Toms River (25 page)

She and her husband, along with some of their neighbors, invited four science-minded friends over for coffee. Three were high school science teachers: William Skowronski and Peter and Susan Hibbard. The fourth, Stephen Molello, worked at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant south of town. They decided to form a group, which they
later named Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water, with Stephanie Wauters as the leader. The group’s mission would be to push for stricter water testing and for full disclosure by Ciba-Geigy of the types and quantities of chemical waste it was discharging into the ocean, burying in landfills, and sending up its smokestacks.

These were daunting goals, considering Ciba-Geigy’s local clout and penchant for secrecy. Within a few weeks, the group got even more ambitious. From Don Bennett’s articles in the
Observer
, Wauters learned that Ciba-Geigy’s ocean-dumping permit had expired and that the state Department of Environmental Protection would be conducting hearings to decide whether to renew it, and if so, under what conditions. That permit was absolutely crucial to Ciba-Geigy because the company had no other way to get rid of the almost two billion gallons of wastewater it discharged every year—a total that would surely rise after the pharmaceutical manufacturing operation moved from Rhode Island to Toms River. Without the permit, there would be no pipeline to the ocean; without the pipeline, the Toms River factory would have to close.

Stephanie Wauters and her friends realized that the expiring permit created a rare opportunity. Ciba-Geigy had little incentive to pay attention to a few science teachers, but the company would have to listen to the state Department of Environmental Protection. If the citizen’s group could force the agency to take a tough line with Ciba-Geigy, the company would have to compromise or risk its entire Toms River enterprise. No one in Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water had a clear idea about how to accomplish that, but they were ready to try. The group’s core members were all Democrats accustomed to outsider status in Toms River, so they took an outsider’s approach that bypassed Roden Lightbody and rest of the local power brokers. Instead, they published letters in the local papers and sought allies among reporters. At the
Observer
, Bennett obliged with detailed coverage of their activities. In the beach communities, meanwhile, Mayor Gorga spread the word about the new group. Soon, a few dozen people were crowding into the Wauters’ living room for meetings.

Cancer was not yet a key point of attack for Ciba-Geigy’s critics,
but it was always lurking in the background. Many people in town had heard murmurings about illnesses on Cardinal Drive and in other neighborhoods near the chemical plant, as well as among its workers, but the general feeling was that nothing could be proved. The company would not even divulge the names of the chemicals in its waste, so how could anyone hope to connect the plant to a specific pattern of illnesses? “From Day One we were concerned about cancer in the community, but we didn’t have the resources to look into it,” Wauters remembered. “We were taking on the whole social structure of the company and the politicians and agencies; we felt we couldn’t fight the cancer fight, too.”

Even so, new information about cancer was trickling out, and none of it was good for Ciba-Geigy. Back in 1981, the same year the company applied for a new ocean discharge permit, a team of inspectors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had visited the plant, collected samples of treated wastewater, and brought them back to an agency lab, where saltwater tanks filled with tiny bug-eyed sea creatures were waiting. These were mysid shrimp, which were often used in tests to see whether polluted water was harming marine life.
⁹
For years, Ciba-Geigy had refused to conduct those mysid tests, preferring instead to test its effluent on a much hardier animal, the sheepshead minnow. (The company’s critics would later call the minnow the “cockroach of the sea” for its ability to survive even in highly toxic environments.) The reasons for the company’s reluctance became clear as soon as EPA technicians poured various amounts of Ciba effluent into the mysid tanks and waited the requisite four days to see what would happen to the animals. Ciba-Geigy’s effluent, the agency concluded, was “highly toxic” to the mysid, more than half of which died in every mixture the EPA tested—even the most diluted, which consisted of just 6 percent effluent and 94 percent salt water.
¹⁰

The agency also conducted a second test that Ciba-Geigy had long refused to undertake, one that was directly relevant to the cancer issue.
¹¹
It was aimed at seeing whether the company’s treated wastewater triggered genetic mutations in bacteria. That was important because mutations, alterations in DNA, frequently lead to the uncontrolled cell growth of cancer; mutagenic chemicals often, though not
always, are carcinogens, too. The results from the second test were even worse for Ciba-Geigy. Its wastewater was more damaging to DNA than any effluent that had ever been tested at the EPA’s New Jersey lab, according to a summary of the tests prepared by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Ciba-Geigy, the report concluded, should not be permitted to continue to discharge “such a clearly mutagenic wastewater.”
¹²

Ever since there had been a chemical plant in Toms River, its executives had refused to disclose what was in its waste. With the new EPA tests, agency officials finally knew enough to put the lie to the claims that only water and salt were going into the ocean and that the company’s new treatment plant was removing any hazardous compounds before discharge. Now regulators knew that even after treatment, and even in diluted form, the more than five million gallons of wastewater Ciba-Geigy discharged every day into the Atlantic was still hazardous enough to kill living things and scramble their DNA. That was a shock because, under the traditional approach to regulating pollution—one chemical at a time—the company’s effluent had always been acceptable, or nearly so. Now it was clear that the mixture, even when diluted, was toxic.
¹³
By the time officials realized how misguided their assumptions had been, the company had already sent more than thirty billion gallons into the ocean—and billions more into the river, before 1966.

