by Dan Fagin
With persistence and luck, a skilled investigator might even manage to use the two instruments to find and identify a vanishingly small amount of an unknown pollutant in a droplet of water. That would be the molecular equivalent of spotting a cork bobbing on the surface of the ocean and then figuring out which bottle of wine it came from.
The chemical signal in Toms River water was a tiny cork indeed. It was so small and strange that most of the people at the state DEP who had heard about it were convinced it was not there at all and was merely a measurement error.4 Even so, the data kept bobbing to the surface. It was still there when the lab retested the samples, which came not from one well but two: Well 26 and Well 28 of the Parkway field, which happened to be the two most pollution-plagued wells in Toms River. As the DEP already knew, those two wells had been sucking up TCE and perhaps other contaminants from the mile-long Reich Farm plume since at least the 1980s and possibly earlier.
The only clue about the mystery compound’s identity was a diagram generated by the DEP’s gas-liquid chromatograph. It looked like a child’s representation of a mountain range, with four peaks of varying heights drawn with a single unbroken line. Each peak corresponded to an unknown nitrogen- or phosphorus-containing compound detected in the water sample. The peaks were low, which meant that the concentrations were very low: six parts per billion, or 0.0000006 percent of the sample. Normally, the DEP would ignore such a faint detection, especially of an unknown compound. But Toms River was an opportunity to do more, to solve a mystery instead of merely satisfying the minimum regulatory requirements. So Floyd Genicola pushed his colleagues to cobble together a sample large enough to test in a mass spectrometer. After a lot of work, they succeeded.
The resulting spectrograms looked something like combs with broken teeth. There were discernible spikes of various heights at the molecular masses of 129, 156, 115, and occasionally 210 daltons. (A dalton is a unit of relative mass, named after the English chemist John Dalton.)5 It was now clear that the trip through the spectrometer was breaking up the mystery compound into the same three or four large pieces, plus many tiny pieces that were almost too small to measure. But what chemical was it? No one Genicola knew had ever heard of a mass spectrum that corresponded to those four numbers. Genicola consulted the federal government’s largest spectral library but found no matches with the combination of 129, 156, 115, and occasionally 210 daltons.
Very few people in state government shared Genicola’s curiosity. To his bosses at the DEP, there were only two characteristics of the mystery chemical that mattered: It was not on any list of pollutants that they had to worry about, and it was only present at six parts per billion. The only reason anyone spotted it in the first place was that Governor Whitman had been pressured by Linda Gillick into ordering an extraordinarily thorough investigation. That was why the DEP had attached a nitrogen and phosphorus detector to its chromatograph, a detector capable of finding “non-target” industrial pollutants instead of only the ones on the EPA’s checklist. Unexpectedly, that detector had found something. Unsurprisingly, Floyd Genicola wanted to find out what it was.
His chief antagonist inside the DEP on the issue was Gerald Nicholls, the director of environmental safety and analysis, who considered it a waste of time and money to try to identify a chemical that could barely even be detected in Parkway water.6 “Normally, you’re looking at fifty parts per billion before anyone got interested. Why would we make an exception for this one?” Nicholls wondered. He was not the only manager upset over Genicola’s advocacy. The people in charge of assessing the safety of old dumpsites were apoplectic. Union Carbide and the EPA had assured them that Reich Farm was not a threat to Toms River’s drinking water. What if it were implicated as the source of the mystery compound in the Parkway wells? Would the DEP and the EPA then have to revise their assessments of all of New Jersey’s dumpsites—of which there were hundreds—to consider the impact of unknown compounds at very low levels? “They were frustrated,” Nicholls recalled. “We were all frustrated.”
