by Dan Fagin
Could Toms River be re-branded, like New Coke or Marlboro Lights? People had tried. Gary Lotano and other business leaders had briefly hired a famous New York public relations firm, Rubenstein Associates, for an image makeover of the town, but soon abandoned the plan as unworkable and too expensive. Earlier, residents of South Toms River had proposed changing the borough’s name to Cedar Pointe, but voters nixed the plan. In August of 1998, however, a group of twelve-year-old boys succeeded where so many others had failed. The Toms River East baseball team won the Little League World Series, defeating a Japanese team and sending the entire town into a state of rapture.
Little League was the ultimate expression of suburban normalcy, and Toms River worked hard to excel at it. Thanks to aggressive fund-raising, the fields and facilities were superb, including stadium lights and indoor batting cages that would be the envy of some minor league professional teams. Eighteen hundred boys played. The female equivalent in Toms River was competitive cheerleading, at which local squads also excelled. The Little League team from Toms River East had been to the World Series tournament once before, losing in the 1995 elimination round. The 1998 team stormed through the eight-team bracket without a loss, finishing with a come-from-behind victory over Kashima, Japan, in which the star was a little-used player named Chris Cardone, who came off the bench to slug two home runs. There were more than one hundred thousand Little League teams around the world; Toms River East was the best of them all.
The victory electrified Toms River like nothing before or since. For the first time since Maria Marshall was murdered alongside the Garden State Parkway in 1984, Toms River was in the national news for something other than polluted water and cancer. And for the first time anyone could remember, Toms River was famous for something positive. “Whenever I tell anyone I’m from Toms River, they say, ‘Oh, the water and the murder,’ ” one woman told the Los Angeles Times.8 “Our little guys are undoing all that,” another told The New York Times. “People are finally going to see Toms River as just another all-American town.” Said a third, “It’s good to have something to talk about that doesn’t make us ashamed anymore.”9 The returning heroes were met by a police escort at the off-ramp of the Garden State Parkway and taken to their home field, where two thousand fans were waiting and hundreds more lined the route. A few days later, more than forty thousand people—almost half the town—turned out for a parade down Hooper Avenue. To mark the occasion, Route 37 was renamed Little League World Champions Boulevard. The same road ran past the old chemical plant, the hospital where many children had first been diagnosed with cancer, and the Ocean of Love office.
There was a special resonance to the victory because Toms River’s triumph had come via its children. After the Little Leaguers’ victory, residents who were asked by outsiders to explain the town’s athletic prowess often responded the same way: “It must be the water.” Some of the Ocean of Love families considered this arch reply to be a barb directed at them. They thought that some of their neighbors were using the Little League triumph to mock the notion that Toms River had a genuine pollution problem. Melanie Anderson, Bruce’s wife, wrote a letter to the Asbury Park Press saying that “the true heroes” were the sick children. “I said that baseball is hardly life and death,” she remembered. “If these baseball players were true heroes, they would reach out to these kids” with cancer. The Little Leaguers later attended a party for the Ocean of Love children, but the breach between the families and most of the rest of the town did not heal.
Around the same time as the Little League frenzy, the county legislature authorized a modest monument in memory of local children felled by cancer, after months of lobbying by the Ocean of Love families. Toms River loved memorials. There were more than thirty monuments and memorial plaques along Washington Street, the busy downtown thoroughfare and parade route that is now, by decree of the town council, also known as the “Avenue of Americanism.” Veterans, merchant seamen, volunteer firefighters, and first-aid providers all had markers, and there was plenty of room for more memorials on the spacious front lawns of the courthouse, the county administration building, and town hall, where a newly erected sign honored the victorious Little Leaguers.
