Toms River (37 page)

For Ciba-Geigy, the timing was miserable. In April, the company had applied for six state permits it would need to build the pharmaceutical plant and stay in business in Toms River. For the plant’s critics, on the other hand, the hellish August was a boon. On Labor Day weekend, while beachgoers were grasping hands down on Long Beach Island, one thousand people gathered at Ortley Beach for a protest rally organized by Frank Livelli’s group, Save Our Ocean. Speaking through a bullhorn, Livelli urged the crowd to boycott Ciba products and tried to link the company’s wastewater discharges to the washups of floatable waste. “What the hell is the difference if they’re dumping it off a barge or through a pipeline under the water?” he asked.
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Actually, there was no connection at all between Ciba-Geigy’s discharges and the dolphin deaths, beach closures, or medical waste washups. The company had been dumping wastewater into the Atlantic for more than twenty years; its effluent had never been cleaner than it was in 1987. In September, the factory’s new manager, John Simas, sent out a “Dear Neighbor” letter to the entire town touting the results of a million-dollar study funded by the company and conducted by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The agency had found no traces of industrial chemicals in water samples taken from the beaches of Lavallette, Ortley Beach, and Seaside
Heights. In fact, the only places the chemicals were detected were within three feet of a pipeline discharge vent, a half-mile from the closest beach.

None of that seemed to matter. There was only one company in New Jersey allowed to dump treated industrial waste into the Atlantic through its own pipeline: Ciba-Geigy. So many of the ocean’s problems seemed utterly beyond control: toxic algae, disease-carrying bacteria, and slicks of medical waste came and went at their own inscrutable whims. But Ciba-Geigy’s discharge was entirely controllable. The factory’s future depended solely on the decisions of public officials who had to answer to a roused electorate. “By the end of that summer, people were just fed up,” remembered John Paul Doyle, the town’s state assemblyman at the time. “The cancer fears were definitely out there, but what made the difference was what was happening with the ocean. After that summer, it was all downhill for Ciba-Geigy.” Over the next three months, thirty-three bills aimed at curbing ocean pollution were introduced in the state legislature, including several that would ban discharges like Ciba-Geigy’s.

In search of political muscle, Ciba-Geigy hired a local real estate lawyer who had rapidly become one of the most powerful men in New Jersey: Lawrence E. Bathgate II. If the acquisition of wealth via rising property values was the secular religion of Ocean County, then Larry Bathgate was its chief apostle. He owned a Rolls-Royce, an airplane, a small airport, and five homes, including a beachfront mansion in Bay Head and an estate in Rumson near Bruce Springsteen’s. Bathgate was on intimate terms with Governor Tom Kean and soon-to-be-president George H. W. Bush, who appointed him finance chairman of the Republican Party in 1987 after Bathgate raised $600,000 for him at a single dinner. Not bad for a carpenter’s son who still practiced law in his hometown of Lakewood, just north of Toms River. Bathgate had made his fortune buying up farms and turning them into subdivisions. Now, at forty-eight, he was at the peak of his power as New Jersey’s preeminent fundraiser and one of the leading political moneymen in the United States.
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While lesser fundraisers toiled for candidates in the hopes of being rewarded with government contracts, Bathgate moved in much more rarefied circles. His talent
was forging relationships with public officials and using those contacts to assist his friends, who were often also his clients and investment partners. With Governor Kean not scheduled to leave office until 1990, Bathgate was perfectly positioned to assist Ciba-Geigy in securing the permits it would need to stay in business.

But Larry Bathgate was not the only power player in Ocean County. Democrats controlled the State Senate, and its president was Toms River’s own John F. Russo, a longtime friend of the chemical plant whose support was wavering as public opposition grew. Russo had unexpectedly won his seat in 1973 (a horrible year for Republicans because of the Watergate scandal) and had never felt entirely secure in office, even after becoming one of the most powerful Democrats in the state. “I paid a lot of attention to my district. They’re conservative in Ocean County, but that doesn’t mean they wanted to have a health risk in their community,” Russo remembered. “Once people became aware that there was a leak in the pipeline, and possible toxic emissions that may cause cancer, it wasn’t hard to go from there to saying let’s just shut the whole thing down.”

