Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  9. Don Bennett, “Widow Sues Ciba over Cancer,” Ocean County Observer, July 27, 1995.

  10. The reinjection plan ended up costing tens of millions of dollars less than Ciba had initially feared, thanks to an EPA decision not to require extra treatment to remove salts from the treated wastewater since it was not being directly discharged into the river—even though the reinjection zone was so close to the river that much of the treated water seeped into the river anyway. See Don Bennett, “EPA Flip-Flops on Ciba Water,” Ocean County Observer, May 14, 1993; and Richard Peterson, “Ciba Proposal Gets Praise from Activists, Neighbors,” Ocean County Observer, June 18, 1993.

  11. The “Ex-Pariah” headline was published May 25, 1995, in the Observer and referred to an award Ciba received from the United Nations–affiliated World Environment Center. The editorial, published June 6, 1995, included this line: “Fortress Ciba, where officials once arrogantly insisted that everything was pristine, is now openly encouraging participation by neighbors in its affairs.”

  12. Craig Wilger, January 7, 1993, letter to Gary Adamkiewicz of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2.

  13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Superfund Record of Decision: Reich Farms, September 30, 1988, 14.

  14. The name change from Toms River Water to United Water Toms River was prompted by a 1994 merger between its parent company, Philadelphia-based General Waterworks, and one of the largest water companies in the United States: United Water Resources, based in Harrington Park in northeastern New Jersey.

  15. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Responsiveness Summary: Reich Farms Superfund Site” (1995). See also “Dover Water Cleanup Plan May Be Altered,” Asbury Park Press, August 17, 1995.

  16. Michael Berry’s August 31, 1995, letter to Steven Jones was later reproduced as Appendix I of Childhood Cancer Incidence Health Consultation: A Review and Analysis of Cancer Registry Data, 1979–1995 for Dover Township, New Jersey (December 1997), 67.

  17. Though it was a key moment in the Toms River saga, Michael Berry and Robert Gialanella have different recollections as to why Berry sent Gialanella a copy of the 1995 analysis Berry conducted of childhood cancer incidence in Toms River. Berry thinks that Gialanella called him to express renewed concern about childhood cancer in Toms River, prompting Berry to send him the newly completed analysis. Gialanella, however, says he has a clear memory of the analysis being sent to him without his having requested it, and says that by 1995 he had given up on asking for help from the state. (Gialanella had requested a similar investigation in 1991, with ambiguous results.) Berry, who was involved in dozens of cluster investigations during his long tenure at the state health department, acknowledges that he is not sure.

  Chapter Seventeen

  1. Gale Scott, “Cluster of Concern: Kids’ Cancer Rate Alarms County,” Star-Ledger, March 10, 1996.

  2. Brett Pulley, “State to Study Ocean County over Cancer,” New York Times, March 12, 1996.

  3. Elin Gursky was quoted in a March 21, 1996, broadcast on The CBS Evening News.

  4. The description of the March 15 protest at the Ocean County Health Department is drawn from three sources: a story broadcast on March 21 on The CBS Evening News; Richard Peterson, “High Anxiety; Local Cancer Scare Spins Out of Control; Parents Demand Answers,” Ocean County Observer, March 17, 1996; and Carol Gorga Williams, “Officials Call in Vain for Patience,” Asbury Park Press, March 16, 1996.

  5. As physician Henry M. Vyner explained in his influential 1988 book Invisible Trauma, chemical pollutants were singularly terrifying because they were invisible environmentally and medically: They could not be detected without special equipment, and even the best-informed experts could not reliably predict their health effects. As a result, residents of a singled-out community could never know whether they were in a truly dangerous situation and whether the appearance of an illness like cancer was due to a past toxic exposure. See Henry M. Vyner, Invisible Trauma (D.C. Heath, 1988), ch. 3.

  6. Vyner, Invisible Trauma, 190–91.

  7. The description of the March 21, 1996, meeting at Toms River High School North is based on interviews with people who were there as well as taped footage broadcast May 5 on The NBC Nightly News and three newspaper accounts: Michael S. Yaple, “Residents Air Fears About Cancer Cluster,” The Press of Atlantic City, March 22, 1996; Carol Gorga Williams, “1,000 Hear State’s Cancer-Study Plan,” Asbury Park Press, March 22, 1996; and Gale Scott and John Hassell, “Fear and Recrimination Engulf Cancer Forum,” Star-Ledger, March 22, 1996.