The county politicians instead decided to place the pink stone slab memorializing the dead children elsewhere: in the back corner of a small and very quiet county park called Riverfront Landing. The dedication ceremony was sparsely attended; most of those present were relatives of the dead. The names carved into the granite slab included Gabrielle Pascarella, Randy Lynnworth, and Carrie-Anne Carter, whose 1995 funeral had drawn nurse Lisa Boornazian to Toms River and spurred her to ask for an investigation of childhood cancer in Toms River.
There was some empty space on the pink granite, enough for a total of fifty names. Not enough space, as it would turn out.
There were more than 2,500 living ex-employees of the Ciba factory, and that summer they received a package telling them they had nothing to worry about. The fourth, and final, worker epidemiological study had been completed, and the results showed that the cancer death rate among ex-employees was slightly less than the statewide rate. “The bottom line is, we’re very pleased with the results,” a company manager told reporters.10 Like its predecessors, the study was conducted by the industrial epidemiology group at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, led by Philip Cole and Elizabeth Delzell, whose work was mostly supported by manufacturers and industry associations. Ciba not only paid the $320,000 cost of the study, it was also paying Delzell to serve as its consultant on the state’s case-control study; she had already appeared at a public hearing on the company’s behalf.
As with the previous studies, there were rough patches beneath the glossy surface. The overall cancer death rate at the factory was about the same as the statewide population due to the healthy worker effect, the well-established observation that industrial workers who are well enough to be hired tend to be healthier than the general population.11 Yet there were clusters of specific cancers among workers who had the most contact with hazardous chemicals. The lung cancer fatality rate among vat dye and maintenance workers, for example, was about 50 percent higher than expected. Azo dye workers were four times more likely than expected to die from stomach and bladder cancer. Deaths from central nervous system tumors were more than three times higher than expected among vat, azo, and plastics workers. Those associations had been found in earlier studies too but were stronger now because there were more deaths. Even so, Delzell and her coauthor, Nalini Sathiakumar, argued that chemical exposure was not necessarily the cause because death rates for veteran workers with more years of exposure were no higher than for workers hired more recently. However, that argument overlooked two other aspects of the healthy worker effect: Recently hired workers tend to be assigned to high-exposure jobs, and those who are unhealthy tend to leave sooner.
Sathiakumar and Delzell did acknowledge the toll that toxic exposures had taken among one accursed group of longtime Ciba employees: the eighty-nine workers, all now dead, who had toiled at the Cincinnati Chemical Works before coming to Toms River in 1959. They were much more likely than expected to have died from bladder, kidney, or central nervous system cancers. For all cancers combined, their death rate was 33 percent higher than the statewide rate (twenty cases instead of the expected fifteen), without taking into account the healthy worker effect. For these men—and only these men—the Alabama researchers were willing to acknowledge that chemical exposures influenced the death rate. Having shoveled benzidine or beta-naphthylamine with their bare hands, and often without dust masks, they were part of an absolutely conclusive chain of epidemiological links between those two dye chemicals and bladder cancer—a chain that stretched all the way back to Wilhelm Hueper’s research at DuPont in the 1930s. For everywhere else at the plant where incidence was high, however, Sathiakumar and Delzell gave no ground. For the cancer clusters among dye, resin, and maintenance workers, they would say only that “increases may be attribut
able to chance, to uncontrolled confounding by smoking or to an unidentified occupational exposure.”12
Former employees saw the study as a final insult. “I thought it was ridiculous, to be honest,” said John Talty, the former union president. He had heard the same rose-colored message back in 1987, when Delzell conducted a similar study that, like the new one, relied solely on the cause of death listed on death certificates. What the workers wanted, then and now, was an incidence study that would track cases, not just deaths. There had been just two modest efforts to track cancer incidence at the plant, by Delzell in 1987 and her doctoral student Fabio Barbone in 1989. They covered only cancers of the brain, nervous system, and lung, yet both found unusually high numbers of cases. Barbone even concluded that chemical exposures caused more than half of the nervous system cancers at the plant and about one-third of the lung cancers.13 Now, ten years later, Sathiakumar and Delzell were again relying on death certificates and were again making a questionable comparison to the general population.
