Toms River (22 page)

The EPA set to work compiling its list of the worst waste dumps. Finalized in 1983, the first “National Priorities List” included 406 dumpsites (later additions would eventually quadruple that number). Sixty-five sites on the original Superfund list were in the undisputed capital of hazardous waste dumping in the United States: New Jersey, which had twenty-four more sites than its closest rival, Michigan. With nine dumps on the list, Ocean County alone had more Superfund sites than thirty-six states. Two of them were in Toms River: Reich Farm and Toms River Chemical, which ranked 105th and 134th, respectively, on the nationwide list. (Love Canal ranked 116th.)
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As far as the people of Toms River knew at the time, Reich Farm and the chemical plant were merely potential threats, but many local residents were already becoming aware of the actual perils of living near a Superfund site for other reasons. Just a few months after Love Canal became national news, in November of 1978, state officials notified 150 families living near the Jackson Township Landfill that their well water was unsafe to drink; most had to use bottled water for almost two years. The landfill, which was just ten miles northwest of Toms River Chemical, was an old strip mine that had been used as a municipal landfill since 1972, after pollution problems forced the closure of Jackson’s previous dump. When a state health survey found that residents were suffering from rashes due to the contaminated water, the families sued the town, winning a $16 million jury award in 1983 that was reduced on appeal. The case was one of the first to establish that a polluter could be forced to set aside funds to be awarded later if a victim developed cancer or some other latent disease—a precedent that would later be important in Toms River.

The advent of Superfund, and the lawsuits it helped to spawn, was bad news for Toms River Chemical—and for Union Carbide, too, since it was on the hook for the Reich Farm contamination. (Nicholas
Fernicola certainly could not afford to clean up the mess he had made dumping Union Carbide’s drummed waste.) Until then, both companies had been managing quite nicely in their dealings with the New Jersey departments of health and environmental protection. Except for the partial cleanups at the Reich Farm site, the state agencies had done very little to require Union Carbide or Toms River Chemical to remove waste from the soil or pump it out of groundwater. Instead, the state’s efforts had been focused (without much success) on the much less ambitious goals of preventing new spills and keeping existing pollution out of drinking water wells. But the federal EPA was less susceptible to political pressure than its state counterparts, and the Superfund law gave the agency broad discretion to insist on comprehensive cleanups even if a dumpsite did not pose an immediate health threat. Before Superfund, a corporation responsible for a leaking dump might face a liability of a few hundred thousand dollars, or perhaps several million dollars for the largest spills. After Superfund, those costs would multiply tenfold or even a hundredfold for the biggest and most complicated cases, including the two in Toms River. Love Canal was exhibit A. Thanks to retroactive liability, Occidental Petroleum, which bought Hooker Chemical in 1968, ended up paying the state and federal governments $227 million to cover the costs of cleaning up the dump and relocating more than one thousand families. Occidental also paid slightly less than $20 million to settle a lawsuit filed by more than thirteen hundred residents of the neighborhood, including Lois Gibbs.

Thanks to Superfund, toxic liability was now a major debit on the balance sheets of even the largest corporations. For more than a century, hazardous waste had generally been left wherever it was dumped, whether in Basel or Toms River or thousands of other places. The passage of Superfund and its counterparts in other countries at last raised the prospect of meaningful cleanups. But the potential costs were so vast that Superfund sites became legal battlefields, attracting legions of pugnacious lawyers, engineers, toxicologists, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and other advocates-for-hire whose conflicting assertions slowed cleanups to a crawl and made health studies vastly more contentious and complex. Environmental epidemiology had always
been an extremely difficult pursuit, rife with uncertainty. Now, with tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars hinging on each outcome, it would be even tougher.

There was no storybook ending on Cardinal Drive for the Lynnworths. In 1986, they sold their house of eighteen years and moved to a different part of town. Their new home was on a large lot, and its backyard was so lushly landscaped that they no longer had to rely on someone else’s forest for the privacy and space they craved. The family needed a change of scenery because Randy Lynnworth was dying. A few months earlier, he had woken up unable to feel his leg, which had gone numb. After more than two years of remission, the medulloblastoma was back. This time, the tumors had spread from the base of his brain to his spine. The year that followed was an extended nightmare of agonizing chemotherapy and inexorable decline, but Randy continued to write poems when he had the strength. One was read at his funeral in the spring of 1987, the year he should have celebrated his high school graduation (he was awarded a diploma posthumously). The boy who loved to run never regained the ability to walk more than a few steps, despite all of his hard work on the parallel bars and in physical therapy. Instead, more than six hundred residents of Toms River walked for him, behind his casket.

By the time Randy Lynnworth died, Toms River Chemical and its successor, Ciba-Geigy, were no longer revered names in Toms River. A company that had been venerated for so long had fallen fast and far, thanks to a series of shocking events starting in 1984 that no one could have predicted. Through it all, the Lynnworths were interested but uninvolved observers. They were not comfortable in the public eye the way that Linda Gillick was. They had met the Gillicks at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center shortly after Randy’s cancer returned and had gratefully joined the network of families Linda Gillick was building. A few weeks before Randy died, the Lynnworths filed a lawsuit against Ciba-Geigy and eventually got a modest settlement from the company, which did not admit any liability.

