Toms River (38 page)

No one will ever know when the fingertip of that toxic plume first reached the intake screen of a Parkway well. The timing of that fateful event would eventually be a matter of great debate in Toms River.
Whether it happened as early as 1978 or as late as 1986, from that moment onward, thousands of customers of the Toms River Water Company were drinking low levels of toxic chemicals from Reich Farm. There had been signs of possible contamination as early as 1974, but the water company declined to install filters or order advanced tests on the Parkway wells. Instead, Toms River Water worked the wells harder than ever during the 1980s. The passage of the federal Superfund law finally broke the cycle of neglect. Along with the Ciba-Geigy factory, Reich Farm was placed on the original National Priorities List in 1983, and by 1986 contractors for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were busy at both Superfund sites conducting “remedial investigations” to determine how extensive the groundwater contamination was and what kind of health risks it posed.

An EPA contractor started testing the Parkway wells in May of 1986 and immediately found something that did not belong there: trichloroethylene. TCE, as it is known, was and still is a jack-of-all-trades for the chemical industry: degreaser, solvent, and key ingredient in hundreds of products, including Ciba-Geigy’s resins and Union Carbide’s plastics. The TCE concentrations in the three affected Parkway wells were relatively low—between three and fourteen parts per billion. But by the mid-1980s, evidence of TCE’s hazards was building. Unlike benzene or toluene, TCE often could not be smelled or tasted in water unless levels were high, yet even low concentrations of its vapors could cause liver, kidney, lung, and heart damage—as well as cancer, at least in rats. As a result, the EPA had started enforcing a limit of five parts per billion of TCE in water, and New Jersey was about to set a limit of just one part per billion that would take effect in 1988.
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The Toms River Water Company definitely was not ready to comply.

Was Reich Farm the source of the contamination that had struck the Parkway wells? There was still no way to know for sure. TCE had been dumped at the farm, but it also could have come from a machine shop, garage, or some other illegal dump. It could even have come from Ciba-Geigy—though that was extremely unlikely because even though the chemical plant was only a mile west of the Parkway wells,
the river was a natural barrier and the groundwater flowed south, not east. On the other hand, there were many reasons to suspect that the source was Fernicola’s illegal dump, since the EPA contractor had found not just TCE but also more than a dozen other industrial chemicals in the groundwater beneath Pleasant Plains, including several used in plastics manufacture.

The Toms River Water Company reacted to all of this information with a characteristic combination of lethargy and secrecy. Sixteen months after the EPA contractor found TCE in three Parkway wells, the water company finally closed down the well where the contamination was highest. But as soon as pumping stopped in one well, TCE levels began rising in two others. (This problem, which resembled the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, would haunt the water company in the 1990s too.) Unwilling to close all three wells, the water company—with the state’s permission—decided to reopen the most heavily tainted well and mix its water with water from the five other Parkway wells before distributing it around town. The dilution reduced the overall TCE concentration in the blended Parkway water to two parts per billion, still slightly above the new limit of one part per billion that would take effect statewide in 1988.

The water company’s customers knew nothing about any of this—just as they never knew about the contamination of the Holly Street wells in the mid-1960s. Back in 1974, water customers had learned about problems at the Parkway well field only because of a belated story in the
Asbury Park Press
. Something similar happened this time, in late 1987, when a copy of a well-testing report was sent to the county board of health, apparently by mistake.
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The
Observer
jumped all over the story, especially after the water company tested water fountains at two schools served by the tainted Parkway wells and detected TCE at concentrations of three and two parts per billion, respectively. Facing more public outrage in a town that was already anxious about pollution, the water company finally shut down the three most affected wells. By then, it was November; the extra water would not be needed until next summer, when it would be needed very badly.

It was 1965 all over again. Back then, the Toms River Water Company
had been rescued from a similar squeeze by the completion of the chemical plant’s ocean pipeline, which diverted chemical waste away from the river and the Holly Street public wells. Now, twenty-two years later, the water company’s Parkway wells needed a similar rescue—and it would have to come before the following summer, when the people of Toms River would be demanding more water than ever. They always did.

