Toms River (20 page)

Without intending for it to happen, Linda Gillick became the hub of information about childhood cancer in Ocean County. By virtue of her assertive personality, her new fund-raising job, the news articles about Michael, and the many hours she spent at hospitals, Gillick knew just about every local family with an afflicted child. Sometimes her phone would ring and a parent she did not know would be on the line, full of questions. Just one case was heartbreaking enough, and now she was hearing about dozens. Ocean County, especially Toms River, seemed to have more than its fair share of misery, she thought. But Gillick had no way to judge whether the number of cases was truly unusual. She knew nothing about cancer epidemiology; she was just a mother who kept her eyes open.

As for Michael’s neuroblastoma, the Gillicks rarely speculated on its possible causes. Why dwell on the past when there was work to be done? They did not argue when doctors told them there was no medical explanation for why neuroblasts run amok in about 250 American babies each year, while staying somnolent in four million others. Devout Catholics, the Gillicks considered Michael’s illness to be god’s will; this acceptance helped them get through their ordeal, one day at a time.

Late one night at New York Hospital, however, Linda Gillick heard something that got her thinking. She was, as usual, talking to another
parent, a man who had been a construction worker in Toms River in the 1960s. He told her a story that at first sounded outlandish, explaining that he had helped to lay a pipeline that carried toxic waste right through the middle of town. The pipe started at Toms River Chemical and passed near the Gillicks’ home in Brookside Heights, where many of the factory executives lived, too. The story startled Gillick, but she was too busy caring for Michael to try to learn more. It did, however, make her wonder what else she did not know about her town.

Seen from the front, Cardinal Drive could be almost anywhere. The houses, mostly built in the boom years of the 1960s, are split-level or ranch-style, with oversized garages, manicured hedges, and handsome picture windows set into painted brick or shiny white siding. To see what makes the street unique, you need to walk around the back. Instead of another row of houses on another gently curving street, the west side of Cardinal Drive backs up against the last large undeveloped space in Toms River. You can sit in a lawn chair or float in a backyard swimming pool and imagine you are at the very edge of suburban civilization, gazing west into the forest primeval. You are not, of course. You are looking at the forest of Ciba-Geigy. Just seven hundred feet away, completely hidden by a thick curtain of trees, is the closest of a series of waste pits and lagoons extending to the north and west. For almost as long as there has been a Cardinal Drive—at least fifty years—those leaky pits have sent toxic chemicals coursing through the ground beneath Cardinal Drive and into the Oak Ridge neighborhood.

The extra privacy on Cardinal Drive was a special attraction for the families who moved there. The McVeighs already lived in Oak Ridge but moved to Cardinal Drive in 1977 because William McVeigh
loved the idea of having a forest in his family’s backyard. “It was so peaceful,” remembered his wife, Sheila. “You’d be back there and you’d feel like you were in the country. You couldn’t see anything or hear anything, it was just trees.” She first heard about the problems with the local groundwater when a neighbor came over to report that the county health department had refused to let her use well water to fill her swimming pool. That sounded disturbing, but what did it really mean to have chemicals in the earth a few feet underneath your property? Sheila McVeigh was not sure, but she was glad that she and her husband, seeking more play space for their two young daughters, had replaced a backyard vegetable garden with sod when they moved into their house. The previous owner, an avid gardener, had died of cancer.

Ray and Shelley Lynnworth had lived on Cardinal Drive even longer—so long that when they first moved into their split-level brick home in 1968, there was no back fence. The yard just trailed off into the woods, giving the quarter-acre property a certain bucolic majesty. Even after the fence went up in the early 1970s, the Lynnworth children—Jill, born in 1967, and Randy, in 1969—did not regard it as an inviolable barrier. “Did Randy climb over the fence sometimes and go into the woods of Ciba-Geigy? Of course he did. All the neighborhood kids did that,” Ray Lynnworth remembered. The children swam in the nearby river, too. The Lynnworths knew that the land belonged to Toms River Chemical, but they did not consider that a bad thing. Quite the contrary, they loved the privacy. There were unpleasant odors at times—usually at night, since that was when the factory’s smokestacks, out of sight but not out of range, were busiest. Their home’s west-facing windows, looking toward the hidden smokestacks, were a bit grittier to the touch than the other windows, as if they had been finely etched by dust particles. But these were small inconveniences, easily overlooked.

