Toms River (26 page)

On one of his first mornings in Lavallette, Rapaport rented some snorkel gear and swam out from the beach to try to find the pipeline discharge area. He quickly recognized that he was out of his depth, in every sense. The first vents did not appear in the half-buried pipe until it was twenty-five hundred feet offshore; by then, it was under forty feet of murky water. (The vents then continued for another thousand feet to the end of the line.) Clearly, if he wanted to anchor the
Aleyka
directly over the pipeline, Rapaport would need help from the locals, preferably ones with boats, scuba equipment, and knowledge of the underwater topography. Cautiously, he began to look for allies. He met with an ex–Navy Seal at a topless bar (he was a diver who had done work for Ciba) and hung out with several charter boat captains. “It was almost like espionage,” he recalled, “because I was trying to find people who were sympathetic, while also trying to avoid giving too much information to people who might turn out to be sympathetic to Ciba.”

Rapaport already had a pretty clear idea of the type of aggressive mischief he wanted to undertake, though he kept the exact nature of his plans a secret. What he had in mind was what was known in the environmental movement as monkeywrenching, illegal but nonlethal actions aimed at disrupting a company’s harmful environmental practices.
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(Critics of monkeywrenching had another term for it: criminal sabotage.) He wanted to plug up the discharge vents in Ciba-Geigy’s pipeline, at least temporarily. It was a bold idea, technically difficult to accomplish in deep, cloudy water and also politically risky, since public opinion in Ocean County might turn against the Greenpeace activists if they were perceived as reckless vandals. That would be the exact opposite of the citizen uprising against Ciba-Geigy that Rapaport hoped to inspire. “The whole purpose was to find a way to dramatize what was going on with Ciba, to expose it, and to inspire people to take action,” Rapaport remembered many years
later. “We wanted people to think, ‘If those crazy guys from Greenpeace can do it, so can we.’ ”

Worried that the pipeline-plugging operation might fail or backfire, Rapaport also identified a second target, one that was visible above the treetops as he drove by the Ciba-Geigy factory complex on Route 37. It was the company’s water tower, one of the tallest objects in Toms River at 160 feet. It looked like a giant aspirin tablet on stilts. The tank on top was white except for the words “CIBA-GEIGY” in six-foot black letters. A narrow catwalk with a railing ringed the lower edge of the tank; below the railing, the tank rested on six stilts that were each about as tall as a ten-story building. One stilt was equipped with a ladder surrounded by a protective cage. To a Greenpeace veteran like Rapaport, an industrial tower on private property was like a fire hydrant to a dog: It was territory that had to be marked. In 1982, five daring activists had garnered nationwide publicity for Greenpeace by simultaneously climbing power plant smokestacks in three states and unfurling banners protesting acid rain. Ciba-Geigy’s smokestacks were too short and narrow for that type of stunt, but its water tower was a climber’s delight—assuming he or she could scale the factory’s perimeter fence, evade the security guards, and sprint all the way to the tower ladder without being caught. Rapaport had just organized a similar climb in Baltimore, so why not in Toms River?

As June became July, Rose Donato acquired a clearer sense of what it meant to host a Greenpeace action. A stream of shaggy young men—and a few women, too—appeared at her doorstep and pitched their sleeping bags on her floor. “We just kind of took over her house,” Rapaport remembered. “More and more people started showing up.” Initially, Donato was still at her winter home in New Brunswick, having left extensive instructions for Rapaport and his fellow campaigners about how to take care of the bungalow. When she arrived in Lavallette to check up on them, she realized how futile those instructions were. The beach house got even more crowded when the
Aleyka
showed up and anchored offshore. Using rubber rafts, crew members went back and forth from the boat to the house, all day and night. One Friday evening in mid-July, Michele Donato showed up for what
she thought would be two weeks of lazy vacationing at her mother’s place. “I was shocked to see them all there,” she remembered. “When I showed up, the house was loaded with twenty-five people, and my mother was sitting there in her kitchen, looking kind of bewildered. I mean, they were sleeping
all over the place
.” After briefly kicking them all out, Rose relented and instead left for New Brunswick, mollified by the gift of a bottle of scotch from her new friends at Greenpeace. Her daughter, a lawyer and self-described “old hippie” at thirty-five, stayed and joined the campaign. “It was all very, very exciting,” Michele Donato remembered. “I wanted to be part of it.”

