by Dan Fagin
There was a catch to Poisson’s insight, however: A disease cluster could be confidently declared to be nonrandom only if there were a sufficiently large number of cases available to establish the “normal” random distribution. That was a formidable hurdle when rare cancers were at issue because predictions based on the law of large numbers were more like guesses when only a few cases could be included in the analysis. There was also the confounding issue of latency: As Percivall Pott recognized in his study of chimney sweeps, many years could pass between a triggering event and the appearance of a tumor large enough to be diagnosed. How would it ever be possible to identify, with high confidence, a culprit that did its nefarious work years earlier? As Pierre Louis had pointed out, a causal agent could be confirmed only after the elimination of reasonable alternative explanations. Which specific component of the “arsenical vapours” identified by John Ayrton Paris had sickened those factory workers in Cornwall? Or did something else entirely make them sick? Or was the apparent disease cluster just a coincidence, as Poisson’s random distribution might suggest, were there enough cases to apply it?
To identify definitively the cause of a disease based on an observed pattern of cases, practitioners of the new “numerical medicine” of Louis and Poisson would not only have to undertake an analysis that eliminated alternative causes, they would also have demonstrate that the apparent pattern was not a coincidence. Those were formidable hurdles, especially if the disease at issue was rare and progressed slowly, as with most cancers. For all its advances in mathematical technique, the rise of statistical epidemiology had the unintended effect of making it harder than ever to investigate patterns of cancer cases in places like Toms River. It also gave medical investigators powerful new reasons to turn their attention away from cancer and to focus instead on fast-moving infectious diseases. Soon they would do so, with spectacular results.
Jim Crane’s discovery that hazardous waste from Toms River Chemical had contaminated the town’s public water supply set off a crisis—but one that was kept secret from the people who drank that water.20 By mid-August of 1965 the Toms River Water Company knew that azo dye wastes had contaminated three shallow wells (they were about seventy feet deep) that supplied drinking water to almost all of the seven thousand homes and businesses in town that were water company customers. Yet there were no public warnings, no newspaper articles. Life in Toms River continued as usual except for the unfortunate fact that the weather was so uncomfortably hot and dry that residents drank even more water than usual, even if it sometimes smelled. Just two entities knew what was really happening, and they were old friends used to working together closely and sometimes secretly: the Toms River Water Company and the Toms River Chemical Corporation.
For years, chemists at Toms River Chemical had assisted the water company in analyzing the quality of the town’s drinking water supply, since the expertise of the Swiss-trained chemists far outstripped that of anyone at the little water company, which was struggling to meet the soaring demand. In ten years, its customer base had quadrupled. On hot days, Toms River Water was pumping more than two million gallons from its four wells, three of which were on Holly Street near the river.
Even before Jim Crane smelled chemicals in the shower, water company officials knew something was wrong with at least one of the three Holly wells. According to an internal Toms River Water report dated March 23, 1965, water in one well had such a strong odor and was so visibly contaminated with what the report described as “trade wastes (dye)” that the water company had started adding very large doses of chlorine (so large as to be unsafe by modern standards) to reduce the color.21 The dry summer made the situation even worse. Pumping rates rose with the increased summertime demand, as usual, but there was no rain to recharge the underground aquifer. Instead, the Holly wells sucked up more of the polluted river water, which is why, by July, Crane could smell dye wastes in the tap at his Oak Ridge home. He and his staff responded quickly, collecting and testing samples from several water lines in the neighborhood and then, with the water company’s permission, testing the Holly wells.
Two weeks later, in mid-August, Toms River Chemical was ready to tell the water company what its chemists had found: dye chemicals, almost everywhere they looked.22 Analytical methods were primitive in 1965, but Ciba had been working with aniline dyes for almost a century; its chemists knew how to spot aniline-like molecules in water, even if they could not always distinguish between similar molecules. In addition to aniline, whose toxicity had been obvious since the industrial poisonings of the 1870s, these similar-looking molecules included benzidine, which had already been implicated as a cause of bladder cancer, and nitrobenzene, the highly toxic “bloodstream” of the vat dye operation. As they tried to determine dye concentrations in the town’s drinking water supply, company chemists devised an overall measurement for what they called “diazotizable amines” because they were components of azo production.
The contamination, the chemists discovered, was severe. Levels of diazotizable amines in the town’s wells and water pipes ranged from five to seventy parts per billion, and later as high as 160 parts per billion. In the 1960s, there were no specific limits for any of those chemicals in drinking water; they were too obscure and difficult to analyze. But by today’s standards, the concentrations were alarming. For benzidine, for example, current Environmental Protection Agency guidelines call for no more than one part per trillion in drinking water—five thousand times less than the lowest concentration of aromatic amines found in Toms River water in 1965.23
There was only one way dye wastes could have reached the water supply. The Toms River Chemical Corporation must have discharged them into the river, and the three shallow riverside wells operated by the Toms River Water Company on Holly Street, more than two miles downstream, must have then sucked in the contaminated water, pulling it through the sandy riverbank and into the wells and eventually pumping it to the kitchen taps of seven thousand unsuspecting customers all over town.