There was talk on Cardinal Drive about unexplained illnesses, just as there was more than a mile away in Pleasant Plains, in the shadow of another toxic waste site at Reich Farm. But unlike the residents of Pleasant Plains, the families who lived on Cardinal Drive and in the rest of the Oak Ridge subdivision got their water through the pipes of
the Toms River Water Company, not from their own backyard wells. The neighborhood had been hooked up to public water since the early 1960s, and it tasted fine most of the time. Some homeowners still used their old backyard wells or drilled new ones to save money on their water bills. They used this backyard water to irrigate their lawns and gardens or fill their swimming pools, though rarely for drinking or showering because the well water had a faint but unpleasant odor, a bit like paint thinner.

Toms River Chemical had said nothing to its neighbors about the risk of well contamination, even though on the other side of the fence, the aquifer beneath the factory property had been so contaminated for so long that the company had resorted to drilling a well more than two thousand feet deep in its neverending search for unpolluted water for the factory’s own use. The company was acquiring so much expertise in groundwater testing, in fact, that in 1980 two of its executives, Jorge Winkler and David Ellis, bought a local water-testing firm and set up their own private testing business, staffed by their wives, both of whom also had some scientific training. The firm’s clients included the Toms River Water Company and several homeowners in Oak Ridge. Winkler and Ellis did not consider this to be a conflict of interest because no one could say for certain if Toms River Chemical was responsible for the contamination in Oak Ridge and also because their wives—not they—did the analytical work at the firm, known as J. R. Henderson Labs. “It was very clear that eventually one day Henderson Labs potentially would find things that Ciba-Geigy was responsible for. Until that happened, I didn’t see any reason to change course,” Winkler recalled. To Winkler, the arrangement made perfect sense: Who in town had more expertise with groundwater contamination than they did?

At first, the test results from the Cardinal Drive irrigation wells were comforting: Henderson Labs conducted the county health department’s standard battery of tests for bacterial contamination and found nothing. Starting in 1982, however, the lab started urging its clients to pay for a more expensive analysis capable of detecting toxic chemicals, not just bacteria. The new tests found dozens of hazardous compounds. All of a sudden, the same wells that neighbors had been
using for years to water their lawns and gardens—and occasionally as sources of drinking water—were regarded as so contaminated that the county health department declared that they had to be immediately abandoned and plugged.
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Of course, no one could say for certain how the chemicals had gotten in those backyard wells, or whether they had made anyone sick.

By the time Randy Lynnworth was twelve years old, he could outrun his equally athletic father in a five-mile race; sometimes, just to keep things close, he would spin around and run backward until his father caught up. Randy was bright and funny, an excellent student who seemed destined to become an equally accomplished adult. He was almost never ill, so when he got a splitting headache and nearly collapsed during a relay run in late 1982, his parents were worried. They got their answer three weeks later, from a brain scan: Randy Lynnworth, at thirteen, had an advanced case of a highly malignant cancer known as medulloblastoma. As with Michael Gillick’s tumor, Randy’s was a blastoma, which meant that it began with the malignant transformation of precursor stem cells—in his case, the cells were located at the base of the brain beside the cerebellum. The tumor formed by those rogue cells was large and virulent, and Randy might not even survive the operation to remove it. A few days after the surgery, he lapsed into a coma. After several agonizing weeks during which Randy was unresponsive, the family was advised by a physician to stop feeding him and let him die in his own bed. They did so for less than a day before changing their minds and resuming his meals. Shockingly, after ten weeks in a coma, Randy abruptly awoke, as talkative and quick-witted as ever, albeit with a speech impediment, memory lapses, and a battery of physical disabilities.