Floyd Genicola thought the issue was clear cut, too: Kids were getting cancer, there was something strange in the water, and it was the state’s responsibility to try to find out what it was and who put it there. He pointed out, to anyone who would listen, that the mystery compound had been found not just in the two Parkway wells. It had also been found, albeit at just one part per billion, in the tap water of a grade school, St. Joseph’s, right in the middle of town. Besides, Linda Gillick and her advisory committee already knew that the DEP had detected the mystery compound. If the state did nothing, the next headline in the Star-Ledger or the Asbury Park Press might read: “Toms River Schoolchildren Drinking Unknown Chemical; State Refuses to Investigate.” There was no real choice; they would have to let Genicola keep chasing the mystery chemical. “We had this long debate and we ultimately came to the conclusion that even if we didn’t want to look for this compound, the public was going to make us look for it because our process was very open and the public knew what was happening,” Nicholls remembered.
Reluctantly, Genicola’s supervisors told him to keep going.
Health Commissioner Fishman’s announcement on May 7 that the water was safe had the desired effect: Toms River calmed down, slightly. Panic was replaced by a quieter but steady anxiety. Amateur epidemiology, meanwhile, was breaking out all over town.7 Calls about possible clusters were pouring into Ocean of Love and a special state hotline; dozens of residents were making their own lists of cancer cases in neighborhoods and offices. Employees at the downtown post office demanded an environmental study, as did workers at the state office building across the street. The postal workers’ union was worried because thirty-two of the three hundred employees at the post office had gotten cancer over the previous twenty-five years. But in 1995, New Jersey’s incidence rate was 1.3 cases per three hundred people, so thirty-two cases over a quarter-century was almost exactly the expected rate.8 That fact was irrelevant in the hothouse environment of Toms River, however. The postal union got its investigation thanks to the ever-helpful Robert Torricelli, the Senate candidate who practically lived in Toms River that spring, when the press coverage was at its peak. After exhaustive, costly tests of the air, soil, and water, federal investigators found no toxic hazards at the post office.9
If anyone had a strong case for an epidemiological study, it was the workers at Ciba. Union president John Talty kept hearing about retirees who were newly diagnosed with cancer, so he began agitating for an update of Philip Cole and Elizabeth Delzell’s worker studies from eight years earlier. The company agreed in early 1996, contracting yet again with Cole’s industry-oriented group at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. With the completion of each earlier study, the evidence of pollution-induced cancer at the factory had gotten progressively stronger; as the body count increased, the confounding influence of chance diminished. The next study seemed likely to continue the pattern, but its results, company officials told the union, would not be available for another two years.
Ciba’s immediate problem was getting through the next few months. The disclosure of the cancer cluster came at an especially sensitive time because the company was finalizing its planned merger with Sandoz, its former partner at Toms River Chemical. The new company was to be known as Novartis, and Ciba had hoped that the rebranding would help improve its image as it shifted from chemical to pharmaceutical manufacturing. Publicity over the Toms River cluster was undermining that effort. There were hundreds of newspaper, magazine, and television stories, most of which featured descriptions of Ciba’s waste dumping as well as wrenching interviews with the Gillicks, the Pascarellas, and other cancer-stricken families. The company had another problem, too: Its long-delayed lawsuit against its insurance companies, seeking reimbursement for several hundred million dollars’ worth of cleanup costs in Toms River, finally went to trial in the spring of 1996. Ciba would eventually win, but in the meantime the trial was unearthing embarrassing information, includ
ing—at long last—the company’s hushed-up contamination of the riverside Holly wells in the mid-1960s.
For Toms River, there was only one beneficial aspect to all the attention: It was much easier now to secure the funds needed to complete the state’s ongoing tests of the town’s water, air, and soil. Those tests were expensive, but the unceasing press coverage attracted politicians like catnip. By summer, Congress had appropriated $900,000, and the state legislature added $600,000. It would not be nearly enough, as things turned out, but it was an impressive beginning.