Still bitter about how Ciba had treated its longtime employees, John Talty could only shake his head in resignation at what was being studied in Toms River—and what wasn’t. He watched as the government spent millions of dollars scrutinizing the possible role of low-level chemical exposures in triggering cancer in neighborhoods far beyond the factory fence line. Talty did not begrudge Linda Gillick her study, but he wondered why no one would do something similar for his 2,500 fellow retirees. They had faced higher risks than any child or pregnant woman who drank Parkway well water or lived downwind from the Ciba smokestacks. But there would be no factory-based equivalent to Jerry Fagliano’s case-control study. Ciba had enough problems in Toms River already, including a hugely expensive cleanup and a possible lawsuit from the families of dozens of sick or dead children. Besides, the company was much smaller now because Novartis (as the merged Ciba and Sandoz was known) had dropped chemical manufacturing for cleaner, and more profitable, pharmaceutical production. In 1997, a year after the merger, the Swiss conglomerate spun off its chemical operations, including the shuttered Toms River plant, into a much leaner company known as Ciba Specialty Chemicals. For the scaled-down Ciba, Toms River represented only costs, not revenue. Revenue was in Alabama, China, and India. Under those circumstances, Ciba was not about to order up another epidemiological study of its former workers in Toms River.
Ever since his stubborn persistence had led to the identification of styrene acrylonitrile trimer in the Parkway wells, Floyd Genicola had been spending his nights and weekends hunting additional TICs. The acronym stood for “tentatively identified compounds,” and Genicola was trying to unmask more of them based on the spectral peaks on his chromatograms. His supervisors at the state Department of Environmental Protection did not approve, which is why Genicola was allowed to do the work only during off-hours. He told his bosses that he was doing the extra work because he hoped to make it the subject of a future doctoral thesis. This was true but not the full story. The deeper truth was that Genicola had formed an emotional connection to the Ocean of Love families. His work had paved the way for the case-control study by linking Union Carbide’s SAN trimer waste to the Parkway water. Now the former police chemist wanted to find out what else from Reich Farm had seeped into the Parkway wells and reached thousands of Toms River homes.
The analytical work was difficult because the unidentified compounds were obscure and their concentrations were mostly less than one part per billion. Worse still, the original molecules had broken into fragments. Trying to piece together those fragments into coherent molecules was like trying to reassemble the shell of an egg dropped off a second-story balcony. Even so, Genicola was making progress. By the end of 1997, he had identified about 250 fragments in the Parkway water samples. Many were closely related to SAN trimer, but others looked more like flame retardants and other compounds Union Carbide had added to its plastics to improve durability. Still others seemed to be new molecules that formed when compounds mixed during their mile-long underground journey from Reich Farm to the wells. Concentrations of those 250 molecular fragments in Parkway water were very low, but the people of Toms River were not drinking them one at a time. “We had kids at schools who were drinking this water, and we didn’t even know what was in it,” Genicola recalled.
His supervisors, as usual, thought Genicola’s efforts were a waste of time. “Floyd was honestly motivated. However, other people did not see the TICs that he saw, and there was a question as to what level these things gained any significance,” remembered Gerald Nicholls, the DEP’s director of environmental safety and analysis. By mid-1998, the DEP and the health department were no longer paying any attention to Genicola’s TIC work and had quietly stopped all other efforts to identify chemicals in the Parkway water. As far as the state was concerned, the problem was solved. Low levels of SAN trimer and trichloroethylene had been found in two wells, and carbon filters and an air stripper were now removing them. No one was drinking water from those wells anymore, except briefly during the water emergency of the previous summer. Instead, the wells were being used solely to clean up the Reich Farm plume. Why spend time and money looking for more contaminants?