In early 1988, as the dates of three climactic public hearings approached, Ciba-Geigy’s terrible luck continued. In mid-February, at a construction site across the street from the Ocean County Mall, a bulldozer ripped a four-foot gash in the company’s waste pipeline. This time, about two hundred thousand gallons of wastewater spilled, an event the
Observer
marked with the headline, “Oops!” The next day, just in case anyone had forgotten that Ciba-Geigy was still in criminal jeopardy, a grand jury issued a new set of indictments on the familiar charges of conspiracy, illegal dumping, filing false reports, and misconduct. (The original charges had been dismissed on procedural grounds and then restored on appeal.) The new indictments targeted only two executives—William Bobsein and James McPherson—plus the company. Ominously for Ciba-Geigy, there were reports that the other two previously indicted executives, David Ellis and Robert Fesen, who were now out of legal jeopardy, were cooperating with prosecutors.
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Ciba-Geigy was trying to look to the future, but events kept dredging up the ugly past.

The long-awaited public hearings were the circus everyone had expected. At Toms River High School North, the eighteen hundred students were sent home at noon; by then, hundreds of adults were already milling outside in an unruly mass. There was some shoving among the warring parties: union workers in white baseball caps, placard-waving environmentalists, and a dozen police officers trying to preserve order as state officials collected the names of the people who wanted to speak. By the time the hearing started, at one o’clock in the auditorium, all but a handful of the twelve hundred seats were full. Sentiment was divided—several hundred white baseball caps were visible in the crowd—but the environmentalists were louder.
They booed and heckled plant manager John Simas and Larry Bathgate, the first speakers, but fell silent when a woman most of them had never seen before approached the microphone and began talking.

She was Linda Gillick, and she had carefully choreographed her five minutes of allotted time for maximum effect. First, she motioned for a group of children to walk to the front of the room; each carried a red rose with a black ribbon tied to the stem. “I represent the families of Ocean County children with cancer. Some are with me today,” she began. Ciba-Geigy, she said, was not the only polluter in town, but the company should be forced to clean up its waste before producing any more. As she spoke, her message became increasingly dramatic, her voice louder and more insistent: “Ciba-Geigy helps sell flowers—daffodils, to be exact—for the American Cancer Society to raise money for research. Keep your daffodils; most of our children are pushing them up from their graves, or will be. You may think I have no facts and figures to substantiate the high incidence of cancer in Ocean County. I do.”
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Gillick then told the hushed crowd that she would recite the ages, hometowns, and cancer types—but not names—of forty-one Ocean County children diagnosed since 1983, including ten now dead. The children at the front of the room would hand out their roses as she read. “Watch your rose as its beauty fails slowly, silently and continuously, because you are watching my child and all the others around you slowly, but not silently or painlessly, die,” she said, as the children began giving the black-ribboned flowers to the state officials on the stage and to members of the audience, including several very uncomfortable Ciba-Geigy employees. “I leave their destiny and the destiny of each and every child here, and those still to be born, in your hands.”

And then, as Linda Gillick prepared to read her list, the small boy beside her—he was nine, but looked closer to five—asked to speak. He had not filled out a request card, but it made no difference. No one would have dared to tell Michael Gillick he could not speak. As he began, the television cameras scrambled for a clear shot of the boy whose face seemed the very personification of cancer’s torments. “If you have a child, picture him with cancer because of this water,” he said. “Think of what it could do to him. He could die at any second,
any minute, so please stop!” As he spoke, there was no other sound in the huge auditorium but the clicking of cameras. Michael Gillick’s voice broke, and he began to cry. “What Ciba-Geigy is doing is really wrong, but you guys keep going on and on doing your stupid job and making people sicker,” he continued. “Please stop!” And with that, the boy ran up the aisle and out of the auditorium. His mother ran after him, after first remembering to hand the list of sick children to another parent and instructing her to finish reading it.

