Toms River (19 page)

For the people of Pleasant Plains, 1974 was a bewildering year. Accustomed to getting their water for free from their own backyards, they were told they would have to abandon their wells and start paying monthly bills to Toms River Water. Many simply refused, defying the town and state. Others, especially if they could actually smell the chemicals in their tap water, made the switch but spent the rest of their lives wondering whether they had been poisoned in 1974. “All of our wells were contaminated, and we did drink it for a period of time until we got city water,” recalled William Hyres, whose auto body shop was about two thousand feet from Reich Farm. “Did anyone get sick because of it? I don’t know. It did stain our clothes, I know that.”

The county and town health departments made a halfhearted attempt to find out whether an unusual number of people had gotten sick in Pleasant Plains that summer, but it was quickly dropped. In June, just after news of the contamination appeared in the local newspapers, the county health department conducted a cursory health survey, questioning twenty-three randomly selected families in Pleasant Plains. Fifteen reported at least one recent illness involving the kidneys, stomach, liver, or gallbladder, but that group included several whose water was unaffected; meanwhile, some other families known to have consumed tainted water reported no illness at all. Since there was no obvious correlation, the county dropped the investigation without any follow-up to look for longer-term health problems. “We didn’t have the expertise to do it, and I had almost no staff at all at that point,” Chuck Kauffman explained many years later. At the time of the Pleasant Plains contamination, Kauffman was still new on the job, having been appointed the county’s first health coordinator in 1973.

Twenty-five years later, when the entire town was in an uproar over cancer and pollution and a multimillion-dollar health study was under way to examine links to tainted water, no one ever tried to look back at what had happened to the residents of Pleasant Plains, despite the well-documented contamination there. Informally, the talk of illnesses would persist for years. At the butcher shop, Ernest Nagel’s father, also named Ernest, died of leukemia in 1976. The senior Nagel had drunk copious amounts of water from a shallow well behind the
shop—and kept doing so even after it started to smell in 1974. The following year, the Nagels joined a class-action suit against Union Carbide that was eventually settled out of court with modest payments from the company—barely enough to repay residents for the expense of connecting to public water mains. “The lawyer said there was nothing else we could do,” Nagel said, “so the whole thing was just dropped.”

Elsewhere in Toms River, the tribulations of Pleasant Plains provoked sympathy but very little anxiety. The articles on the topic that appeared in the local papers during the summer of 1974 invariably described the contamination as a localized problem, one that would go away as soon as the neighborhood was linked up to the Toms River Water Company’s distribution system. The subtext could not have been clearer: Backyard wells were dangerous; city water was safe. The news stories avoided the awkward fact that six of Toms River Water’s newest and most important supply wells—three of them just 125 feet deep—were only one mile south of Reich Farm and therefore in the path of the contamination plume as it crept southward from the illegal dump. Nor was there any talk about how the speed and direction of that underground plume might be influenced by another uncomfortable fact: Those six new public wells in the Parkway well field were running at full capacity, sucking in more than two million gallons of groundwater every day, as the Toms River Water Company labored to keep up with burgeoning demand.

In truth, there was already reason to worry. In June of 1974, Union Carbide tested a water sample from one of the Parkway wells and found petrochemical concentrations of between three and ten parts per million—at least four times higher than the state’s informal guideline of no more than 700 parts per billion. The state Department of Environmental Protection then did its own tests and found solvents in four Parkway wells, though at lower levels. The highest detection the DEP found was forty-two parts per billion, which was about sixteen times less than the state’s guideline of that era but still more than eight times higher than today’s health standard.
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There was something in the Parkway wells, but exactly what it was and where it came from was anyone’s guess. The typical state testing
protocols of the time were only sensitive enough to indicate broad groupings like “petrochemicals,” “phenols,” or “organic compounds.” “The tests that we had back then were very primitive,” recalled Herb Roeschke, who became the town’s first full-time health director in 1978. “We could not look for very specific compounds or lower concentrations.” Many years later, hydrologists would guess that the chemicals found in Parkway wells in 1974 were almost certainly industrial solvents, but that was still not proof that they had come from Reich Farm. Solvents like trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, and benzene—all now classified as known or likely carcinogens—were important components of the chemical waste Nick Fernicola had dumped at Reich Farm in 1971, but they were also used by gas stations, machine shops, and dry cleaners, among other places. Those solvents could have come from almost anywhere; Reich Farm, almost a mile away, was only one possibility.

