Toms River (49 page)

Roeschke, Gursky, and other officials seemed bewildered by the rage their comments provoked, but they should not have been. Similar storylines had already played out in other communities with toxic sites, including Love Canal. Sociologists studying the phenomenon came to regard fury as a predictable and even rational response to a uniquely nightmarish situation.
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Facing a threat they could not see, residents had to rely on experts who did not seem to know much more than they did. If children were involved, the trauma of this loss of control was magnified; parents felt crushed by their inability to protect their children.

Research from other “hotspot” communities suggested that the attitude of the relevant government agencies was crucial in determining how people reacted. If the authorities tried to avert panic by seeming to understate the risk of an invisible threat—or, worse still, by withholding information—they would only increase the trauma they
hoped to avoid. The best strategy was to acknowledge the fear, to provide as much information as possible (even if it was tentative), and most importantly, to give the community a substantive role in a genuine search for answers.
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By that standard, the leaders of the New Jersey Department of Health had horribly mishandled the first stage of the Toms River crisis. They would spend the next five years trying to repair the damage.

The March 15 protest outside the county health department was only the beginning. The fear and fury kept building, reinforced by a stream of television and newspaper reports. “HIGH ANXIETY; Local Cancer Scare Spins Out of Control,” was the screaming headline in the
Observer
on March 17. “Where have all the children gone?” asked a New York City television newscaster, introducing a story that opened with a shot of an empty Toms River playground. For the first time since Greenpeace and the “Blind Faith” Marshall murder case a dozen years earlier, Toms River was national news. Network camera crews came to town, and politicians were right behind them, heading straight to Linda Gillick’s living room. At the front of the line was Robert Torricelli, who visited both the Gillicks and the Pascarellas. A North Jersey congressman known for his pugnacious personality (his nickname was “the Torch”), Torricelli was running for the United States Senate in 1996 and made environmental health a centerpiece of his campaign. He began pushing hard for a full-scale investigation in Toms River. President Bill Clinton was eager to assist a fellow Democrat, but Governor Whitman, a Republican, said nothing publicly, as her health department continued to resist doing anything except re-checking Berry’s data. Gillick kept the pressure on, telling reporters that the governor’s stance was prompting “frustration, anger and tears” at Ocean of Love.

Under heavy political pressure, State Health Commissioner Fishman did consent to hold an “information session” with the community on March 21, eleven long days after the initial
Star-Ledger
article. Expecting a huge crowd, the health department picked the biggest venue in town, the same auditorium at Toms River High School North that had been the site of the climactic hearing on the Ciba pipeline
almost exactly eight years earlier. This time, the department made plans to bring in state police troopers for extra security, which turned out to be a wise decision.

The meeting itself proved to be less an information session than a demonstration of mob rule. The plan was for Fishman, Steve Jones, Elin Gursky, and a few other officials to explain what Michael Berry’s study had found and what it meant. Gursky had come prepared with several hundred copies of Berry’s letter and data tables, which were passed out to the crowd. Jones had some news too: The ATSDR would conduct an environmental study in cooperation with the state health department, which until then had refused to do so. The Clinton administration had come through with financial support, although Governor Whitman was still balking at the use of state funds. But the meeting did not go as planned. Instead of Fishman, the surprise first speaker was Michael Gillick, now seventeen but still only about four feet tall. He climbed on stage and took a microphone, reprising and updating his electrifying speech of eight years earlier. Once again, no one dared tell him to stop. He began by blasting Gursky, who was sitting just a few feet away, and the other state officials who had suggested that an environmental investigation would be a waste. “Is it a waste of time to save lives?” he said. “Is it a waste of time to save
children’s
lives? I ask you to honestly think of the answer, not with your brains but with your hearts. I’ve battled this infestation of the body and soul for seventeen years. I know what it is like to live in pain and fear, not knowing when you are going to die.”