  8. Paul Mulshine, “Ignorance Is the Real Cancer in Phony Ocean County Scare,” Star-Ledger, March 31, 1996.

  9. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Twenty-Five Years of the Safe Drinking Water Act: History and Trends (December 1999), 5, fig. 2. By 2011, the number of contaminants mandated for testing under the Safe Drinking Water Act had risen only slightly, to eighty-eight.

  10. New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Public Health Consultation: Drinking Water Quality Analyses, March 1996 to June 1999, United Water Toms River (2000), 110–11, table 9a. Drinking water at ten schools exceeded the five picocuries per liter regulatory standard, and four more were over it if margins of error were included.

  11. Public Health Consultation: Drinking Water Quality Analyses, March 1996 to June 1999, United Water Toms River, 113–16, table 9b.

  12. A New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection scientist, Bahman Parsa, eventually realized that United Water’s privately tested water samples typically sat for weeks before reaching the laboratory—enough time for the chief culprit, Radium-224, to decay to low levels. (Radium-224 has a half-life of just three and a half days.) Later, the DEP would discover similarly high levels of Radium-224 in groundwater almost everywhere it looked in central and southern New Jersey, as long as it analyzed the sample within two days. The state would institute a two-day turnaround requirement for radiation testing, and several utilities in the region—including United Water Toms River—would spend years and millions of dollars trying to bring down radioactivity levels in their drinking water.

  13. Ted Sherman, “2d Water Test Shows Acceptable Radium Reading,” Star-Ledger, April 19, 1996.

  Chapter Eighteen

  1. In addition to the radiation issues, the state’s initial checks of Toms River’s water system showed that six schools had relatively high levels of lead or copper, a common problem in buildings with old pipes. As expected, the state also found trichloroethylene in three Parkway wells at levels slightly over the safety limit, but the air stripper was removing almost all of it before the water was distributed to residents.

  2. “Water Tests Find No Link with Cancer,” New York Times, May 9, 1996.

  3. Another half-century would pass before Danish physicist Niels Bohr explained why atoms and molecules have unique spectral signatures. Bohr recognized that spectral lines were generated by the release or absorption of photons—particles of light with distinctive, measurable wavelengths—as the electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus jumped predictably from one discrete orbit (or energy level) to another in atoms that had been put into an excited state by the flame of a Bunsen burner or some other catalyst. When an atom absorbs energy from the burner, one or more of its electrons will jump to a higher orbit. And when the atom returns to an unexcited ground state, it will release that energy in the form of photons at specific spectral wavelengths that can be measured on a detector as lines of light.

  4. This chapter’s account of the sequence of events that led to the identification of styrene acrylonitrile trimer in Toms River’s water is based on interviews with, and documents provided by, Floyd Genicola and Jerald Fagliano of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services; Gerald Nicholls and Eric Rau, formerly of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection; and G. Wayne Sovocool of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although
they had many disagreements over how best to proceed in 1996, their recollections many years later of what had transpired were quite consistent. Readers interested in a detailed scientific account of the identification process should consult Andrew H. Grange et al., “Identification of Pollutants in a Municipal Well Using High Resolution Mass Spectrometry,” Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 12 (1998): 1161–68. The process is also explained in Susan D. Richardson et al., “Identification of Drinking Water Contaminants in the Course of a Childhood Cancer Investigation in Toms River, New Jersey,” Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology 9 (1999): 200–216.

  5. In 1805, the British Quaker chemist John Dalton published a primitive but highly accurate table of six elements—including hydrogen, the lightest, to which he assigned a weight of one. He gave oxygen a weight of 16 because its mass was 16 times greater than hydrogen. More than a century later, using a very similar principle, Francis Aston helped develop the modern scale of atomic and molecular mass, which is now named after Dalton. The subtle difference is that the fundamental unit of the modern scale, one dalton, is equivalent to one-twelfth of the mass of a carbon-12 atom, which turns out to be nearly identical but slightly lighter than the mass of a hydrogen atom (1.00794 daltons). The same subtle differences apply to other elements, which is why oxygen is now considered to have an atomic weight of 15.9994 daltons.

