A small community in New Jersey had a large proportion of
cancer sufferers. Could the chemical plant in town have
anything to do with it? This is the true story of a town
that took on big business in a situation where there were
never going to be any winners.
Coal tar, a toxin, is used in making dyes, paint,
detergent, adhesives and other items. As long ago as 1846
the Swiss authorities found a factory owner guilty of gross
negligence in poisoning neighbouring people by dumping
waste full of arsenic into the water system. The great
chemical factories of Switzerland and Germany were built
beside the Rhine River to dispose of waste. By 1910,
bladder cancer in aniline factories was recorded as an
occupational disease.
As American import tariffs were high, the Swiss firms
needed to build factories in the US to gain access to the
market. They built in 1920s Ohio, piping untreated waste
directly into the Cincinnati River though many thousands of
people depended on it for drinking water. The plant became
the biggest manufacturer of DDT insecticide. Industrial
polluters made the river appallingly toxic and by the 1950s
industries were being ordered by the city authorities to
clean up outflow or pay fines. Seeing this coming, Ciba-
Geigy moved to the small town of TOMS RIVER on the Atlantic
coast.
Ciba bought 1,350 forested acres and cleared trees from the
central 35 acres. Here their new plant made dyes around
the clock, from chemicals such as arsenic, nitrobenzene,
toluene, sulphuric acids, lye, mercury and chromium. In
1952 the plant produced four million pounds' weight a year
of dye and eighteen million pounds of hazardous waste.
Solid waste was dumped in the woods. Liquid waste was
dumped into porous sand pits and allowed to drain into the
groundwater. Two miles downstream was the town's water
supply, and many residents had backyard wells. Lawsuits had
already been brought on contaminated groundwater, including
some in New Jersey. But Ciba-Geigy was hiring, in a town
dependent on egg farms, and that was welcome.
The air was so toxic in the production plant that nylon
stockings melted on women's legs. If anyone complained they
were told to be grateful they had a job. In 1960 a building
exploded. Epicholorohydrin and phosgene gas were
concentrated in some production areas. In the 1960s it was
noted that workers at Ciba were coming down with cancer.
But nobody in authority wanted to ask about long-term
health hazards. By 1956 the factory's own drinking wells
were contaminated and a plume of pollution had been found
2,000 feet in all directions from the settlement lagoons.
In 1959 new waste lagoons were opened beside the river,
rubber-stamped by the authorities. Other firms were
treating or safely removing hazardous solid and liquid
wastes by now, but this was expensive, so Ciba dug new
sludge pits and built smokestacks.
The $8 million payroll and booming land prices kept the
plant out of trouble. They decided to remove visible
pollution by piping the waste directly to the ocean in
1964. The State Department of Health was complaisant
despite protests from the shore community of the Barnegat
Peninsula. Meanwhile the town's Cadillac dealer sued the
factory for contaminating the river. The firm bought his
land. A Fish And Game inspector recorded massive fish kills
and blamed it on oxygen-depleting discharges by the plant.
In 1965 the town's drinking water was found to be
contaminated with azines, and the water company hid the
information. With the pipeline open people stopped
complaining about a filthy river. But hazardous waste was
now a cash crop in New Jersey, with farmers paid to allow
dumping, and Ciba-Geigy began accepting hazardous waste
from other firms too.
In 1979 a baby named Michael Gillick was born who swiftly
developed cancer. His Toms River family felt devastated.
The newly-formed Environmental Protection Agency had
prosecuted Ciba successfully in 1972 for polluting at sea,
but the town's water was thought to be clean. A cluster of
childhood cancers made parents think again. In 1984 the
pipeline burst, eroded by its contents. Don Bennet,
reporter at the 'Observer', began an information campaign.
He published state lab results showing that the effluent
was highly mutagenic - causing mutations in DNA; he listed
22 hazardous chemicals in the effluent and 109 used at the
plant. One resident wrote to Greenpeace asking for help. A
banner unfurled on the plant's water tower by activists
while others sampled pipe discharges generated massive
publicity. A lengthy legal and publicity campaign began.
TOMS RIVER by Dan Fagin is excellently informative on a
historical and modern basis, and is a frightening read.
If
you don't feel concerned about the environment, read this
book, and you will. Highly recommended.
“A thrilling journey through the twists and turns of cancer
epidemiology, Toms River is essential
reading for our times. Dan Fagin handles topics of great
complexity with the dexterity of a scholar, the honesty of a
journalist, and the dramatic skill of a
novelist.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., author of the
Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All
Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
The riveting
true story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution,
Toms River melds hard-hitting investigative
reporting, a fascinating scientific detective story, and an
unforgettable cast of characters into a sweeping narrative
in the tradition of A Civil Action, The Emperor of All
Maladies, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks.
One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable
quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting
for a decades-long drama that culminated in 2001 with one of
the largest legal settlements in the annals of toxic
dumping. A town that would rather have been known for its
Little League World Series champions ended up making history
for an entirely different reason: a notorious cluster of
childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and
water pollution. For years, large chemical companies had
been using Toms River as their private dumping ground,
burying tens of thousands of leaky drums in open pits and
discharging billions of gallons of acid-laced wastewater
into the town’s namesake river.
In an astonishing
feat of investigative reporting, prize-winning journalist
Dan Fagin recounts the sixty-year saga of rampant pollution
and inadequate oversight that made Toms River a cautionary
example for fast-growing industrial towns from South Jersey
to South China. He tells the stories of the pioneering
scientists and physicians who first identified pollutants as
a cause of cancer, and brings to life the everyday heroes in
Toms River who struggled for justice: a young boy whose
cherubic smile belied the fast-growing tumors that had
decimated his body from birth; a nurse who fought to bring
the alarming incidence of childhood cancers to the attention
of authorities who didn’t want to listen; and a mother whose
love for her stricken child transformed her into a tenacious
advocate for change.
A gripping human drama rooted in
a centuries-old scientific quest, Toms River is a
tale of dumpers at midnight and deceptions in broad
daylight, of corporate avarice and government neglect, and
of a few brave individuals who refused to keep silent until
the truth was exposed.
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