Mostly, though, the publicity ticked people off. The news coverage, like the public’s anxiety about the cluster, seemed to feed on itself. The stories attracted the attention of public officials, who then gave reporters more to write about. So did Linda Gillick. She cooperated with all of the national reporters and kept local journalists well informed of each incremental step in the state’s investigation. Gillick became the funnel for all sorts of bizarre information from worried locals, including ex-Ciba workers and even hunters who reported seeing weird tumors in Ocean County deer. While she was usually careful about what she told reporters, Gillick always made it clear that she believed the cluster was real and caused by polluted drinking water. She never missed an opportunity to describe the anguish of the Ocean of Love families and their crusade to prevent more tragedies in Toms River. It was an irresistible storyline, especially because Michael Gillick was a smart, articulate teenager who was unafraid to go on camera, where his appearance made for a compelling visual tableau.
No one in town ever criticized Michael, but his mother was another story. Many locals resented the attention Linda Gillick was getting. News stories often styled her as an ordinary suburban mom thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but there was nothing ordinary about her. The same relentlessness that made her such an effective advocate also infuriated many people who came into contact with her. “I had a lot of respect for Linda, but she was a no-holds-barred kind of person,” recalled Gary Casperson, who scrapped with her as chairman of the county board of health. Even Gillick’s friends sometimes winced at her badgering of officials she believed were impeding the cluster investigation. “Linda’s approach was not the approach that I would have taken, but for the situation we were in, the times that we were in, it was very effective,” said Bob Gialanella, who was on the Ocean of Love board as well as the citizens’ advisory committee Gillick chaired. “It worked to have somebody stand there and sometimes personally accost these people, verbally, to the point where they would finally do something to assist us.”
A key cause of the grumbling was financial. In May, Gillick found an anonymous note in her mailbox: “The water is fine, cancer cluster is probably a freak. Meantime, Ocean County will suffer this summer because you have scared away tourists, home buyers and others.” The negative publicity was striking directly at the two fragile industries that constituted the core of the town’s post-Ciba economy: real estate and tourism. “Toms River is a summer tourism site, and property values were going down. People couldn’t sell their homes,” remembered Casperson, the banker and board of health chairman. “The business people at first weren’t real vocal about how they felt, but there was an underlying feeling of, ‘Why is everyone saying bad things about Toms River when the experts don’t know the answers?’ ” The real estate slowdown had powerful psychological consequences, too, by making some residents feel trapped in homes they could not sell.
Deepening the sense of gloom was another surprise announcement, in August of 1996, that Ciba was shutting down what little manufacturing remained at the Toms River plant, sending another 170 jobs south to Louisiana and Alabama. After December, only about thirty employees would be left, mostly technicians monitoring the Superfund cleanup, which was just beginning. The mini-city behind the trees would be virtually deserted, a ghost town atop an unimaginably vast amount of buried toxic waste.
Toms River had little to show from its first six painful months in the national media spotlight except a battered reputation and a thicket of “For Sale” signs. An explanation for the cluster was as distant as ever.
Floyd Genicola intended to change that. He was already making progress. Using an unusual type of spectroscopy called isobutane chemical ionization, he had managed to determine that the mystery compound’s molecular weight was 210 daltons—not 156, as he had earlier thought.10 Now Genicola knew enough about the compound that he was ready to give it a name: It was a “nitrogen/phosphorus tentatively identified compound molecular weight 210”—or a TIC for short. But what was it, really? And where did it come from? Answering the second question, Genicola thought, might help answer the first. Reich Farm was the obvious suspect, since it had already been fingered back in 1988 as the source of the trichloroethylene that had turned up in Parkway wells. If an industrial solvent could make the one-mile trip underground from Nick Fernicola’s dumping ground all the way to the Parkway well field, why not the mystery TIC?
