8. Avicenna’s insightful list of diseases spread by person-to-person contact included leprosy, smallpox, plague, tuberculosis, and the skin infections scabies and impetigo.
9. In the mid-seventeenth century, a London cloth merchant named John Graunt who had no training in mathematics or medicine started reading the Bills of Mortality as a hobby. Realizing that the reports were untapped founts of information about the lives of Englishmen, especially their health, Graunt compiled the first statistically derived estimates of life expectancy and tracked many other statistics, from fertility rates to suicides and murders. Published in 1662, his immensely popular Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality helped to launch the modern science of demography.
10. The chapter by William Farr, “Vital Statistics,” appeared in John Ramsay McCulloch, ed., A Statistical Account of the British Empire, published in 1837.
11. William Farr, “Tenth Annual Report of the Registrar General,” cited in Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42.
12. John Snow, “The Cholera near Golden Square, and at Deptford” excerpted in Carol Buck et al., eds., The Challenge of Epidemiology: Issues and Selected Readings (Pan American Health Organization, 1988), 415–18.
13. John Snow also was one of the first disease investigators to recognize that the absence of illness could be just as informative as its presence. A brewery in the cholera outbreak zone, for instance, had no deaths, while an overcrowded workhouse had just five. Snow and Henry Whitehead investigated further, discovering that at the brewery everyone drank beer instead of water and that the workhouse had its own water well and did not rely on the Broad Street well. Snow scrutinized victims who appeared to be outliers, too, such as an older woman who several months earlier had moved from Soho to Hampstead, where there were no other cholera deaths. Interviewing the dead woman’s relatives, Snow learned that she preferred the taste of Broad Street water and had a large bottle delivered to her every day.
14. John Snow learned of the basement cesspool from an interview with the mother of a baby who had died of cholera. She had cleaned her child’s dirty diapers in the pool.
15. An Italian, Filippo Pacini, was the first to identify the cholera bacterium under the microscope as a likely source of the disease. But his 1855 observation was generally ignored; the bacterial hypothesis did not gain wide currency until Robert Koch independently reached the same conclusion thirty years later.
16. The first great champion of centralizing waste-handling was an English lawyer named Edwin Chadwick. Even before William Farr and John Snow confirmed the connection between filth and cholera, Chadwick vociferously argued that lack of sanitation was a root cause of poverty. He was the driving force behind the British Parliament’s passage of the Public Health Act of 1848, which provided for the appointment of “inspectors of nuisances” (forerunners of today’s public health officers), who were tasked with improving the safety of water distribution and sewage and garbage disposal.
17. Two statistics illustrate why urbanization in the developed world has vastly increased the amount of waste per capita. First, the average American generates almost twice as much garbage today as in 1960. Second, urban residents in wealthy countries are responsible for three times as much garbage as their counterparts in the cities of poorer nations. Franklin Associates, Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste in the United States (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1998), 141, table B-1; see also Sandra Cointreau, Occupational and Environmental Health Issues of Solid Waste Management (World Bank, 2006), 4, table 1.
18. Philip Wehner, “Waste Disposal/Effluent Problems,” August 15, 1966, memo to Robert Sponagel, 1.
19. Nine days after the ocean pipeline opened, a man who lived near the plant, Ronald Clayton, complained at a meeting of the Ocean County Board of Chosen Freeholders that no one in his neighborhood could sleep because of a “terrible stench” that he believed was coming from the ten-acre holding pond at Toms River Chemical, according to an article that appeared on the front page of the July 21, 1966, edition of the New Jersey Courier. A front-page story that same day in the rival paper, the Ocean County Sun, noted that after Clayton voiced his complaints to the legislators, Mayor John G. Woods spoke up to defend the company, as did Robert Conti, secretary of the town sewer authority.
20. Morris Smith, “Solids and Solvent Waste Disposal,” October 11, 1966, memo, 2: “Every 6–8 weeks, approximately 50 AQ [anthraquinone] laden filter socks must be disposed of. Because this material cannot be burned in the incinerator without generating huge quantities of black smoke, it is usually burned at night.” See also September 7, 1967, letter from W. A. Helbig of Atlas Chemical Industries Inc. to James Crane of Toms River Chemical: “We understand it is the desire of Toms River Chemical Corporation that we refrain from making public the work on waste effluent treatment at your plant.”
