Toms River (11 page)

Facing something new and deeply disconcerting—public criticism—company managers decided, for the first time, to acknowledge publicly what had been obvious for years to anyone in town with a working sense of smell: Toms River Chemical had fouled the iconic river that lent its name to the town and the company. This time, there were no absurd claims that the factory’s effluent had somehow improved the quality of the river water. Instead, the general manager of the factory (by now it was a Swiss national named Robert Sponagel) acknowledged that “at times our wastes add color and medicinal odors” to the river. He said that the company was considering building a “chemical recovery plant” to reduce its pollution but made no promises that it would eliminate odors and discoloration. Reminding reporters of the company’s annual payroll of $8 million (about $56 million in today’s dollars), Sponagel added, “If the responsible people of this area want a prosperous community with continuing growth, we must realize there will be changes in our natural surroundings. Very few of us are willing to live like the Indians, in spite of our idyllic dreams.”
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Many in Toms River seemed inclined to agree with him. Only the old-timers remembered when the river was clean and the fishing abundant,
but they also remembered when land was all but worthless and the moribund local economy subsisted on egg farming and a few summer beachgoers from Philadelphia. Now land prices were soaring, and the economy was expanding almost as rapidly as Toms River Chemical’s workforce, which by 1964 was nearly twelve hundred strong. Certainly the State of New Jersey showed no inclination to spoil the party. State officials not only failed to enforce the terms of their own discharge permits (which banned “detectable odors,” among many other ignored provisions), they actively advised Toms River Chemical on how to stymie its critics—encouraging the company to adopt a policy of “complete silence” because its news releases “are only agitating people and supplying them with information.”
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A senior state environmental official, Robert Shaw, gave voice to the state’s overall attitude in a frank newspaper interview in 1963: “If anyone believes that New Jersey will remain what it was years ago, whether in regard to population, open spaces or streams or any other environmental factor, he fails to appreciate what’s going on in New Jersey.”
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Ciba, Geigy, and Sandoz understood what was going on in New Jersey. Their investment in Toms River Chemical was paying off, and they saw no reason to tamper with a good thing. America’s love affair with bright colors—a passion with cultural antecedents stretching all the way back to Heracles’ mythic discovery of Tyrian Purple on the Levantine shore—was in full swoon. Back in 1960, Toms River Chemical sold slightly more than a million dollars’ worth of dyes and other products per month. By 1964, monthly sales had topped four million dollars, and production was also at a record level: more than five million pounds per month. Toms River Chemical was now the second-largest producer of epoxy resins in the United States and the fifth-largest dye maker.

As for the consequences of this frenetic growth, Jim Crane described them in a confidential memo to Robert Sponagel and other senior managers in 1965.
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Effluent from the plant, he wrote, was coloring the river water for eight miles downstream. Azo compounds and nitrobenzene could be measured in the water and in bottom mud all the way to Barnegat Bay. Yet there was no sign that Toms River
Chemical was changing its practices. The “chemical recovery plant” Sponagel had discussed back in 1963 still did not exist; the company was still handling its solid and liquid wastes in essentially the same primitive fashion it had chosen when the plant opened in 1952. The only significant changes were that the wastes were more toxic now due to the addition of azos and resins to the product stream, and the volume had more than tripled.