She was not the only one caught up in the impending drama. As the Greenpeace contingent grew and its activities became more visible, the people of Lavallette started to take notice. There was a cultural chasm between the middle-class families who summered there and the young activists, but they found common cause in their opposition to the pipeline. “We might have been dirtier than they wanted their own kids to be, but we were good kids and the people in Lavallette recognized that,” Rapaport said. A few trusted locals began visiting the
Aleyka
and sitting in on Greenpeace strategy sessions, which were always more like parties anyway. Lavallette mayor Ralph Gorga, still the only public official in the county willing to attack Ciba-Geigy in the newspapers, helped by allowing Greenpeace to leave its inflatable boats on the beach, even though a borough ordinance forbade it. Lavellette, he declared, would be a safe haven for Greenpeace.

The aura of illegality only added to the romance of the enterprise. Twice, Rapaport scaled the perimeter fence and led clandestine nighttime scouting missions onto the factory property to assess Ciba-Geigy’s security, map the fastest route to the water tower, and collect soil samples for later testing. Meanwhile, off Ortley Beach, scuba divers (some from Greenpeace and some local) jumped off the
Aleyka
and searched the cloudy ocean bottom for the pipe. After many failed attempts, they managed to collect a few bottlefuls of the dark liquid that was shooting out one of its discharge vents. The bottles of brown water found a home on the front porch of Rose Donato’s increasingly crowded beach bungalow. When they wanted inspiration, Dave Rapaport and his band of monkeywrenchers-in-waiting would hold the
bottles up to the light and wonder what kinds of chemicals were swirling inside.

The 1915 triumph of Katsusaburo Yamagiwa in inducing cancer in rabbits exposed to coal tar had a galvanizing effect on cancer researchers around the world, especially after his former student Hidejiro Tsutsui in 1918 used the same “tar painting” technique to produce tumors in mice, which were much easier to handle in a laboratory than rabbits. One of the most determined of those scientists was a tall, bespectacled, and rather severe Oxford-trained pathologist named Ernest Laurence Kennaway.
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Joining the small research staff of London’s Cancer Hospital in 1922, Kennaway immediately embarked on a search for the specific ingredients of coal tar responsible for causing cancerous tumors in animals and, presumably, humans. Yamagiwa had confirmed the first carcinogenic substance, but Kennaway wanted to find the first carcinogenic
molecule
. What made the quest so difficult was coal tar’s composition: It was not one chemical but several thousand. The high-temperature combustion of coal generates a complex and highly variable stew of all sorts of compounds, largely but not exclusively hydrocarbons. Most of these combustion products are airborne gases, others are solids in ash, and the rest comprise the viscous liquid known as coal tar. This thick, dark-brown goo was carcinogenic—Yamagiwa had proved that—but Kennaway wanted to know why. Identifying the particular ingredients responsible would be a huge step toward understanding and preventing cancer.

He had only a few clues. The biggest was that the tars produced when coal was burned at higher temperatures were more carcinogenic to mice than those generated by less heat. So Kennaway started testing pure chemicals such as anthracene that were produced only when coal was burned above 700 degrees Celsius, or about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. None of those pure compounds induced tumors in his mice, but he did find that when he burned organic substances—including human skin—at the same high temperatures, he could produce mixtures that also gave mice cancer. Kennaway realized that the combustion products he created from his experiments were mostly members of a large class of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
or PAHs. The mystery carcinogen in coal tar, he reasoned, was probably a PAH.

By the late 1920s, Kennaway was certain he was getting close to his goal, but he may also have begun to doubt that he would be the one to reach it. He had Parkinson’s disease; he had noticed its symptoms—shaking hands, a shuffling gait, and slightly slurred speech—a few years earlier, and they were getting progressively worse. Like the tubercular Yamagiwa, Kennaway increasingly relied on assistants and colleagues to undertake the laborious work of analyzing potential candidate chemicals and testing them on mice. He had always been fastidious about recording each day’s work in the lab, but now it took him an hour or more to write just a few pages.