Besides the newly hired Bathgate, the only local counterweight to this army of newly stirred voters was the badly outnumbered factory workforce, and many of those dispirited workers were already getting layoff notices. By 1987, there were only about five hundred union workers left, and in another year the total would shrink to three hundred and fifty. Ray Talty by now was working at Ciba-Geigy’s newly upgraded sewage-treatment plant, where he would occasionally take a sip of the treated wastewater, just to satisfy himself that it was as clean as the company claimed. “The stuff was very clean, it looked just like our drinking water,” he remembered. But his brother John, the union vice president, knew the improvements had come too late to save the company’s reputation. “After a while, we figured out that it wouldn’t have mattered if you had nothing but distilled water or milk in the pipe, the pipeline was going down,” said John Talty. “It had become a symbol.”

The workers were increasingly focused on their own health worries. In 1988, Ciba-Geigy had to post danger warnings on sixty-two water fountains at the factory due to contamination from the plant’s
aging lead pipes.
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More importantly, employees were hearing the initial results of the worker cancer study being conducted by Philip Cole and Elizabeth Delzell of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Management called the union leadership up to the meeting room to hear the results of Doctor Cole’s study and told us, ‘This is great news—we don’t have a problem,’ ” recalled George Woolley. “Then they gave us information packets about what we were supposed to say about the study out in the community.” The message Ciba-Geigy hoped to communicate to its employees and to the public was that the plant’s workers were healthier than the general population. Based on an analysis of medical records of 2,642 current or former male employees, the Alabama researchers concluded that the death rate among male workers was almost 20 percent lower than the overall rate for white American men of the same age. Deaths from cancer, meanwhile, were only slightly higher than expected: 106, compared to 97 expected. Many of the cancer victims were Cincinnati veterans who might have been exposed there, not Toms River.
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What the company did not say was that industrial workers, even at chemical plants, were almost
always
healthier than the general population because of a well-established concept called the “healthy worker effect.” Simply put, factory workers are less likely to die prematurely because they are healthy enough to be hired in the first place and to hold on to their jobs. That is why the death rate among long-term factory employees is only 60 to 90 percent of the rate for the general population, which has more sick and disabled people.
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Despite this well-known bias, many factory-based epidemiological studies made the same questionable comparison because obtaining mortality statistics for the general population was much easier than getting them for a more appropriate comparison group, such as workers at a different factory. For manufacturers, there was another advantage to this shortcut: Comparisons to the general population tended to make their factories seem safer than they really were.

The union leaders at Ciba knew nothing about the healthy worker effect, but when they took a close look at the study results, they were disturbed nonetheless. For one thing, many now-dead workers who the leaders knew had been treated for cancer were not included. The
study was of deaths, not cancer incidence, so if cancer was not listed on a worker’s death certificate, he was not classified as a cancer case. “We’d say, ‘What about Frank Scarpone? What about John Jaczkowski?’ We knew a lot of names, and not all of them were listed as dying of cancer,” John Talty remembered. He and Woolley were also frustrated that the Alabama researchers, in their initial presentation to the union, did not subdivide the overall death rate into specific buildings, which meant that there was no way to gauge the risk faced by those workers who handled the most dangerous chemicals.

What worried them most were brain and central nervous system cancers. The Ciba-Geigy worker study had confirmed five such cases, higher than the expected three. But at the briefing, Woolley was told that the case totals were low enough that the apparent excess was probably a statistical fluke. This was exactly the type of excuse that Wilhelm Hueper had anticipated a generation earlier: Case-control studies gave reliable results when huge populations and common diseases were studied, but for a rare cancer at a single factory—even one as large as the Toms River plant—unsettling findings could almost always be explained away as random flukes because the case numbers were so small.