From a business perspective, the company’s unwillingness to take action to curb its pollution made sense. Almost any step Toms River Chemical could have taken to reduce its discharges would have cut directly into its profits. Building an entirely new waste-handling system, one that would cost millions of dollars in capital and yearly operating costs, would have required shutting down the plant for months. To the Swiss, that was unthinkable. Their resistance to any shutdown stiffened after a brief strike at the plant in October of 1964 cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost production. Even smaller cleanup actions that might have saved the company money in the long run were given low priority out of fear that they would slow the manufacturing process. Jim Crane tried unsuccessfully for years to convince supervisors to recapture and reuse expensive and very hazardous production chemicals like epichlorohydrin and nitrobenzene; instead, thousands of pounds of those chemicals every day were spilled or dumped into factory drains that led to the lagoons and eventually the river.
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But Crane did not strike out completely in his pleas for Toms River Chemical to do something,
anything
, to clean up the river. Starting in early 1964, he and others in the company began pushing an audacious idea that promised to eliminate the factory’s river pollution problems—the visible ones, anyway—in one fell swoop. If it worked, Toms River Chemical would no longer have to deal with angry fishermen or disgruntled neighbors; their complaints of tinted, smelly river water and dead or strange-tasting fish would go away virtually overnight. Best of all, from the company’s point of view, this new idea was a bargain, which is why Robert Sponagel and his bosses in Basel were willing to consider it. In their eyes, it was a much better option than the only realistic alternative, which was to build an activated sludge
treatment plant that would have cost at least $2.5 million plus another $250,000 a year in operating costs and—most importantly—would have required closing down the factory for weeks or months.
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Their big idea was to bypass the river by building a ten-mile pipeline to carry all of Toms River Chemical’s wastewater—about five million gallons per day and growing—to the Atlantic Ocean. The pipe would cost almost $4 million, but the operating costs afterward would be minimal. Most importantly, the company would not have to suspend production or provide any additional treatment to its effluent, which could remain just as toxic, smelly, and tinted as ever. Sponagel was so enthusiastic about this bold idea that he proposed the pipeline be wide enough (at twenty-eight inches) to handle as much as fifteen million gallons per day—leaving plenty of room for Toms River Chemical to ramp up its own discharges or sell excess capacity to other companies in search of a hassle-free dumping ground.

By today’s standards, dumping minimally treated waste into the coastal ocean seems inconceivable, but it was not at all an outlandish idea in 1965. Many cities around the world, including a half-dozen in northern New Jersey, had been discharging poorly treated sewage into the ocean for years (a few still are today, though typically only after providing higher-level treatment).
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Even in the 1960s, however, it was rare in the United States for private companies to use ocean outfalls, and the few that did were usually grandfathered by government approvals granted years earlier. Securing permission to build a new one might not be easy.

Executives from Toms River Chemical did not need to worry about their immediate neighbors. Support in Toms River was as reliable as ever, and town officials loved the idea of shifting the pollution elsewhere. But the reception was very different in the beach communities out on the Barnegat Peninsula, where local leaders were livid at the prospect of an industrial waste dump just a half-mile offshore. They were not at all mollified by tests, undertaken by Toms River Chemical, that concluded that the color and odor would be sufficiently diluted to be invisible to beachgoers.

The ever-complaisant New Jersey State Department of Health, which had always given the Swiss whatever they wanted, green-lighted
the ocean pipeline in the fall of 1964, leaving only the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the final hurdle. The beach communities appealed to the region’s new congressman, James Howard, a Democrat who had little love for the Republican bosses who played golf with Toms River Chemical executives at the company-owned Toms River Country Club. Howard convinced the Army Corps of Engineers to delay issuing the permit while the U.S. Public Health Service studied a long list of environmental concerns, including possible impacts on clams and other marine life. The wrangling held up the project for months and continued into the blistering summer of 1965 with no sign of resolution.

As the river fell and the stench worsened during that summer of high heat and record low rainfall, Toms River Chemical’s problems escalated. In July, Philip Maimone, the Cadillac dealer who owned more than six hundred acres downstream from the factory outfall, sued the company for dumping “poisonous and deleterious effluents” into the river.
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A week later, responding to reports of another fish kill in the river, an inspector from the state Division of Fish and Game visited a site five miles downstream and saw thousands of fish, crabs, and eels “dead, dying or in distress.” The inspector, Bruce Pyle, noted that the fish had died from lack of oxygen and that Toms River Chemical is the “principal source of oxygen depleting matter in the river.” Ever since its first inspection in 1961, the state agency had been warning Toms River Chemical to correct the problem. Now, Pyle wrote his supervisor, it was time to prosecute the company, finally, for destroying fish habitat. It would be an easy case to prove, he predicted.
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After fifteen years of operating with impunity, Toms River Chemical was now besieged on multiple fronts.
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Yet the situation did not appear to be anything the company could not handle. Relatively few people in town were paying close attention to the issue; a much bigger controversy in the local papers during that long, hot summer was whether flying the United Nations flag at town hall was a gesture of international cooperation or “evidence of communist conspiracy,” as one newspaper article put it.
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Toms River Chemical was still the economic colossus of Ocean County, the engine of the region’s headlong growth. The company had powerful friends, a huge payroll, and a
multimillion-dollar revenue stream. It seemed more than a match for Philip Maimone and the New Jersey Division of Fish and Game.

