by Dan Fagin
By mid-October, Sovocool thought he had fingered the perpetrator: a dye ingredient called 1,2-benzenediacetonitrile. The chemical was a logical suspect for Toms River because it was used in dye manufacture and contained two nitrile groups plus a benzene ring of six carbon atoms, another ubiquitous feature of industrial solvents. The chemical’s mass spectrum, including the fragments, was very similar to the TIC’s. But it was not a perfect match, which bothered Sovocool. He wanted confirmation, and the EPA’s Las Vegas lab had just developed a new technique (it carried the unwieldy name of Mass Peak Profiling from Selected Ion Recording Data) that might be able to provide it. Developed by a colleague of Sovocool’s, Andrew Grange, it was a form of spectrometric wizardry that could determine the precise mass and abundance of even the smallest molecular fragments. Sovocool asked Genicola to send him additional superconcentrated water samples from the Parkway wells, and then Grange set to work.
It took only a few days. By the beginning of November, Grange had solved the central mystery of the TIC by deducing its chemical formula: fourteen carbon atoms, fourteen hydrogen atoms, and two nitrogen atoms, or C14H14N2. Even more usefully, he determined the exact molecular masses, to the fourth decimal point, of ten molecular fragments broken off during the TIC’s trip through the spectrometer, not just the four most common fragments Genicola had tried to match. Several of those fragments were so small they had never even been measured before. When he saw the new data, Sovocool knew that his earlier guess about the dye chemical was wrong. But he was not discouraged; he was excited. At last, he had a formula and a precise spectral signature of the TIC. He was closing in. Floyd Genicola was even more excited. With barely concealed glee, he relayed the discovery to Union Carbide. “I told them that we had the molecular formula, and that we were going to identify it,” Genicola recalled.
The final step was not a simple one, however. More than three hundred thousand compounds were listed in digital spectral libraries, including forty-six with a mass of 210 and the formula C14H14N2. None was a perfect match for the TIC, which was too obscure to be listed. Instead, it would have to be found the old-fashioned way, via published abstracts. To conduct the search, Sovocool talked the EPA into hiring a specialist, Joseph Donnelly, who scoured hundreds of old scientific journals in search of an industrial process that would yield a C14H14N2 molecule with the required characteristics. Within a week, he found it. In articles published in the 1960s, Donnelly discovered references to a process in which two molecules of acrylonitrile were bound to one molecule of styrene to form a strong, flexible polymer, suitable for plastics. The process had since fallen out of favor, but during the 1960s and 1970s several Japanese and American companies had produced styrene acrylonitrile for use in products ranging from toys to piping.12 What caught Donnelly’s attention was that the chief waste product of the process was a thick, smelly brown liquid called styrene acrylonitrile trimer that matched all of Sovocool’s criteria. “It quickly became apparent that this fit the data perfectly,” Sovocool recalled.
On November 13, Sovocool sent Genicola a triumphant fax. “I think this is it!” he scrawled on the cover page. On the very same day, another important fax arrived in Genicola’s office. This one was worded much more soberly, which, considering the source, was understandable. It was from Craig Wilger of Union Carbide, and it said that the company had identified a suspect based on the C14H14N2 formula Genicola had given Wilger ten days earlier. A search of old records from the company’s Bound Brook factory, the letter said, had discovered that Union Carbide in the early 1970s had made its polystyrene plastic by mixing in acrylonitrile. The process created useless trimer byproducts—formed by accident—that were discarded as waste. “The compound of interest may be trimers,” the company’s letter advised, adding that the company had no information about its toxicity.
Union Carbide was being truthful about that. No agency had ever ordered it to test the safety of styrene acrylonitrile trimer, and there was no indication that the company had ever tried to find out on its own. SAN trimer was an unwanted byproduct, something that was thrown away instead of resold—why bother testing it? But now that it had been found in Toms River’s water supply, even at low levels, there was reason for concern. Its structure was similar to those of toxic aromatic compounds like benzene and naphthalene that were known or possible carcinogens. In fact, both of the trimer’s namesake components—styrene and acrylonitrile, the combination of which generated SAN trimer—had long been strongly suspected to be carcinogenic and probably mutagenic, too.13
The identification of SAN trimer proved that Reich Farm waste was still tainting the town’s drinking water and probably had been for years—long after the DEP, the EPA, United Water, and Union Carbide had all claimed the problem was solved with the 1988 installation of the Parkway air stripper. As those agencies knew, an air stripper could be counted on only to remove volatile chemicals like trichloroethylene that vaporized easily. SAN trimer was a semivolatile compound; the way to remove it was carbon filtration. But as far back as the late 1970s, the water company had rejected requests to install expensive filters on the Parkway wells. The agencies did not insist, even after Reich Farm was finally confirmed as a source of TCE contamination in those wells. Instead, the EPA sided with Union Carbide and dropped plans to force the company to intercept the pollution plume before it reached the Parkway wells. The EPA had trusted solely in the air stripper to protect the water supply; the unmasking of SAN trimer now made that decision seem like a foolish gamble.