21. Raymond Simon, Toms River Chemical Company Public Opinion Survey, February 1, 1968, report to Toms River Chemical. Simon, a Utica College professor of public relations, and ten of his students designed the questions and conducted the poll.
22. “Public Opinion Survey Reveals TRC’s Standing in the Community,” TRC Color (Spring 1968).
23. In addition to the Abbatemarco deposition, this chapter’s account of the events at Reich Farm in 1971 and 1972 relies on a 119-page report entitled, “Analysis of a Land Disposal Damage Incident involving Hazardous Waste Materials, Dover Township, New Jersey.” It was prepared in May 1976 by Masood Ghassemi, an environmental engineer at TRW Inc. who was serving as a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
24. Nick Fernicola “just kept digging holes all around the place. Digging holes and digging holes and digging holes, and we kept dumping the chemicals on the ground,” recalled Richie Winton, one of the truck drivers Fernicola hired. Abbatemarco deposition of Winton, 73.
25. Abbatemarco deposition of Nicholas Fernicola, 37–38.
26. The state’s “unfortunate” decision not to investigate further what Nick Fernicola was doing at Reich Farm is cited in an April 27, 1977, memo about the case written by New Jersey deputy attorney general Lawrence E. Stanley.
27. Twenty-two years after the 1971 dumping incidents at the town landfill and Reich Farm, Nick Fernicola claimed in a sworn deposition that drivers from Ciba-Geigy and the Lakehurst Naval Air Station “without a doubt” paid bribes in 1971 to get rid of drums at the town landfill. But he did not provide names or other evidence to support this claim. See Abbatemarco deposition of Nicholas Fernicola, 83–84.
28. Abbatemarco deposition of Nicholas Fernicola, 43, 80.
Chapter Six
1. This chapter’s description of the early life of Michael Gillick is drawn primarily from published sources, including numerous magazine and newspaper articles and Linda Gillick’s book about his childhood, For the Love of Mike (WRS Publishing, 1994). The author also conducted a ninety-minute on-the-record interview with Michael Gillick and had several informal
conversations with Linda Gillick at her home and office. Ultimately, however, Linda Gillick did not agree to a formal interview.
2. Bruce M. Rothschild, Brian J. Witzke, and Israel Hershkovitz, “Metastatic Cancer in the Jurassic,” The Lancet 354 (July 31, 1999): 398. See also Bruce M. Rothschild et al., “Epidemiologic Study of Tumors in Dinosaurs,” Naturwissenschaften 90 (2003): 495–500. In the second study, interestingly, although Rothschild and his collaborators used fluoroscopy to examine more than ten thousand fossilized bones from 708 dinosaurs representing seventy-seven species, they found tumors only in bones from the duck-billed hadrosaur family. The authors suggest that both genetic and environmental factors may explain the finding, since hadrosaurs had a unique diet that consisted largely of cone-bearing evergreen trees and shrubs.
3. James Henry Breasted, trans., The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (University of Chicago Press, 1930), 404–5, 457–58.
4. W.H.S. Jones, trans., Hippocrates, Volume IV, and Heracleitus On the Universe (Heinemann, 1959), 189.
5. This chapter’s discussion of Rudolf Virchow’s contributions and character is based on Leon Eisenberg, “Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow, Where Are You Now That We Need You?” American Journal of Medicine 77 (September 1984): 524–32; J.M.S. Pearce, “Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow,” Journal of Neurology 249 (2002): 492–93; Myron Schultz, “Rudolf Virchow,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 14:9 (September 2008): 1480–81; and “Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902)—Anthropologist, Archeologist, Politician, and Pathologist,” unsigned editorial, Journal of the American Medical Association 188:12 (June 22, 1964): 1080–81.
6. In another 1848 editorial in the same newspaper, Rudolf Virchow famously declared: “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.”
7. “The chief point,” Rudolf Virchow wrote, is that “the cell is really the ultimate morphological element in which there is any manifestation of life, and that we must not transfer the seat of real action to any point beyond the cell.” Rudolf Virchow, Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology, trans. Frank Chance (John Churchill, 1860), lecture 1, 3.