To no one’s surprise, Floyd Genicola did not accept his supervisors’ decision quietly, and he knew whom to complain to about it. He requested a meeting with Linda Gillick. Nicholls agreed, but only if he could be present to offer a rebuttal. The meeting, held at the Ocean of Love office, was stormy. When Genicola said the Parkway wells had been tainted by other chemicals, not just SAN trimer and trichloroethylene, Nicholls countered that those detections were at very low levels and were irrelevant because carbon filters were removing them. Genicola was not finished, however. He also told Gillick that low levels of trimer had infiltrated two other Parkway wells, which were not being filtered and were important supply wells for the town.
A few months later, chagrined state officials had to admit Genicola was right again. The problem, as always, was that United Water could not keep up with peak demand. In July of 1998, during a heat wave, the water company pumped its Parkway wells more heavily than usual and pulled in the Reich Farm plume. The detections of trichloroethylene and SAN trimer were very low, less than one part per billion, but they were there.14 When the state declined to order the water company to filter the newly tainted wells, Gillick got Senator Frank Lautenberg to come to town and demand the filters. “Something is terribly wrong in Toms River,” he declared as he stood beside the new cancer memorial at Riverfront Landing Park. Governor Whitman quickly capitulated, ordering carbon filters for the two additional wells. This time, Union Carbide refused to pay to remove chemicals at such low concentrations; taxpayers picked up the tab: $1.5 million.
With the addition of the new filters, the last known traces of the Reich Farm pollution plume finally vanished from the water consumed by the people of Toms River. Since at least 1982, Union Carbide’s waste had infiltrated the Parkway wells, but the chemical composition of the tainted water was still largely a mystery. Only two specific contaminants had been confirmed: the solvent trichloroethylene and the plastic byproduct SAN trimer. Floyd Genicola had some ideas about what else might be in the water, but no one was listening to him, and everyone else had stopped looking.
In its final report, the state “TIC Committee” concluded there were 261 distinct but unknown compounds in the prefiltered Parkway water samples, 122 of which were not related to SAN trimer. “The information contained herein,” the report stated, “is meant to provide a starting point for further analysis should such analysis be deemed important to the investigation.”15 But there would be no more analyses of the Parkway water, even though there was much more that could have been done. Genicola had pushed for a cumulative risk assessment of all of the TICs to see whether the mixture of low-level compounds posed a collective hazard, but the Department of Environmental Protection nixed the idea. Understanding the toxicity of SAN trimer would be hard enough without also trying to assess the com
bined impact of more than one hundred other chemicals at low levels.
The DEP’s decision shifted the Toms River studies even farther away from the complicated reality of the town’s environment. Later, even a consultant for Union Carbide would regard that as a mistake. “We really should be looking at the total of all that stuff, as well as at the individual contaminants. If you add them all up, the sum total is more than one part per million, which is not a low level,” said Jon Sykes, an engineer at the University of Waterloo who mapped the Reich Farm plume for Union Carbide. “You just look at it and you say, ‘My God, there’s a lot of crap in that water.’ ” But the State of New Jersey was unwilling to keep looking. As a result, the scientific case that polluted groundwater had contributed to the cluster would rest almost entirely on just one compound: styrene acrylonitrile trimer. There was trichloroethylene too, but TCE concentrations in Toms River water were rarely over the safety limit of one part per billion after 1998. For SAN trimer, though, there was no established limit because no one had ever tried to assess its toxicity. Much would be riding on the question of how hazardous SAN trimer really was, but testing to find out was only just getting under way.
Floyd Genicola, the perennial outsider, soon gave up trying to force his way back into the investigation. In 1999, he moved to a different section of the DEP and then to the state health department, where he focused on food safety and antiterrorism and tried to forget about Toms River. He even put aside his unfinished doctoral thesis about the unmasking of SAN trimer, although years later (after he retired in 2012) he began working on it again, warily. He would always be proud of his crucial role in spurring the Toms River study, but he also believed it badly damaged his career in state government. “There are a lot of painful memories with Toms River,” Genicola said. “My stomach still turns.”