The identification of SAN trimer in Parkway water was like a perfect fingerprint left at a crime scene. It was definitive evidence implicating both Union Carbide and the agencies that were supposed to be protecting the town’s water supply. SAN trimer was so obscure that it could only have come from the five thousand drums of Union Carbide waste Nick Fernicola dumped back in 1971.14 Its identification also strongly suggested that there were other strange compounds from Reich Farm in Parkway water. After all, the chromatographs Genicola examined showed many unidentified spectral signatures, not just trimer. The other mystery compounds were at even lower concentrations, but they were present—and Genicola was already making plans to try to identify them, too.
Now Union Carbide, United Water, and the state faced some very uncomfortable decisions. They would have to consider closing important water wells they had resisted shutting for twenty years. Union Carbide would also have to face the possibility of being sued for its role in polluting the drinking water of a town where a cancer cluster had just been discovered. Even for a company accustomed to dealing with catastrophe—the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India, killed thousands—the situation in Toms River was alarming.
Union Carbide’s belated admission that the mystery chemical was theirs was unprecedented in the tortuous four-decade history of chemical pollution in Toms River. For years, the company had denied that it was contaminating the public water supply, and state and federal regulators had backed them—and backed Ciba, too. Now those denials had been refuted. The residents of Toms River had drunk low levels of Union Carbide’s toxic waste in their tap water. That was no longer in doubt. Now the debate would shift to how much they had consumed and for how long, and to whether that pollution had anything to do with the unusually high numbers of childhood cancer cases in Toms River.
Floyd Genicola, a cantankerous state bureaucrat acting on his own initiative, had made it happen. Like Linda Gillick, the anonymous nurse Lisa Boornazian and a few others, he did not turn away from the evidence in front of him. Because he did not, the Toms River saga was about to enter a new and even more contentious stage.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Expectations
On the day after Wayne Sovocool’s triumphant “I think this is it!” message rolled out of Floyd Genicola’s fax machine, Governor Whitman told United Water to shut down the Parkway well field—the whole thing, all eight wells, for the first time ever. Overnight, Toms River lost about 45 percent of its water supply, forcing
the water company to make up the difference by pumping its other wells to the very edge of their capacity, as if it were midsummer instead of mid-November. How United Water would cope the next summer—the same question that had plagued its corporate predecessor, Toms River Water, during the water crises of 1965 and 1987—was anyone’s guess.
Whitman and her health commissioner, Len Fishman, braced for a fresh outbreak of panic as they announced the discovery of an industrial pollutant in the town’s drinking water, but the response was surprisingly muted. Now that state officials were no longer keeping information secret, residents reacted more calmly to each new disclosure. The wild scene in the high school auditorium back in March would never be repeated. Almost no one visited the public liaison office that the state health department had recently opened in Toms River; soon, the office would close for lack of interest. An old pattern was reasserting itself: With each passing month, more residents wanted to move on with their lives. The same thing had happened after brief surges of anti-Ciba activism in the mid-1960s and the late 1980s. Now that the town was getting so much negative attention, the desire to change the subject was stronger than ever. Residents were still worried about the water, and they sympathized—from a safe distance—with the Ocean of Love families, but most seemed to think the authorities now had the situation in hand. As Fishman repeatedly pointed out, the water in Toms River had now been tested more thoroughly than anywhere else in New Jersey. For most people in town, that was good enough.
Bruce Anderson adamantly disagreed. Like some other Ocean of Love parents, he wanted to keep the pressure on. Attendance at the monthly public meetings of Linda Gillick’s advisory committee was dwindling, but Anderson made a point of never missing one, even though he rarely spoke up. He wanted Fishman and the other officials to know that the families were expecting action to uncover the cause of the cluster and to prevent it from reoccurring. They had been through too much pain to simply accept their children’s affliction as a mystery and move on. The families were a small but formidable political force, with ready access to journalists and politicians, including newly elected U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli, one of their early champions. They had earned their bully pulpit in the most agonizing way imaginable, and they were not going to squander it. Their message, consistent and powerful, could be distilled to a single phrase: We want answers. After everything they had been through, who could deny them that?
Cautious and serious behind his wire-rim glasses, Jerry Fagliano had not endeared himself to Linda Gillick and the other Ocean of Love parents during the first year of the state’s environmental testing in Toms River. He was an eleven-year veteran of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services (the health department’s new official name, as of 1996), which he joined after earning his master’s degree in public health from Yale University. Fagliano was a natural choice to serve as the state’s on-the-scene epidemiologist in Toms River, since he had expertise in assessing the health risks posed by hazardous compounds in drinking water. His doctoral dissertation, which he was still finishing up in 1996 as a part-time student at Johns Hopkins, looked at whether pregnant women who drank water tainted with low levels of industrial chemicals were more likely to have children with brain cancer. (He found a modest increase in risk.)1
Fagliano had spent most of the previous year quietly searching for a scientifically legitimate way to conduct the epidemiological study that the Toms River families so badly wanted. His reticence at meetings annoyed the parents, but he did not want to promise what he might not be able to deliver. The decision on whether to go forward with an in-depth study would be made by his boss at the health department, Len Fishman, in consultation with Governor Whitman. After the initial panic in Toms River, they had backed down from their flat-out opposition to an in-depth study but said that they would authorize one only if it were based on a credible, testable theory of how pollution could have caused a cancer cluster that was unique to the town. Until the identification of SAN trimer, that seemed unlikely. The discovery of low-level radiation in the town’s drinking water might have qualified as a causal hypothesis, except that similar radioactivity had subsequently been found all over South Jersey. The results from soil tests around town, except at the Superfund sites, were similarly unremarkable. The air quality was normal, too—or, at least, was normal now that Ciba had ended manufacturing.