The crowd of nearly thirteen hundred people roared its approval, but when Fishman began to speak he was shouted down. “Shut up!” a woman yelled. A man shouted, “We’ve got to do something right now! Not a year from now, not three months from now—now!”
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More than ninety minutes later, Fishman was still trying to get through his opening statement as incensed residents excoriated him every time he tried to speak. The crowd took control of the meeting, lining up at the microphone to tell one wrenching story after another about cancer and pollution in Toms River. It was as if a padlocked door had been flung open and all the demons of the previous half-century were suddenly loosed. Retired Ciba workers spoke about colleagues felled by
tumors, an adult cancer victim tore off her wig to reveal a scalp bald from chemotherapy, and parents of dead children wept as they described their ordeals. What they were seeking from the state was not always clear, but their chief demand seemed to be for a truly comprehensive investigation—starting immediately—of the water, soil, and air in Toms River and its possible role in causing cancer.

A slight, professorial lawyer who wore owlish glasses, Fishman was at a loss. His expertise was in healthcare finance and eldercare; he had little interest in environmental issues and no experience with unruly crowds. “He lost control of the meeting almost immediately, and he never got it back,” recalled Michael Berry, who was present. “It was a pretty ugly proceeding, not one of the most stellar moments in health department history,” remembered another longtime state official, James Blumenstock. “You had a group of almost thirteen hundred people who were truly at the end of their rope.”

The chaos grew as people began shouting from their seats instead of waiting for a turn at the microphone. “Somebody open your mouth and tell all of us how can we explain it to our kids!” one woman screamed at the thirteen officials on the dais, who had given up trying to talk and instead sat in stunned silence. Some people in the audience walked out, repulsed by the shrieking, but others moved forward toward the stage as they sought to be heard over the din. The state troopers edged forward, too, forming a barrier between the officials and the increasingly aroused crowd. And then, just as the raw emotions inside the auditorium seemed about to explode, Linda Gillick stepped onto the stage, picked up a microphone, and—in her sternest schoolteacher voice—commanded the crowd to sit down and be quiet.

She was the only person in the auditorium who could have gotten away with such a demand, with the possible exception of a trooper brandishing a gun. Gillick had the personal credibility that came from having a son with cancer, and she had the respect of everyone in the room because of her years of charity work. “We all trusted her—all of the families, the whole community,” recalled Melanie Anderson, who was at the meeting along with more than a dozen other parents of afflicted children. “People described her as a bulldog with a bone. She just could cut through all the garbage.” Gillick had been omnipresent
on television and in the newspapers as an advocate for children with cancer and their suffering families, and she had the no-nonsense, I’m-in-charge manner Fishman lacked. In a community that felt powerless and hopeless, she exuded authority and confidence. She was now the essential woman.

The officials on the dais watched, with a mixture of wonderment and relief, as Gillick quieted a crowd that five minutes earlier had seemed completely beyond anyone’s control. She had defused, at least temporarily, a potentially violent confrontation. But her wizardry also carried an implied threat: I made them stop, and I can make them start again. She was now the most important person in the room, a startlingly adept leader who did not seem to care about budgets and probabilities and the limitations of cluster epidemiology and was instead demanding immediate action. Gillick was no longer a supplicant in the audience; she was on stage, in the power position. After calming the crowd, she turned to Fishman and asked a pointed question: You have heard from the people, she said, and you know what we want. What are you going to do now?

Fishman, who had seemed paralyzed throughout the meeting, suddenly came to life. Making an on-the-spot decision, he declared that the state would take its cues from the community, and specifically from Gillick, in designing a state-federal environmental study. (This was the same study that, until the day before the hearing, his department had opposed as impractical and still did not want to pay for.) Gillick would not only chair the study’s citizens’ advisory committee, Fishman announced, she would also choose its members. The state would also launch an emergency program to test drinking water in local schools, he said. By the time the meeting broke up shortly before midnight, after five excruciating hours, Gillick was setting the agenda. She declared that she would begin work the following morning, and she expected Fishman and his staff to be in Toms River tomorrow, too. The weary-looking commissioner promised he would.