No matter where they came from, solvents were showing up in one of the town’s most heavily used wells, and that worried Chuck Kauffman at the county health department. He asked the DEP to order Toms River Water to install a carbon filtration system on the Parkway well where the contamination levels were highest. But the water company balked at the half-million-dollar cost, and the state—fatefully, it would turn out—did not insist. There is no record that anyone ever proposed shutting down the well or using less water or paying for sophisticated testing that could have identified specific pollutants even at low levels. Nor did anyone inform the thousands of Toms River Water customers who got their drinking water from the well. In 1974, the water company was still being touted as the savior of Pleasant Plains—its mains were being extended into the beleaguered neighborhood—not as a fellow victim of Fernicola’s dumping.

The news that a public well was tainted finally broke in January of 1975, when an article in the
Asbury Park Press
disclosed the test results from the previous summer. The DEP and the water company moved quickly to discredit the story.
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In a follow-up article, a top DEP official dismissed any concern: “We sure wouldn’t let people drink anything that would be dangerous,” he said.
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Local officials did not challenge him; in fact, they seemed eager to forget about the
whole thing. In pollution matters, they had a very long tradition of deferring to Toms River Water and Toms River Chemical. “You have to remember that except for the people at Ciba, no one in Ocean County had any knowledge that these kinds of chemicals moved through soils,” recalled Kauffman, the county health coordinator. Before Kauffman’s arrival in 1973, in fact, there were no full-time county health officials. There were town health inspectors, but just barely. Many Ocean County towns did not bother to do inspections at all; the Toms River inspector had a high school education and spent most of his time looking at plumbing. Kauffman’s background was in agriculture: He had been an egg farmer before getting licensed as a sanitary inspector.

The Toms River Water Company was essentially left to police itself—and its focus, as always, was on meeting the water demands of the fast-growing town. As the pollution spread south from Reich Farm, the water company’s officers did not waver in their public assertions that there was nothing to worry about. The company’s laissez-faire attitude did not change even after phenols were discovered in the spring of 1976 in thirteen more backyard wells—this time a full mile south of Reich Farm and just a few hundred feet west of the Parkway well field, at levels as high as six parts per million. By now everyone knew the drill: The thirteen wells were ordered closed, and the National Guard dispatched a water truck to the area (filled with water from the Parkway wells), while water mains were extended to serve the two affected streets. Was Reich Farm, a mile to the north, to blame for the newly discovered contamination? There was no proof, insisted the state and the water company. Was it finally time to add carbon filters to the Parkway wells, which were just a few hundred feet from the newly discovered contamination? No, that would not be necessary; continued monitoring was sufficient.

Whatever had happened in Pleasant Plains was over, as far as the guardians of Toms River’s water were concerned. The state DEP, which had sued Union Carbide and Nick Fernicola in late 1975, quietly settled the case in 1977. Union Carbide agreed to pay $60,000 to reimburse the state for its groundwater testing costs. Fernicola agreed to pay just $100 and stay out of the chemical waste business for good.
In return for the minuscule payments, the state dropped its pollution charges against both without requiring either Fernicola or Union Carbide to admit guilt.

No one had done anything illegal, and there was nothing to worry about. The water was perfectly safe.