  6. Years later, Gerald Nicholls would remember his battles with Floyd Genicola in intricate detail: “Floyd had a history with the department,” Nicholls recalled. “He was largely viewed by his colleagues as very intelligent and a good analytical chemist. In fact, I can’t remember a time when he was ever proven wrong about an analysis. But he also had the reputation of being a loose cannon, and of pursuing things well beyond what we could argue for scientifically and logically.”

  7. Sociologist Phil Brown coined the term popular epidemiology to describe the very different process by which nonexperts gather information about environmental risks to their health and seek solutions. Phil Brown, “Popular Epidemiology and Toxic Waste Contamination: Lay and Professional Ways of Knowing,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33 (September 1992): 267–81.

  8. New Jersey State Department of Health and Senior Services, Cancer Incidence in New Jersey, 1995–1999 (September 2001), tables 1, 2.

  9. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Public Health Consultation: Toms River General Post Office (December 1998).

  10. The spectrogram actually showed 211 daltons, not 210, but a quirk of isobutane chemical ionization is that it yields a result with one extra hydrogen ion, with an atomic mass of 1.

  11. The fax was Floyd Genicola’s last interaction with anyone at Radian International. As soon as Union Carbide managers heard about his call to the contractor, they complained to Genicola’s supervisors, who ordered him to stop communicating with Radian.

  12. For a brief summary of styrene acrylonitrile’s uses and environmental properties, see the National Toxicology Program’s background documents on styrene acrylonitrile trimer, available at the NTP website. In consumer products, styrene acrylonitrile polymer was eventually replaced by acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS plastic, in which the same two compounds—styrene and acrylonitrile—are bonded in the presence of polybutadiene, a synthetic rubber. ABS plastic is less toxic and is widely used in products such as Lego toy blocks, plastic clarinets, and certain auto parts and plumbing pipes.

  13. Acrylonitrile is classified as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” in the Eleventh Report on Carcinogens, published in 2005 by the National Toxicology Program, because it causes stomach and central nervous system cancers in rats. It has also been associated with lung cancer in textile workers in some studies. The Twelfth Report on Carcinogens, issued in 2011, for the first time listed styrene as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” for causing lung tumors in mice and increasing incidence of leukemia and lymphoma in factory workers in the plastics and rubber industries. The International Agency for Research in Cancer classifies both styrene and acrylonitrile as possibly carcinogenic to humans based on animal studies and lists acrylonitrile as a genotoxic mutagen that damages DNA in animal studies. For styrene, the evidence of mutagenicity is mixed, according to the IARC.

  14. Later, styrene acrylonitrile trimer would also be found in soil at the town landfill, which made sense because Nick Fernicola had briefly dumped Union Carbide waste there, too.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1. Jerald Fagliano, “A Case-Control Study of Childhood Brain Cancer and Drinking Water Contamination,” unpublished dissertation (The Johns Hopkins University, 1998).

  2. Peter J. Murphy, Exposure to Wells G and H in Woburn Massachusetts, report produced under contract to the Massachusetts Health Research Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (August 1990).

  3. Kevin Costas, Robert S. Knorr, and Suzanne K. Condon, “A Case-Control Study of Childhood Leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts: The Relationship between Leukemia Incidence and Exposure to Public Drinking Water,” Science of the Total Environment 300 (December 2002): 23–35, 29–30, tables 3, 4.

  4. Suzanne Condon of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, quoted in Richard Saltus, “Woburn Poisons’ Route Mapped; Study Blames Water for Leukemia,” Boston Globe, May 10, 1996.

  5. Gale Scott, “Dover Twp. Childhood Cancers Alarmingly High to Feds; Study Will Check Link to Water Supply Toxins,” Star-Ledger, January 24, 1997.

  6. The third defendant in the Woburn case, a uniform launderer called UniFirst, had less potential liability than W.R. Grace or Beatrice Foods and settled early in the case for slightly more than $1 million.

  7. Patricia A. Miller, “Officials Quizzed on Water in Dover,” Asbury Park Press, July 15, 1997.

  8. “Requests to Conserve Water, Power Ignored by Many in N.J.,” Associated Press, July 16, 1997.

  9. Jean Mikle, “Cancer Cluster Confirmed; Federal, State Studies Verify High Rates in Dover,” Asbury Park Press, April 8, 1997.

  10. Paul Kix, “In the Shadow of Woburn,” Boston Magazine, September 22, 2009.

  11. Paula Span, “One Man’s Poisons; Jan Schlichtmann’s Last Pollution Case Turned into a Toxic Obsession. Now He’s Digging for the Truth from a Different Angle,” Washington Post, February 22, 1999.