And then Jim Crane smelled chemicals in his shower, and suddenly the company had bigger problems than dead fish and an angry Cadillac salesman.

The idea that dangerous compounds in the environment might harm innocent bystanders, and not just industrial workers, was slow to take hold. Paracelsus recognized that nearby residents could be affected by emissions from workshops and mines, and so did Bernardino Ramazzini, but they focused their investigations on work-related illnesses because they reasoned, correctly, that most people are exposed to poisonous substances at much higher concentrations and for much longer periods at their workplaces than at their homes. There were sporadic attempts to investigate disease patterns outside of the workplace, but they were rare. In 1761, fourteen years before Percivall Pott published his observations about scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps, another London physician, John Hill, published his
Cautions Against the Immoderate Use of Snuff
, in which he described two patients with nasal cancer and speculated that users of tobacco snuff were vulnerable to the disease.

But how could Hill know what had really caused those nasal tumors? How could Pott know? How could
anyone
know? Answering those questions in a workplace setting was extremely difficult; in a residential setting, it was close to impossible. In a neighborhood, where exposures to harmful substances tended to be much lower, how could any investigator ever hope to credibly identify a specific cause, especially for a disease like cancer that took years to develop? Trying to determine the environmental trigger of a slow-developing disease was like trying to identify a criminal based on a smudged fingerprint left at the scene of a crime: It required a subjective interpretation of an indistinct impression left behind long after the perpetrator had fled. The neurological ailments Ramazzini observed in glass workers in Venice, for instance, often took many years to develop and could have been caused by exposure to lead, arsenic, antimony, or mercury (the artisans worked with all four metals) or something else entirely.

This was the central dilemma of epidemiology, a term coined in the mid-nineteenth century for the study of factors influencing health and disease across populations.
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Identifying an exposure that appeared to increase the risk of disease in a particular population—whether neuropathy among Venetian artisans or bladder cancer among German dye workers—was interesting and perhaps useful, but what did it prove? It did not prove that the chemical caused any particular case of the disease, since there were probably other potential causes, too. It did not even prove that the apparent link between chemical and disease was important and not a coincidental distraction from the still-hidden true cause. It did not
prove
anything at all. This inherent uncertainty would take on extra significance as the age of industrial chemistry dawned. With the rise of large-scale manufacturing, the outcomes of environmental health debates could affect the economies of entire nations.

As factories sprouted across England in the early nineteenth century, the successors to Ramazzini and Pott continued to look for connections between cancer and pollutants, focusing almost always on the workplace. One of the most notable of these medical detectives was a London physician named John Ayrton Paris, a skilled mineralogist and prolific writer whose eclectic interests included applying medical evidence to legal disputes and using toys (everything from shuttlecocks to soap bubbles) to teach children the principles of science. From 1813 to 1817, soon after completing his medical training, Paris moved from London to the Cornish harbor town of Penzance, where his patients included laborers in the small copper- and tin-smelting workshops of Cornwall. He took the time to inspect those small factories in person, as Ramazzini had advised more than a century earlier, and noticed that on nearby farms “horses and cows commonly lose their hoofs, and the latter are often to be seen in the neighboring pastures crawling on their knees and not unfrequently suffering from a cancerous affection in their rumps.” Paris blamed the “pernicious influence of arsenical fumes” from the factories, and thought there were human casualties as well. “It deserves notice that the smelters are occasionally affected with a cancerous disease in the
scrotum, similar to that which infests chimney-sweepers,” he wrote in 1822.
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