During the first trimester of Linda Gillick’s pregnancy in the summer of 1978, the Parkway wells were the source of 25 to 50 percent of the drinking water the Toms River Water Company pumped to her neighborhood, which was known as Brookside Heights. Another 10 to 25 percent of the neighborhood’s water came from the Holly Street wells, which were still being used ten years after the Toms River Chemical Corporation had secretly contaminated them. Other neighborhoods in Toms River, especially in the more northerly parts of town, got at least 90 percent of their water from the Parkway wells, while some of the areas to the south got almost all their water from Holly Street. The Gillicks lived near the geographic center of Toms River, so their water was a mixture of many sources, with the Parkway and Holly well fields supplying the lion’s share. Linda Gillick, of course, did not know any of this at the time. No one knew, including the water company, which operated the interconnected system without knowing which wells supplied which neighborhoods. Those facts would not be established for another quarter-century, and even then, no one would be sure what any of it really meant.

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, unless they were unlucky enough to live in Pleasant Plains and to rely on a backyard well, few people in Toms River knew or cared where their drinking water came from. They turned on the tap, and it was there. Certainly Linda Gillick’s concerns lay elsewhere. The health of her youngest child was the focus of her life, and when Linda Gillick focused, she was like a magnifying glass on a sunny day. A fierce, formidable protector of Michael’s interests, she knew more about the intricacies of his condition than most of the doctors and nurses who treated him, and she was not reluctant to say so. She also made a point of trying to bring as much pleasure as she could into the lives of both of her sons. When the local papers started publishing stories about Michael, she became savvy
about how reporters did their work—a skill that would later be crucial. By encouraging or at least tolerating publicity, she discovered, she could be an example to other families while also making it possible for Michael to have some unique experiences. The Gillicks got to visit Yankee Stadium, where Reggie Jackson gave Michael one of his bats, and then Giants Stadium, where Michael pretended to lift weights with star running back Joe Morris. They even got to watch the Giants win their first Super Bowl in 1986, meeting actor Michael J. Fox there and attending the victory party, where the thrilled Michael Gillick, a devoted Giants fan, was “passed around like a human football from one player to another,” his mother later wrote.
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For Michael, it was a twilight existence. Smart and observant, despite impaired vision, Michael knew how other people reacted to his appearance and was acutely aware that he was chubby and half the size of most children his age. Too weak for school, he was tutored at home. Most of the kids he knew were fellow patients he met during hospital stays. Many had died, and the ones who recovered often did not want to be reminded of their ordeal by staying friends with Michael. Some of his closest relationships were with adult celebrities like Michael J. Fox and local lawyer John F. Russo, who had arranged the Super Bowl trip shortly after being elected president of the New Jersey State Senate. For as long as Michael could remember, death had been omnipresent. “When I was very young, my mom gave it to me straight,” he remembered years later. “She said there was a battle going on inside my body, and she didn’t know who was going to win.” Sometimes he wondered what it would feel like to stop fighting. Once, at age eight, in the midst of another dire health crisis, he had what he later described as an out-of-body experience. Looking down on his hospital bed from above, he saw his mother weeping inconsolably. “When I saw that, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go,” he remembered.

Michael Gillick was not the only beneficiary of his mother’s devotion. The long days and nights in pediatric oncology wards left plenty of time to get to know other families, and Linda Gillick, unlike her reserved husband, was a born talker. She did not wait in hospital waiting rooms, she
occupied
them—filling every square foot of fluorescent-lit space with nonstop conversation. By the time Michael was five, she
had had heart-to-heart talks with dozens of parents waiting to find out whether their children would survive another medical crisis. She learned more about childhood cancer than she ever thought she would. Besides neuroblastoma, there was Wilms’ tumor, which struck kidney cells, and astrocytoma, which began in the brain. There was osteosarcoma in bones and Hodgkin’s disease and lymphoma in white blood cells. And seemingly everywhere was acute lymphocytic leukemia, which began in bone marrow and was responsible for about one in four cases of pediatric cancer, far more than any other type. There were so many sick children, so many frightened parents. They deserved the same support she was giving Michael, Linda Gillick decided. She took a job at a local cancer charity and threw herself into the task of raising funds to support research and assist stricken families.