Not until the Alabama study was published in the
Journal of Occupational Medicine
in 1989—after the factory’s fate had been sealed—did a more disturbing picture emerge. In that article, Elizabeth Delzell briefly mentioned that she had subsequently found at least
eleven
brain cancer cases—including four nonfatal cases and two deaths that were not included in the original study because they had occurred in Toms River dye workers who had moved to Europe. “This analysis confirmed that rates were relatively high among men employed in the azo dye and [plastics and resins] areas, and suggested, in addition, a relatively high rate among men employed in the laboratories,” she wrote.
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Delzell also noted that there were unusually high numbers of cancer deaths in several job categories, including azo production (sixteen cases instead of the expected eight) and maintenance (thirty-seven cases instead of the expected twenty-five).

Later, George Woolley and others in the union would be bitter about not getting the full story in 1987. For now, however, they had
only their suspicions—and the company’s assurance that there was nothing to worry about. “We didn’t trust the study, but we didn’t know the facts,” Woolley said. The worries over the Alabama study further corroded morale at the factory, but the union leaders continued to support the company publicly as they geared up for a climactic showdown with Ciba-Geigy’s critics in the spring of 1988. After months of delay, the state announced plans for three public hearings on the company’s application for the permits it would need to build the pharmaceutical plant. Hundreds of people were expected to attend. Both sides promised a lively show. “We’re not looking for a confrontation,” explained the union’s blustery president, James McManus, at a press conference. “If we need to be reasonable people, we’ll be reasonable people. If we need to be wild men, we’ll be wild men.”
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Despite all the
sturm und drang
it was generating, the Ciba-Geigy factory was not the most serious water pollution threat in Ocean County. The larger risk in the 1980s came from the plume of contaminated groundwater from the old illegal dump at Reich Farm, which had been all but forgotten amid the tumult over the vastly larger chemical plant. While controversy raged over the theoretical possibility that Ciba-Geigy’s waste might make people sick if they swam near the ocean outfall or drank from a contaminated irrigation well, tens of thousands of unknowing Toms River residents were almost certainly drinking tap water tinged with industrial waste, some of it carcinogenic. The waste had leaked from the five thousand Union Carbide drums that Nick Fernicola, back in 1971, had dumped on two acres in the rear of the now-abandoned egg farm. Still owned by Samuel and Bertha Reich, the Pleasant Plains property was now being used for storage by a stone-crushing business.

The farms of Pleasant Plains gave way to subdivisions at a leisurely pace during the 1970s and 1980s, even as other parts of town were growing feverishly. Underneath the fields, however, there was plenty of activity. Struggling as usual to keep up with demand, the Toms River Water Company was still very dependent on its Parkway well field, which was about a mile south of Reich Farm. There were
six Parkway wells operating in mid-1987, providing one-third of the town’s overall supply. The thick layer of saturated sand beneath the Parkway well field was a rich source of groundwater, and it was continually replenished by a natural north-to-south flow. Groundwater seeped southward at a brisk pace of about sixteen inches per day. Then, when it entered the huge “capture zone” of the Parkway field, the water would start moving much faster—zipping along at more than nine feet per day as it was pulled toward the intake screen of one of the six wells. The Parkway field was essentially a perpetual water source, a bottomless cup—the perfect resource to match Toms River’s grow-now-worry-later ethos. The water company made the most of it. Back in 1974, when the Parkway field was new, Toms River Water extracted two million gallons per day. By 1987, the daily draw averaged nearly three million gallons—closer to four million on hot summer days.

A mile away at Reich Farm, meanwhile, there was also action underground. The chemicals Nick Fernicola had dumped in 1971 were on the move. There had been three attempted cleanups at the dumpsite—two in 1972 and one in 1974—involving the removal of about five thousand waste drums and eleven hundred cubic yards of soil. But the remediation was anything but thorough. Instead of testing the soil to look for chemicals, Union Carbide contractors carted dirt away only if it looked or smelled contaminated. If the dirt looked okay—whatever that meant—they left it alone. But the soil was not okay at all. Almost as soon as Fernicola dumped the leaky waste drums, globules of benzene, trichloroethylene, styrene, and other wastes began trickling down through ten feet of sandy soil and into the aquifer zone, where they hitched a ride with the groundwater seeping south. Within a year, the edge of the chemical plume had already moved beyond the Reichs’ land. It kept going south, tainting dozens of private wells as it spread like a fat, uncurling finger—pointing right at the Parkway field and its six huge and very thirsty public-supply wells.