In the frenetic days that followed, government officials struggled to figure out how to deliver on the promises they had just made under extreme duress. The community wanted fast action, but it would take
months or years to satisfy most of Linda Gillick’s demands. She wanted Michael Berry’s incidence data to be checked and updated to reflect recently diagnosed cases, but getting the cancer registry up to date would be a massive chore requiring outreach to hundreds of doctors, clinics, and hospitals. She also wanted a comprehensive environmental study capable of unearthing the connections between cancer and pollution, but a scientifically meaningful study would need to start with one or more specific hypotheses—testable theories about what may have caused the cluster. Before they could even think about developing hypotheses and designing a study, the ATSDR and the state health department would have to do a sweeping investigation of past environmental conditions. Funding was also an issue. After the trauma of the public meeting, Governor Whitman relented and agreed to spend state money on a local investigation. The county legislature also set aside $250,000 to assist. But there was no doubt that most of the needed funds—probably millions of dollars—would need to come from Washington. Politicians as high up as Vice President Al Gore had promised to help, but there was no specific monetary pledge yet.

As they began work on those longer-term projects, the agencies were under pressure to do something—anything—to generate fast and preferably soothing results. Whitman, who would be up for reelection in nineteen months, had taken a political beating from Robert Torricelli and others over the initial failure to disclose Berry’s cancer incidence data; she was now determined to show that her administration was moving quickly. On March 28, just seven days after the fiasco in the auditorium, a phalanx of state workers fanned out to twenty-one local schools, with water testing kits in hand. If people were frightened about their kids’ health, what better way to begin regaining their trust than by testing at the schools? That same day, Whitman led a group of kids from Toms River on a tour of the state laboratory in West Trenton where the water samples would be analyzed. A large group of reporters and cameras captured every stage-managed minute.

There was an element of condescension to the water tests; their goal was clearly to placate the residents. Federal and state law already required water suppliers to test their wells regularly, so another round
of tests seemed like a purely political exercise. “I was skeptical that it would tell us anything that we didn’t already know,” remembered Jerry Fagliano, the health department epidemiologist. A
Star-Ledger
columnist from Toms River, Paul Mulshine, berated the “howling mob” in the auditorium for its “aggressive ignorance” and said that the state officials should have refused to give in to its demands.
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But the crisis was getting so much attention that appeasing Toms River had become a political imperative for Whitman. As the state lab began to analyze the water samples, she made plans to visit the town in person so that she could make the expected announcement that the water was safe. Any other result seemed too absurd to even consider.

The new water tests were not the usual ones, however. Gillick wanted the local drinking water tested “for everything,” and she made it clear that if the state did not agree, she would complain to the newspapers. As she had promised, Gillick had plunged right into the work of the newly formed Citizen Action Committee on the Childhood Cancer Cluster. Even before she had settled on all twelve of its members (her first appointment was her son, Michael), Gillick’s committee was huddling with Fishman and Gursky. “We decided early on that our function as a committee was to keep the governmental agencies to the grindstone,” said Kim Pascarella, another early committee appointee, along with Bob Gialanella. In addition to their devotion to Ocean of Love, Pascarella and Gialanella shared one other important characteristic with the Gillicks: They were already convinced that pollution was the root cause of the cluster. A key role of the committee, as they saw it, was to push skeptical government officials to ferret out the supporting evidence needed to prove what the families were sure they already knew.

Their first push was for a water-testing program that was much more ambitious than had ever been tried in New Jersey. The EPA required that drinking water be tested for just eighty-three potential contaminants.
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New Jersey’s list was slightly longer and included some concentration limits that were stricter than the EPA’s, but United Water and the state’s other drinking water suppliers were still testing for only a tiny fraction of the total number of possible pollutants. The utilities were earning passing grades for not much testing effort;
Linda Gillick, the former teacher, wanted a much more thorough examination. The question was, what else should the state health department look for in Toms River’s drinking water? There were more than fifty thousand chemicals in commerce; the state could not possibly test for them all.