The 1981 test results were a disaster for Ciba-Geigy, but its managers could at least console themselves that no one outside the regulatory agencies knew. There was still a chance that the company could get a new permit for its pipeline without public scrutiny and thus keep making chemicals in Toms River. But on the morning of April 12, 1984, with the discovery of the leak at the corner of Bay and Vaughn avenues, all hope of a quiet accommodation vanished. A state source tipped off Don Bennett about the results of the 1981 mysid and mutagenicity tests, which he promptly splashed all over the
Observer
. By the summer of 1984, Bennett was writing articles about
all
of the chemicals used at the factory. Thanks to the information the company was forced to provide on its application for a new permit, the composition of its waste was no longer a trade secret. Instead, the people of
Ocean County were reading about it every day. Bennett even wrote a two-day series featuring detailed descriptions of twenty-two hazardous chemicals in the company’s wastewater and 109 others used at the plant.
¹⁴

The list was devastating, but by the time it was published, Ciba-Geigy had bigger worries than another damaging story in the local paper about cancer-causing chemicals.

There were hippies in Rose Donato’s kitchen. She was seventy-one years old and stood less than five feet tall, and she liked to keep a clean kitchen. It was the brightest room in her beachfront bungalow, the place where she sipped her morning coffee and watched the sun rise over the surf as she paged through the morning’s
Ocean County Observer
. And now hippies were there—and on her front lawn, too. Their sleeping bags were crowding her perennials.

It was her own fault. She had invited them, sort of. It had started with an article Donato noticed in the
Observer
three months earlier, in April of 1984. She read newspaper stories all the way through if they were about environmental topics, and this particular one hit close to home. The article, by Don Bennett, described a rupture in a pipeline that carried wastewater from the big chemical plant in Toms River, which was ten miles inland, to a discharge zone a half-mile offshore from Ortley Beach—a location well within view from Rose Donato’s kitchen, since Lavallette was just north of Ortley Beach. Donato had summered in Lavallette for many years, long enough to remember the controversy over Ciba-Geigy’s plans to build the pipeline back in the mid-1960s. She had considered joining the opposition back then but was mollified by assurances from public officials that
the pipeline would be carrying “a clear, harmless water,” her daughter Michele remembered.
¹
So eighteen years later, when Rose Donato read in the
Observer
that hazardous chemicals had just leaked from the pipe in a Toms River neighborhood, she was “absolutely infuriated,” as Michele Donato put it. “I think she felt very, very betrayed by her government officials, who had lied.” Rose Donato could be tough when the situation called for it. A divorcée, she had run a demolition business in New Brunswick before retiring, and she was used to pushing back if someone tried to take advantage of her. And so she resolved, as soon as she finished the article in the
Observer
, to push back against what she considered a grave offense to the Atlantic Ocean.

Rose Donato was not an activist, but she knew what she loved: her garden, her view, her beach, and her ocean. She had been involved in an effort to stop Rutgers University from expanding into a forest near New Brunswick, where she lived when she was not in Lavallette. And every year since the 1970s, Donato had sent a check for twenty dollars to an environmental group she especially admired: Greenpeace. Newsletters from the organization would arrive in her mailbox, and they were always filled with accounts of the derring-do of plucky young activists who somehow managed to disrupt all kinds of nefarious activities on the high seas, including nuclear weapons testing in Polynesia, seal clubbing in Newfoundland, whaling off the California coast, and industrial waste dumping in the North Sea. The last one is what caught Rose Donato’s attention. If Greenpeace was fighting dumping off the coast of Scotland, why not off the coast of New Jersey, too?

She wrote a letter to Greenpeace asking for help. And then the adventure began.

The news that a chemical company was discharging its waste near a New Jersey beach was just what Dave Rapaport wanted to hear—not because he supported ocean dumping but because he wanted to end it. He worked for Greenpeace U.S.A. and was somewhat of a prodigy there. Bearded and intense—he looked like a young Al Pacino in
Serpico
,
but with wire-rimmed glasses—Rapaport, at age twenty-five, had just been put in charge of Greenpeace’s new toxics campaign in the Northeast, which was supposed to target companies that discharged waste into lakes, rivers, and oceans. It already had a donated boat: a forty-foot, steel-hulled ketch named
Aleyka
. Rapaport and other staffers had fixed the boat up the year before. Now, in the spring of 1984, he was looking for destinations on the East Coast. The trick was to find creative ways to use the
Aleyka
that would generate news coverage for Greenpeace and build support for its campaign. To Rapaport, the discharge at Ortley Beach sounded ideal.
²
New York City media were nearby, and the dumper, Ciba-Geigy, was one of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world. The fight in Toms River, he thought, could turn into a big deal.

The first thing Rapaport did was to call Stephanie Wauters and arrange to meet with her and the other founders of Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water. They were suspicious of Greenpeace and worried it was far too radical for conservative Toms River. But they also recognized that they needed help to rouse the community, and the young man from Greenpeace looked reassuringly respectable, with his neatly trimmed beard and glasses. “I went down there to Stephanie’s house and talked to them and listened to their stories,” Rapaport recalled. “From everything I heard, it seemed like as good a place as any to bring the boat. It all kind of added up, so we put it on the itinerary.”

For the next few weeks, in May, Rapaport scouted out the area, especially Ortley Beach and next-door Lavallette. The beach towns on the Barnegat Peninsula were odd but endearing; they were blue-collar resorts full of quirky characters. Rapaport needed to make some friends. If the
Aleyka
was going to come to New Jersey, its crew would need a base of operations on shore. In Lavallette, he heard about Rose Donato’s beach house, which was perfectly situated just off the beach, within easy range of ship-to-shore radio. He asked her if she would be willing to allow her house to be used for a good cause, and Donato agreed. She had written Greenpeace a letter, after all. If she had any worries about the fact that Rapaport was vague about
how many people would come and how long they would stay, the septuagenarian did not show it. “She just said, ‘OK, you can stay at my house,’ ” Michele Donato remembered, “and that was how it all started.”