Toms River (12 page)

But Paris, as an expert on court proceedings, well understood the weakness of an argument that relied on vague characterizations like “occasionally” and “not unfrequently” in an era in which industrial production was beginning to generate great wealth. What was needed was a much stronger standard of proof, one rooted in the solid ground of mathematics. Two Frenchmen played key roles in providing it.
¹⁹
The first was Pierre Louis, who published a study in 1835 that proved what he and many other physicians had long suspected: Bloodletting, a mainstay of humoral medicine since ancient Greece, did not work. He reached this revolutionary conclusion by going beyond the anecdotal evidence of individual cases and instead applying what he called “numerical medicine.” Louis analyzed 174 patients with pneumonia or related conditions and discovered that no matter when leeches were employed—early in the progression of the disease or late—they had no impact on whether or when a patient recovered. Bloodletting may have
seemed
to be the critical factor, but in fact it was irrelevant or harmful, as Louis showed.

Louis’s work not only helped hasten the long-overdue demise of humorism—by 1837, just seven thousand leeches were imported into the city of Paris, down from thirty-three million ten years earlier—it also helped lay the groundwork for modern observational epidemiology. In order to find out whether a treatment was really healing an illness, or if a pollutant was really causing it, an investigator would have to come up with an experimental design that could eliminate alternative explanations. Anecdotal observations, like those of Percivall Pott or John Ayrton Paris, were not enough.

Another Frenchman who made a key contribution was Siméon Denis Poisson, a mathematician whose 1837 study of Parisian jury verdicts became a cornerstone of modern statistical analysis. His ideas were an extension of the “law of large numbers”—namely, that the outcome of any particular random event cannot be predicted with confidence, but if you repeat the event enough times under the same conditions, and if there are only a certain number of possible outcomes,
then the aggregate results can be predicted very accurately. Predicting the outcome of a single flip of a fair coin, for example, requires a guess that will be wrong half the time. But if you predict that “heads” will turn up 50 percent of the time and then flip a coin one hundred times, your prediction is very likely to be accurate, plus or minus a few percent. If you make two hundred flips, the results will be even closer to 50 percent. In fact, the more times you flip the coin, the more accurate your initial prediction of 50 percent will be.

Siméon Poisson extended this very simple concept to circumstances in which an event occurs rarely despite many opportunities. (Traffic accidents, for example: The likelihood that someone will be in an accident on any particular day is very low, yet many accidents occur every day because so many people drive cars.) Poisson discovered that if the overall number of events is sufficiently large, it is possible to predict the “normal” or random distribution not just of coin flips but also of unusual events such as carriage accidents, deadlocked juries, or rare diseases. This “Poisson distribution” would eventually become a huge breakthrough for epidemiology, although its value would not be widely recognized until much later. Using his formulas and those of his successors, a statistician could analyze what appeared to be an unusual number of cases of a disease in a particular place and time—say, bladder tumors in workers at an aniline dye plant—and determine the likelihood that the apparent cluster was not a mere chance occurrence but instead was a true cluster for which there might be a specific environmental cause.

There was a catch to Poisson’s insight, however: A disease cluster could be confidently declared to be nonrandom only if there were a sufficiently large number of cases available to establish the “normal” random distribution. That was a formidable hurdle when rare cancers were at issue because predictions based on the law of large numbers were more like guesses when only a few cases could be included in the analysis. There was also the confounding issue of latency: As Percivall Pott recognized in his study of chimney sweeps, many years could pass between a triggering event and the appearance of a tumor large enough to be diagnosed. How would it ever be possible to identify, with high confidence, a culprit that did its nefarious work years
earlier? As Pierre Louis had pointed out, a causal agent could be confirmed only after the elimination of reasonable alternative explanations. Which specific component of the “arsenical vapours” identified by John Ayrton Paris had sickened those factory workers in Cornwall? Or did something else entirely make them sick? Or was the apparent disease cluster just a coincidence, as Poisson’s random distribution might suggest, were there enough cases to apply it?

To identify definitively the cause of a disease based on an observed pattern of cases, practitioners of the new “numerical medicine” of Louis and Poisson would not only have to undertake an analysis that eliminated alternative causes, they would also have demonstrate that the apparent pattern was not a coincidence. Those were formidable hurdles, especially if the disease at issue was rare and progressed slowly, as with most cancers. For all its advances in mathematical technique, the rise of statistical epidemiology had the unintended effect of making it harder than ever to investigate patterns of cancer cases in places like Toms River. It also gave medical investigators powerful new reasons to turn their attention away from cancer and to focus instead on fast-moving infectious diseases. Soon they would do so, with spectacular results.