When the marathon search finally ended in 1932, Kennaway was too incapacitated to run its final leg.
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Instead, members of his lab team distilled and tested PAHs extracted from two tons of coal tar pitch donated by a nearby London gasworks, finding one molecule that had all of the characteristics they were looking for. It was a previously unknown compound called 3:4-benzpyrene, now known as benzo(a)pyrene, and its identification marked the first time a pure chemical found in the real world, and not just synthesized in a laboratory, had been shown to cause cancer in a lab animal. The ambiguity was over: The combustion of organic compounds—in boilers, engines, chimneys, and all the other fires of industry—produced at least one molecule capable of causing malignant tumors in a living organism. Soon Kennaway’s lab would find more than a dozen other carcinogenic PAHs, all of them present wherever organic compounds are incinerated—from the coal-fired power plants of inland China and the American Midwest to the kettles and boilers of Ciba-Geigy’s Toms River plant.

The significance of what Kennaway achieved went far beyond a particular molecule or class of chemicals, however. If Katsusaburo Yamagiwa launched the era of the carcinogen, then Ernest Kennaway turned the search for cancer-causers into a methodical, fruitful science—one that would often be undertaken by teams of collaborating chemists, physicists, biologists, and physicians emulating the work of Kennaway’s own team. Thanks in large part to Kennaway
and his colleagues, dozens of carcinogenic pollutants would be identified by the 1940s, and environmental causation—the effects of toxic chemicals on living cells—would gain wide acceptance as an important (if largely unproven) explanation for many human cancers. But those developments would also transform the social conditions in which environmental cancer research is conducted. Now that specific products of commerce—including the detritus of dye manufacture—had been directly implicated as causes of deadly disease, the discoveries of Kennaway’s successors would no longer be greeted with acclamation. As governments took their first steps toward meaningful regulation of the chemical industry, science would become both a weapon and a target.

Anyone in Toms River who did not already know Greenpeace was in town found out during the last week of July of 1984, when the group staged a press conference in Lavallette and called for the immediate closure of the pipeline.
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Exactly how that would happen went unsaid, but Ciba-Geigy executives did agree to meet the following day with Dave Rapaport and other Greenpeace representatives to talk about it. By now, the company was beginning to recognize what it was facing, so Jorge Winkler and other executives adopted a conciliatory tone. Yes, they told Rapaport, Ciba-Geigy agreed that ending ocean discharges was a worthy goal. No, they added, it was not feasible with current technology. “Of course they weren’t going to meet our demands,” said Rapaport, “and we told them if they didn’t, we would do what we had to do”—whatever that meant.

Dave Rapaport knew what it meant. He would have to talk his friend Sam Sprunt into climbing the water tower. He already had one confirmed climber, a serious-minded twenty-three-year-old woman from Boston named Beverly Baker who worked full-time for Greenpeace. But it would take two volunteers to carry all the banners and supplies. Rapaport wanted Samuel Sprunt to be the second. Sprunt, who was twenty-six, did not work for Greenpeace. He was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying physics. Sprunt cared about environmental issues—he had participated in some anti–nuclear power demonstrations as an undergraduate at
Stanford University—but he was in Toms River mostly because he was Rapaport’s friend and because he was pursuing a young woman with the group.

As it turned out, the young woman had already left Toms River by the time Sprunt arrived, but Rapaport urged Sprunt to stay because he possessed a characteristic Rapaport thought would come in handy on a Greenpeace mission: He was not afraid to try something crazy in the pursuit of adventure. Sprunt had proved that the previous summer in Newport, Rhode Island, at the America’s Cup yacht race, where the upstart
Australia II
was about to win a historic victory, breaking the United States’ perennial hold on the most famous sailing trophy in the world. Stealthily swimming up to the yacht in the middle of the night, Sprunt and a friend managed to photograph its super-secret winged keel, avoiding detection by a squad of Australian military guards on the pier just a few yards away. “The whole world wanted a picture of that keel, and we had it,” Sprunt remembered. “We walked all around Newport that night, soaking wet, trying to find a reporter who would believe our story.” Alas for Sprunt, by the time his film was developed,
Australia II
had won the final race, and its gloating owner had revealed the keel to the world. Sprunt’s hard-earned photo was worthless, but he had a great story to tell his friends, including Rapaport, who thought it sounded a lot like a Greenpeace stunt.