But there was nothing normal about the discovery of a previously unknown compound in drinking water from the Parkway wells. Fagliano had assumed, like almost everyone in state government except Floyd Genicola, that because the extensive environmental testing the state had undertaken in Toms River was aimed at calming the town, nothing surprising would turn up. Now that his assumption had been proved wrong, Fagliano thought that the case for a full-blown study was much stronger. “At that moment, we knew that there was at least one contaminant that people in Toms River were exposed to on a continuing basis, and it was a chemical that was probably unique to the community,” he recalled. That was a “sobering thought” but also an almost ideal hypothesis to explore. “Now we had at least one question we could ask because we had a pathway to a unique set of chemical exposures. That was a really critical piece to justify the study.”
Now the question was, what kind of study? The fastest, cheapest option would be a case series, similar to the ones Wilhelm Hueper had conducted at DuPont in the 1930s and urologist Arthur Wendel had undertaken with Mitchell Zavon a generation later at the Cincinnati Chemical Works. Those investigators simply interviewed factory workers with bladder cancer and looked for shared exposures that might have caused their illness. In Toms River, many families wanted to be interviewed; they had their own ideas of what types of pollution might be at fault, and they were eager to share them. But Fagliano thought an interview-only study would yield vague and unreliable results. Unlike the dye workers at DuPont and in Cincinnati, who could describe shoveling BNA and benzidine with their bare hands, the affected Toms River families had no idea which chemicals were in the water they had drunk or the air they had breathed. Plus, there would be no control group of unexposed people for comparison purposes—a crucial shortcoming.
Another option would be a prospective cohort study that would, in effect, transform Toms River into a living laboratory for ongoing epidemiological research. For a study period that could last ten years or longer, investigators would monitor the health and habits of the town’s eighty thousand residents and regularly test the water, air, and soil. As the years passed, some children in town would get sick, allowing researchers to then look for correlations between those illnesses and possible environmental causes. Prospective cohort studies were highly credible because they did not depend on the foggy memories of participants, but they were extremely expensive and no one—least of all the Ocean of Love families—wanted to wait another ten years for results. Besides, the emergency closure of the Parkway wells had finally interrupted the last known pathway conveying industrial waste to the residents of Toms River. All of the recent environmental testing had turned up no new risks except radioactivity, now known to be ubiquitous in South Jersey. What the town needed now was a study of past exposures, not current ones.
A case-control study was the obvious choice. Its results would not be as reliable as a prospective cohort because it would depend in part on participants’ memories of past exposures: how much water local mothers had drunk while pregnant, for example. But most case-control studies could be completed in a year or two, and even the most ambitious rarely cost more than a few million dollars. (The Toms River study would become an exception as it grew, taking five years and costing more than $10 million.) Like all forms of epidemiology, case-control studies could never determine the cause of any particular case, but they could confirm correlations between a disease and risk factors, as Richard Doll had shown in the 1950s with his smoking studies, which he later bolstered with even stronger results from prospective cohort studies.
A case-control study of more recent vinta
ge played a decisive role in convincing Fagliano, and his bosses, that an epidemiological study was worth undertaking in Toms River. It concerned the other heavily publicized childhood cancer cluster in the United States: the leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, ten miles north of Boston. The similarities to Toms River were obvious. In 1979, upgraded tests had found trichloroethylene and other industrial chemicals in two public wells in Woburn, near a field where hazardous waste had been dumped years earlier. A local mother named Anne Anderson and her parish priest, Bruce Young, together compiled a list of twelve local children diagnosed with leukemia between 1969 and 1979, marking the locations of their homes on a map. They saw an obvious clump: Within a six-block area near the two contaminated wells, there were six leukemia cases—including Anderson’s son Jimmy, who died in 1981. The ensuing investigations in Woburn would continue virtually nonstop for another fifteen years, but until 1996, case-control studies at Woburn had failed to identify a likely cause for the cluster. The investigations had foundered because researchers couldn’t tell how much pollution Woburn residents had been exposed to in the past. The problem was that Woburn had eight public wells, and there was no obvious way to look back to the 1960s and 1970s and determine which neighborhoods in the small city were getting water from the two contaminated wells versus the six clean ones.