Genicola chose an unorthodox way to try to find out. One day in August of 1996, he picked up the phone and called Union Carbide—a highly unusual step for a state agency that usually communicated by memo, often through lawyers. Actually, Genicola called a contracting firm, Radian International, which was monitoring groundwater in Pleasant Plains for Union Carbide. Genicola asked for chromatograms of any unidentified compounds the company had found in groundwater at Reich Farm that had molecular masses of 115, 129, 156, or 210 daltons. It was a cheeky request because there was no regulation requiring a company to supply that kind of information. “I didn’t think there was any way they would do it, but they did,” Genicola remembered. “Surprisingly, they faxed it over right away.”11 When the chromatograms from Radian International emerged from his office fax machine, Genicola could barely contain his excitement. They were identical to the chromatograms the state had generated from samples of Parkway drinking water. Whatever mystery compound was in the wells was also at Reich Farm. In fact, there was a lot more of it at the dumpsite. In one monitoring well just south of the site, Radian International had measured the mystery compound at a concentration of about one part per million—almost two hundred times higher than what was in the Parkway drinking water.
To Genicola, it was obvious what was happening: The mystery compound was flowing south from Reich Farm straight to the Parkway wells—and was not being removed by the air stripper. Whatever that mystery chemical was, the citizens of Toms River had been drinking it for years. In fact, they were still drinking it.
All that was left was to identify the TIC, but even someone as self-confident as Genicola knew by now that the task was beyond his expertise. He needed a world-class mass spectroscopist to crack the puzzle and determine the molecular structure of the mystery compound. Some EPA chemists suggested a candidate: If anyone could do it, G. Wayne Sovocool could. Sovocool’s reputation inside the EPA was similar to Genicola’s inside the DEP. He was stubborn, quirky, and an absolute whiz at interpreting mass spectra. At Cornell University, Sovocool had taken a class from Fred McLafferty, who had ushered in modern analytical chemistry by pairing liquid-gas chromatography with mass spectrometry and then writing the standard text on interpreting mass spectra. Sovocool went to work for the newly created EPA in 1972 and had been analyzing pollutants for it ever since, working in North Carolina and then Nevada. His triumphs included being the first to find highly toxic dioxins in fly ash from coal-burning power plants and the first to find chlorobenzene in the blood of Love Canal residents. Sovocool liked challenges, and he was about to get one.
It took weeks for Floyd Genicola to get his wary supervisors to agree to let him contact Sovocool and send the data and new water samples to his lab in Las Vegas. The samples had to come from the state health department because the DEP’s laboratory had just been shut down in a budget-cutting move. If it had closed just a few months earlier, the mystery TIC would never have been found because the older equipment at the health department could not have detected a compound at levels as lo
w as five parts per billion.
The lucky timing with the DEP lab was one more indication that nothing about the Toms River case—from the detection of the childhood cancer cluster to the decision to investigate it and now the identification of a possible cause—had been preordained by consistent, proactive government oversight. Instead, a fortunate combination of the right equipment, at the right time, in the right hands had found the TIC. Now its identity would be unmasked by the right person.
Wayne Sovocool had spent a quarter-century running pollutants through spectrometers, and he very rarely encountered a chemical he could not quickly identify. The one from Floyd Genicola was tricky, though. So many combinations of atoms could add up to 210 daltons, and shared some of the fragments of the TIC’s mass spectrum, that Sovocool decided to try to reduce the number of suspects by making some educated guesses. Like a child with a Tinkertoy set, Sovocool started building models of the molecule, atom by atom, to try to find an arrangement that matched what little he knew about the TIC. He worked in two dimensions, with pencil on paper, but he was thinking in the three-dimensional, submicroscopic world of molecular structure. Sovocool knew that nitrogen was almost certainly an important component of the TIC and that industrial chemicals that contain nitrogen often do so in the form of a nitrile group, which consists of a nitrogen atom and a carbon atom connected by a triple bond. Further, he knew that the mass spectra of compounds containing two nitrile groups frequently yielded spectrometer fragments at 156 daltons, just as the TIC did. So Sovocool guessed that the TIC had two nitrile groups and began searching spectral libraries for industrial compounds that had two nitriles and a mass spectrum similar to the TIC.