It lasted just thirty seconds, but Michael Gillick’s speech was long enough to sear the memories of the hundreds who heard it. Amazingly, it would be reprised eight years later at an even more emotional public meeting in the same high school auditorium. For those who heard it, Michael Gillick’s 1988 speech was a
Rashomon
moment, open to many interpretations. Michael remembered it with a child’s simplicity: “I gave them the rose, I gave them the lecture, and I ran out of there.” Ciba-Geigy’s opponents remembered it as deeply moving and immensely powerful—the ultimate expression of what was at stake in their crusade. “It was amazing. I can still picture it,” said Sheila McVeigh, who still lived on Cardinal Drive. “The room was packed, and the Ciba people just kept quiet. Everyone cheered for the little children when they finished. It was spellbinding, really, and very sad.” Many of the factory employees had a different interpretation. They could not deny young Michael Gillick’s sincerity or ignore his pain. But they thought his mother’s tactics were terribly unfair. John Talty, who had been handed a black-ribboned rose, knew the long war was lost. “When Linda Gillick’s son gave me that rose, I just looked up and said to someone, ‘How do you beat that?’ ”

Having lost what little was left of its support in the community, Ciba-Geigy had one last hope: that Larry Bathgate could convince his good friend, Governor Tom Kean, to issue the permits the company needed, no matter what the people of Ocean County wanted. For a while, it seemed possible that Bathgate might succeed, especially after Christopher Daggett came to town. A former top aide to Kean who still played tennis with the governor, Daggett was the regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He came to Toms River in June to announce that the EPA did
not
want Ciba-Geigy’s
ocean pipeline closed. Instead, the agency wanted to use the pipeline to assist in the long-awaited cleanup of the site. There were billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater beneath the factory property, and the EPA wanted the company to pump it all up (a process that could take thirty years), treat it at the factory’s newly upgraded wastewater plant and then send it through the pipeline into the ocean. The only feasible alternative, Daggett added, would be to discharge the treated groundwater into the river. Either choice, he said, was a “very low risk” to public health—and fully compatible with the planned pharmaceutical plant. That last point was crucial because he would soon have the authority to decide whether the pharmaceutical plant would be built; Governor Kean had just announced that Daggett would be leaving the EPA to become commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Daggett’s plan was a tremendous lift to Ciba-Geigy. Not only would it clear the way for the pharmaceutical plant, it would also be a financial windfall for the company. Using the ocean pipeline to get rid of the treated groundwater would be about $90 million cheaper than building a new piping system to discharge it into the river or, as the local environmentalists preferred, injecting it deep underground.
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But Ciba-Geigy’s reprieve was only temporary. A few weeks later, the town council—in a final break after decades of slavish deference to Ciba-Geigy—voted to rezone the factory site (and Reich Farm, too) to bar new construction, despite a threatened lawsuit by Bathgate.

The final blow, fittingly, was self-inflicted. Larry Bathgate’s most famous friend, the Republican presidential nominee, George H. W. Bush, came to Ocean County on July 22, 1988, for a fundraiser at Bathgate’s mansion on the beach in Bay Head. Bathgate gave Chris Daggett and his wife two free tickets, which would have cost $5,000 if Daggett had paid for them. That turned out to be a huge mistake. When word got out, Democrats up and down the Jersey shore attacked Daggett as a pawn of Ciba-Geigy. Frank Livelli and the Save Our Ocean Committee successfully demanded an ethics investigation by the EPA inspector general. The investigation eventually cleared Daggett, but the imbroglio held up his confirmation as state environmental
commissioner for months. By then, his plan to keep the pipeline open was dead.

After the free tickets fiasco, the last dominoes fell in rapid succession. Daggett’s successor at EPA quickly dropped plans to use Ciba-Geigy’s pipeline to discharge the treated groundwater into the ocean. Then, in October of 1988, the state DEP denied Ciba-Geigy’s application for a permit to build the pharmaceutical plant on the grounds that “too many unresolved concerns about the existing site remain to consider adding a new industrial facility.”
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Two weeks later, despite a last-minute advertising blitz by Ciba-Geigy that included a final “Dear Neighbor” letter from plant manager John Simas, eleven Ocean County towns voted overwhelmingly in favor of closing the pipeline—including even Toms River, the plant’s dearest neighbor of all. In 1952, Toms River had welcomed the Swiss with brass bands and flowery speeches; now voters were, in effect, telling them to leave, by a two-to-one margin. The vote was nonbinding, but the company was finally ready to surrender. In December, Simas announced that Ciba-Geigy would shut down the pipeline by the end of 1991 and focus instead on cleaning up the mess left behind from almost forty years of chemical manufacturing.