That was an electric time on Cardinal Drive and in the larger community. If Randy Lynnworth could wake up, then anything seemed possible. His sudden and horrific illness had been widely publicized, and now it seemed like the whole town was participating in his recovery. The former long-distance runner could not walk, so his parents installed a set of parallel bars in the living room and Randy began working to strengthen his upper body so that he could confidently pilot his wheelchair. In the fall, he made a triumphant return to school
(by now it was high school), steering his wheelchair through the halls with the same spirit of reckless abandon he had brought to his running. Camp was not an option, so during the summer of 1984 his parents organized a day camp on Cardinal Drive for all the neighborhood kids and Randy, too. Life was far from normal, but Randy was writing poems and cracking jokes, and that was enough.

As the months passed, the Lynnworths dared to wonder if the doctors might be wrong and Randy might beat cancer after all. For the first time, they even allowed themselves the freedom to wonder why he had gotten sick in the first place. It was impossible to live on Cardinal Drive and have a child with cancer and not think about Toms River Chemical. Initially, Ray and Shelley Lynnworth had a hard time believing that there could be a connection. “The idea that there might be a cancer cluster, that was something that built very slowly,” Ray Lynnworth recalled. However, he did remember how the oncology surgeon at New York Hospital reacted after first hearing about Randy: “Another one from Toms River,” the doctor had said. There certainly did appear to be an unusually high number of local families touched by childhood cancer. Was there really a cluster of cases, perhaps even one that was somehow caused by exposure to manmade chemicals like the ones that Toms River Chemical had vented into the air and dumped into the ground? Would it ever be possible to find out? The Lynnworths wondered.

The triumphs of John Snow and William Farr during the cholera epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century finally proved what had been suspected by observers as far back as Hippocrates: Infectious diseases waxed and waned across populations in nonrandom patterns that could be mapped in space and time. In other words, they clustered. But what about diseases like cancer that took years to develop and generally were not infectious? Percivall Pott, with his wretched chimney sweeps, and John Ayrton Paris, with his Cornish copper smelters, had described what they thought were associations between those occupations and scrotal cancer. Other physicians noticed apparent clusters of scrotal cancer among workers in factories that manufactured paraffin wax derived from coal tar.
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But their observations, involving
just a handful of cases, lacked the scope and precision of Farr’s statistical ledgers and Snow’s maps. Skeptical peers were mostly unconvinced, their doubts bolstered by the work of Siméon Poisson and other pioneering statisticians who showed how easy it was for apparent clusters to be caused by nothing more sinister than random chance, especially when only a few cases were involved.

But why
shouldn’t
cancers cluster? If Rudolf Virchow was correct that all cancers begin when an external event disrupts a healthy cell and triggers a frenzy of cell division, it stood to reason that the external trigger—whatever it was—would have similarly lethal effects for many other individuals exposed to it, just as the cholera bacterium did. The patterns of cancer incidence deduced by a well-designed epidemiological study might even provide crucial clues about the identity of those triggering events, just as Snow’s maps implicated a water-borne contagion for cholera.

Cancer was immensely more difficult to study than a cholera epidemic, however. Through his microscopic analysis of cancerous cells, Virchow had helped to prove that cancer was not one common disease but many rarer ones, each with its own pathology and place of origin inside the body. Besides uncontrolled cell division, just about the only characteristic that most types of cancer had in common was that it usually took years for a tumor to grow large enough to be noticed. So a John Snow–style study of potential environmental causes of cancer—incorporating columns of figures, maps, questionnaires, physical exams, environmental measurements, and all the rest—stood a chance of being fruitful only if a researcher was lucky enough to stumble upon an island of misery whose population had just the right characteristics. The population had to be definable and stable, without too many people coming or going over the years. It had to be affected by an unusually intense and easily measured form of pollution, one that might be carcinogenic. And it had to be afflicted with so many cases of a particular type of cancer that the cluster could not reasonably be dismissed as an unlucky fluke.