Within a couple of weeks, the chemists from Toms River Chemical had figured out what had happened and explained it to the water company—in secret, of course. Toms River Water could have responded by shutting down the wells, but did not. August was a time of intense water demand, thanks to the influx of summer tourists, and that August was the driest on record. Toms River was growing frenetically, and having a verdant lawn was part of the new ethos of a town in which appearance and property values meant everything.24 There was no way to shut down the Holly Street wells during the summer without having to explain exactly why customers would suddenly have to make do with less than half the water supply they were used to. The water company and the chemical company would also have to face uncomfortable questions about how long the people of Toms River had been sipping toxic chemicals in their morning tea, and why the companies had done nothing to stop it earlier.
The wells stayed open, continuing to operate at their maximum capacity, and the people of Toms River kept unknowingly drinking tainted water. The water company did add filters to its Holly Street pumping station, and Toms River Chemical took the unprecedented step of reducing production over the Labor Day weekend, when demand for drinking water was high and the river was full of fishermen. Both stopgap measures were soon abandoned, however. The factory went back to full-scale production, and Toms River Water stopped using the filters after tests at Toms River Chemical showed that they weren’t working: concentrations of diazotizable amines were as high as ever. In October, the water company finally, and quietly, shut down two of the Holly Street wells. By then, the weather had cooled and demand had declined enough that no one would notice the drop in water pressure. Even so, Toms River Water had to keep one of the Holly wells open—the one in which the amine concentrations were lowest. Again, water users were told nothing.
Toms River Chemical and Toms River Water had managed to keep their secret in 1965, but the summer of 1966 would pose a bigger challenge. They would have to worry about kee
ping odors down and water flowing for an entire summer, not just in August. As the two companies worked in secret to devise a solution, a long-awaited gift arrived from Washington, D.C.: A construction permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Toms River Chemical’s pipeline to the sea. The permit came with several conditions, including a requirement that the inside and outside of the twenty eight-inch steel pipeline be lined with a thick enamel made from coal tar—an ironic choice, considering that most of the contaminants the pipe would carry were also derived from coal tar. (The liner was supposed to be leak-proof, though subsequent events would demonstrate the folly of that assumption.)
With the permit in hand, Toms River Chemical moved quickly. By January of 1966, it had beaten back a legal challenge from the shore communities, selected a contractor, and bought ten miles of piping for the project. By March, construction was under way. Meanwhile, lawyers and managers for Toms River Chemical and Toms River Water were secretly negotiating a plan to get through the summer without water customers finding out that they had been drinking dye wastes.25 Here, they were fortunate again. Tests at Toms River Chemical showed that adding chlorine dioxide to the drinking water improved its smell and taste and reduced the diazotizable amines from 100 parts per billion to about 20 parts per billion—still far higher than would be permitted under a modern standard, but a major improvement. Adding lots of chlorine to the water also made it harder for anyone to smell the contamination. Plus, chlorination was cheap: just $2,000 to set it up, plus $50 a day for salt. Toms River Chemical readily agreed to cover the expense as long as it could reimburse the water company in secret and without admitting fault.26
Their luck held. The summer of 1966 was cooler and wetter than the previous years, and the chlorination treatment worked well enough that there was no outcry over smelly drinking water. On July 11, the ocean pipeline began operating, having overcome a series of glitches, including an incident in May in which a large section of pipe came loose from its moorings and bobbed to the surface of Barnegat Bay.
Even after the diversion to the Atlantic, dye waste from Toms River Chemical was still reaching the river, of course. The company was still withdrawing up to ten million gallons of cooling water every day from the Toms and returning it there in less-than-pristine condition. In addition, so much waste had already been dumped on the factory property’s sandy soil, and would continue to be dumped there for another two decades, that about two hundred thousand gallons of chemical-laced wastewater was still seeping through the soil and into the river every day.27 Nevertheless, the most visible sign of the company’s despoliation of the river—its direct discharge of liquid wastes—had finally ended after fourteen years and more than ten billion gallons of wastewater. The state Division of Fish and Game dropped plans to prosecute the company; its jurisdiction did not extend to the ocean.