Unlike many Toms River parents who lost their children to cancer, Ray and Shelley Lynnworth never claimed to be certain that pollution
was to blame. In fact, the more Ray Lynnworth learned about the complexities and controversies associated with health studies, the more convinced he was that no one would ever be able to find out why Randy had gotten sick. “I can’t base something like that on intuition or what’s in my heart, you have to be more scientific about it,” he explained. “I’m not a political activist, that’s not where my heart and soul are. For me, it’s not about waging a battle for justice or revenge. There are others who feel differently, and that’s fine. It’s a very personal choice.” What the Lynnworths wanted most of all was to honor their son’s memory in their own quiet way. They did so by turning their do-it-yourself summer camp into a formal organization, called Team Randy. More than twenty-five years later Team Randy was still organizing summertime travel activities for Toms River teenagers, with a special emphasis on serving those who are physically disabled or in financial need.

The Lynnworths never went back to Cardinal Drive. If there was going to be a battle for justice or revenge, others were going to have to wage it.

PART II
BREACH

The first cracks in the long peace between Toms River and its chemical plant appeared on the morning of April 12, 1984, at the intersection of Bay and Vaughn avenues, right in the middle of town. Overnight, the road surface had buckled, and a county road crew was sent to investigate. The crew used a backhoe to dig out the cracked asphalt and discovered that the soil underneath was deep black instead of sandy brown and saturated with a liquid that had a strong chemical smell.

Roden Lightbody drove over to take a look, too. He went because he was a traffic engineer for Ocean County, but that was not the only reason. Red-faced and gruff, Lightbody was an important political figure in the county, and also in Toms River. In the grand tradition of the Ocean County Republican machine, he was both a public employee
and
a public official. In fact, he was the mayor of Toms River (officially, of Dover Township). By the time Lightbody arrived at the scene, a television news crew was there, and the reporter was asking questions the mayor could not answer.

“When they dug out the road surface, they found all kind of mucky black material. I thought maybe it came from Ciba-Geigy, but at first we didn’t know,” Lightbody remembered many years later. “We called
them and said something’s happening here, and Ciba-Geigy at first said, ‘It’s not our problem.’ ” Lightbody knew that the company operated a pipeline that ran through Toms River, but he was not sure where, and it did not appear on the town’s utility maps. The pipeline was not quite a secret, but it was close. It had been in the local newspapers in 1965 and 1966, when Ciba completed its construction and started pumping five million gallons of partially treated wastewater every day into the Atlantic Ocean instead of the river. But that was a generation earlier, and the leaders of Toms River had long since perfected the art of forgetting unpleasant nuggets of local history, especially those that concerned Ciba-Geigy. Like everyone who mattered in Toms River, Lightbody had strong connections to the factory. His brother had worked there since the 1960s. The mayor had heard plenty of stories over the years about burial pits, strange smells, and unexplained illnesses—who in town had not? But it was not the job of local government to check up on Ciba’s environmental practices, in Lightbody’s view. After all, the company seemed to know what it was doing. “We were not in a position to demand anything from Ciba-Geigy,” he remembered. “We didn’t have the knowledge.”

In many ways, the company had never been more popular in Toms River than it was at the beginning of 1984. The factory’s environmental problems seemed to be in the rear-view mirror, growing ever distant with the passage of time. Its solid waste was finally going into a lined landfill and its wastewater to a new treatment plant and then the ocean. Moreover, there was less waste overall than there had been during the peak 1970s because of a shift in the factory’s product mix. Starting in 1983, the company no longer made anthraquinone vat dyes, its original product, and concentrated instead on more profitable azo dyes, resins, and specialty chemicals. The 1972 indictments were ancient history, the river pollution of the early 1960s was forgotten entirely, and the secret contamination of the town’s drinking water in 1965 was still a secret. There was a bitter labor strike at the factory in late 1980—several strikers were arrested for throwing nails under managers’ cars—but tempers had since cooled. With one thousand workers and managers and a $35 million payroll, the chemical plant was still the largest private employer in Ocean County, even if the
total workforce was a few hundred below the peak employment before the strike. As if to formalize a clean break with the past, in late 1981 the Swiss changed their factory’s name. Henceforth, it would be known as the Ciba-Geigy Toms River Plant, instead of the name that had meant so much to the town for so long: Toms River Chemical.

The name change also symbolized the company’s aspirations to move beyond chemical manufacturing in Toms River. Its plans became public in January of 1984, when Ciba-Geigy announced with great fanfare that after a two-year transition period it would move its United States pharmaceutical manufacturing operations from Cranston, Rhode Island, to Toms River. What Ciba-Geigy did not announce was the reason for the relocation: a decade-long battle with Rhode Island environmental officials over the company’s wastewater discharges—one and a half million gallons per day—into the Pawtuxet River and Narragansett Bay. The discharges ended in 1983 when a new municipal treatment plant opened, but by then the company had become deeply unpopular in Cranston and was the target of protests and lawsuits.