  12. Michael Gillick, who was diagnosed in the spring of 1979, barely met the criteria for inclusion in the legal case. Randy Lynnworth did not because he had been diagnosed in 1982; his parents had reached a separate legal settlement with Ciba.

  Chapter Twenty

  1. Patricia A. Miller and Jean Mikle, “Lawyer Vows Answers for Families Hit by Cancer,” Asbury Park Press, December 12, 1997.

  2. In an interview, Robert Butler said his memory of the confrontation differed from Esther Berezofsky’s account but, citing the confidentiality of the discussions, would not provide specifics.

  3. Lois Gibbs, the onetime leader of the Love Canal protests who was now a full-time environmental activist in Washington, D.C., had recommended Richard Clapp to Linda Gillick.

  4. Frederick Kunkle, “Activist Cites Five New Kid Cancers,” Star-Ledger, May 14, 1998. See also Patricia A. Miller, “Utility’s Aim: Keep Two Wells Off Line,” Asbury Park Press, May 19, 1998.

  5. Patricia A. Miller, “Cancer Scare ‘Hysteria’ Irks C of C Leader,” Asbury Park Press, May 21, 1998.

  6. Angela Stewart, “State to ‘Aggressively’ Pursue Report of New Child Cancer Cases,” Star-Ledger, May 15, 1998.

  7. Michael R. Edelstein, Contaminated Communities: Coping with Residential Toxic Exposure (Westview Press, 2004), ch. 4.

  8. Nancy Lorenzo, quoted in Mark Fritz, “Little League Giants Put Town on Map, For Good,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1998.

  9. The second and third quotations are from Laurie Baiamonte Amato and Kevin Turner in Nichole M. Christian, “What Tropical Storm? Only Bliss in Toms River,” New York Times, Augus
t 29, 1998.

  10. Eugene Gessler, Ciba Toms River site manager, quoted in Jean Mikle, “Cancer Death Rate Normal among Ex-Ciba Workers,” Asbury Park Press, July 2, 1998.

  11. Nalini Sathiakumar and Elizabeth Delzell, “An Updated Mortality Study of Workers at a Dye and Resin Manufacturing Plant,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 42:7 (July 2000): 762–71.

  12. Sathiakumar and Delzell, “Updated Mortality Study,” 762.

  13. Delzell, Macaluso, and Cole, “Follow-Up Study of Workers,” 276–77. See also Barbone, Nested Case-Control Study, 39–40.

  14. Jean Mikle, “Third Toms River Well Has Traces of Pollutants,” Asbury Park Press, September 10, 1998.

  15. John Jenks et al., Characterization of Non-Target Substances in the Ground-water near the Reich Farm Superfund Site, Dover Township, New Jersey, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (April 10, 2000), 5.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  1. For a list of Paracelsus’s attributed works, see Franz Hartmann, Life and Doctrines of Philippus, Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known as Paracelsus (Kessinger, 1992), 31–36.

  2. The quotation, “Alle Ding sind Gift und nichts ohn Gift; allein die Dosis macht, das ein Ding kein Gift ist,” appears in Paracelsus’s Seven Defensiones, first published in 1538. See Four Treatises of Theophrastus Von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus, 22.

  3. Laura N. Vandenberg et al., “Hormones and Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Low-Dose Effects and Nonmonotonic Dose Responses,” Endocrine Reviews 33:3 (June 1, 2012): 378–455. See also Dan Fagin, “Toxicology: The Learning Curve,” Nature 490:7421 (October 25, 2012): 462–65.

  4. Morris Maslia faced many other complications, too, in constructing the water model for Toms River. The old records of the Toms River Water Company were sparse, and he could not conduct a real-world tracer test to confirm the accuracy of his model. In Woburn, Peter Murphy had arranged to add a fluoride tracer to each well, one at a time, and then collect water samples all over town to see if each well’s water was distributed as the model predicted. But after the trauma Toms River had been through since 1996, no one wanted to seek permission to add anything to the water system—even table salt, which Maslia considered using as a tracer. Fortunately, during the emergency water tests of 1996, Jerry Fagliano had noticed that concentrations of naturally occurring barium varied significantly from well to well and thus could serve as a natural tracer Maslia could use to verify his model.