Their shared secret was safe, so Toms River Chemical and Toms River Water formalized their accord in a confidential legal agreement in February of 1967. Toms River Chemical agreed to reimburse the water company for the $45,000 cost of drilling a new well in another part of town plus the small expense (just $50 a day) of chlorine treatment of the Holly wells. In return, Toms River Water gave the chemical company something far more valuable: a liability waiver. The final clause of the confidential agreement stated: “Toms River Water Company hereby agrees to release, discharge, indemnify and save harmless the Toms River Chemical Corporation from any and all claims or causes of action which it may or might have or which may or might hereafter arise from the use of the Holly Street wells.”28
There were a few more loose ends to tie up, and Toms River Chemical took care of them with dispatch. Later in 1967, the company cut a deal with its longtime adversary Philip Maimone, the Cadillac dealer who owned developable land along the river southeast of the factory. Maimone dropped his lawsuit in return for a land swap and a $52,000 payment from Toms River Chemical, which insisted that the settlement also include a statement by Maimone that the factory was no longer polluting the river.29 The company had already bought the adjacent Luker Farm for just $35,100. Once owned by a descendant of the legendary Tom Luker (arguably the “Tom” of Toms River), the farm was a wreck. Toms River Chemical was able to buy it at a sheriff’s sale just before Christmas in 1965, and to tear down what little remained. With the purchase of the old farm and the land swap with Maimone, the company had an even bigger buffer zone, plus newly won protection from liability for its years of pollution. Not only had Toms River Chemical weathered its first storm, it had set itself up for another generation of unfettered chemical manufacture, and waste dumping, deep in its forest redoubt.
As quickly as it had emerged, the controversy over the river contamination faded from view. The river looked cleaner now, and the drinking water smelled better. The factory’s smokestacks belched colored smoke only at night, and its wastewater gushed into the ocean out of sight, forty-five feet below the surface and a half-mile offshore. People in Toms River stopped thinking about Toms River Chemical. When the company was mentioned in the local papers, it was usually because of a charitable project, not an environmental controversy. Would anyone else in town ever find out about the contamination of the town’s drinking water? That seemed unlikely, and it seemed even less likely that Toms River Chemical would be blamed if it did. Both assumptions would eventually be proved wrong, but by the time the truth emerged, few would care about the long-ago contamination of the Holly Street wells. By then, the town would be in midst of an uproar that would make the events of 1965 and 1966 seem quaint by comparison.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sharkey and Columbo at the Rustic Acres
The Fernicola brothers, Nick and Frank, grew up in the dirt cowboy subculture of the New Jersey waste industry. Their father, also named Nicholas (his son always went by “Nick” to distinguish them), operated a drum reconditioning business starting in the 1940s on Avenue L in the Ironbound section of Newark, across the street from a slaughterhouse. Even by the standards of that heavily industrialized neighborhood, it was an extraordinarily filthy way to make a living. Nicholas Fernicola specialized in cleaning, repainting, and reselling the fifty-five-gallon steel drums that carried the foulest dregs North Jersey manufacturers could produce. There was no better place than Newark to be in that line of work. It was the “drum capital of the world,” as Frank Fernicola would wistfully describe it years later.1
The big money, though, came not from refurbishing waste drums but from making them disappear. Back in the 1960s, when the chemical industry was roaring in North Jersey, the forests and farms in the central part of the state were the equivalent of Sutter’s Mill in 1849 California. The rush was not to pull gold out of the ground but to dump chemical waste into it. Up in Newark, the landfills were expensive and so crowded that the lines of trucks waiting to unload their drums would stretch for blocks. A generation earlier, Ciba had found space and privacy in the deep woods of Ocean County to manufacture dyes and plastics on a massive scale. Now the chemical-waste haulers from Newark, Elizabeth, and Perth Amboy started to follow suit, pointing their big rigs south on Route 9 in search of cheaper dumping grounds. (The Garden State Parkway would have been faster, but trucks were banned north of Toms River.) They found plenty of willing partners among the farmers of Monmouth, Burlington, and Ocean counties. The real estate boom had not yet reached into the rural inland areas of the state, and chickens could not compete with hazardous waste as a cash crop, since farmers typically were paid anywhere from $20 to $50 per drum of waste dumped on their land.
One of the more enterprising landowners was a man named Edward Wilson, who worked for Morton International in the 1950s and 1960s, when the salt maker was broadening its business to encompass chemical manufacture. Wilson offered his family farm in Ocean County’s Plumsted Township as a dumpsite for Morton’s toxic wastes, which included halogenated solvents, chlorinated compounds, volatile organics, and heavy metals. His neighbor, Dayton Hopkins, was even more eager: He let Morton dump on thr
ee of his farms, including his family’s own fifty-seven-acre homestead. At the worst of those sites, called Goose Farm, drums were tossed into a pit that was three hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide.2
Most of the rural townships also operated small municipal landfills—back then, people called them dumps—which were also popular destinations for industrial waste from out of town because they charged less and had much shorter lines than their counterparts to the north. The town governments were just as eager as individual farmers to open their gates to the eighteen-wheelers from Newark. If the dumps were not burying waste, they were burning it; on Fridays, the usual burn day, the trails of black smoke would billow for miles. Taking in industrial waste from out of town served everyone’s short-term interest. Farmers and rural townships got much-needed cash, while haulers and chemical companies got cheap and secluded dumping grounds where no one asked too many questions about what was in the drums. If anyone was worried about the longer-term environmental consequences, there is no evidence of it. A generation later, when investigators finally assessed the damage, they identified two dozen major hazardous waste sites in Ocean County alone, including seven farms and three town dumps. Cleaning them all up would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.3