Jim Crane’s discovery that hazardous waste from Toms River Chemical had contaminated the town’s public water supply set off a crisis—but one that was kept secret from the people who drank that water.
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By mid-August of 1965 the Toms River Water Company knew that azo dye wastes had contaminated three shallow wells (they were about seventy feet deep) that supplied drinking water to almost all of the seven thousand homes and businesses in town that were water company customers. Yet there were no public warnings, no newspaper articles. Life in Toms River continued as usual except for the unfortunate fact that the weather was so uncomfortably hot and dry that residents drank even more water than usual, even if it sometimes smelled. Just two entities knew what was really happening, and they were old friends used to working together closely and sometimes secretly: the Toms River Water Company and the Toms River Chemical Corporation.

For years, chemists at Toms River Chemical had assisted the water company in analyzing the quality of the town’s drinking water supply, since the expertise of the Swiss-trained chemists far outstripped that of anyone at the little water company, which was struggling to meet the soaring demand. In ten years, its customer base had quadrupled. On hot days, Toms River Water was pumping more than two million gallons from its four wells, three of which were on Holly Street near the river.

Even before Jim Crane smelled chemicals in the shower, water company officials knew something was wrong with at least one of the three Holly wells. According to an internal Toms River Water report dated March 23, 1965, water in one well had such a strong odor and was so visibly contaminated with what the report described as “trade wastes (dye)” that the water company had started adding very large doses of chlorine (so large as to be unsafe by modern standards) to reduce the color.
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The dry summer made the situation even worse. Pumping rates rose with the increased summertime demand, as usual, but there was no rain to recharge the underground aquifer. Instead, the Holly wells sucked up more of the polluted river water, which is why, by July, Crane could smell dye wastes in the tap at his Oak Ridge home. He and his staff responded quickly, collecting and testing samples from several water lines in the neighborhood and then, with the water company’s permission, testing the Holly wells.

Two weeks later, in mid-August, Toms River Chemical was ready to tell the water company what its chemists had found: dye chemicals, almost everywhere they looked.
²²
Analytical methods were primitive in 1965, but Ciba had been working with aniline dyes for almost a century; its chemists knew how to spot aniline-like molecules in water, even if they could not always distinguish between similar molecules. In addition to aniline, whose toxicity had been obvious since the industrial poisonings of the 1870s, these similar-looking molecules included benzidine, which had already been implicated as a cause of bladder cancer, and nitrobenzene, the highly toxic “bloodstream” of the vat dye operation. As they tried to determine dye concentrations in the town’s drinking water supply, company chemists devised an
overall measurement for what they called “diazotizable amines” because they were components of azo production.

The contamination, the chemists discovered, was severe. Levels of diazotizable amines in the town’s wells and water pipes ranged from five to seventy parts per billion, and later as high as 160 parts per billion. In the 1960s, there were no specific limits for any of those chemicals in drinking water; they were too obscure and difficult to analyze. But by today’s standards, the concentrations were alarming. For benzidine, for example, current Environmental Protection Agency guidelines call for no more than one part per
trillion
in drinking water—five thousand times less than the lowest concentration of aromatic amines found in Toms River water in 1965.
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There was only one way dye wastes could have reached the water supply. The Toms River Chemical Corporation must have discharged them into the river, and the three shallow riverside wells operated by the Toms River Water Company on Holly Street, more than two miles downstream, must have then sucked in the contaminated water, pulling it through the sandy riverbank and into the wells and eventually pumping it to the kitchen taps of seven thousand unsuspecting customers all over town.

Within a couple of weeks, the chemists from Toms River Chemical had figured out what had happened and explained it to the water company—in secret, of course. Toms River Water could have responded by shutting down the wells, but did not. August was a time of intense water demand, thanks to the influx of summer tourists, and that August was the driest on record. Toms River was growing frenetically, and having a verdant lawn was part of the new ethos of a town in which appearance and property values meant everything.
²⁴
There was no way to shut down the Holly Street wells during the summer without having to explain exactly why customers would suddenly have to make do with less than half the water supply they were used to. The water company and the chemical company would also have to face uncomfortable questions about how long the people of Toms River had been sipping toxic chemicals in their morning tea, and why the companies had done nothing to stop it earlier.

The wells stayed open, continuing to operate at their maximum capacity, and the people of Toms River kept unknowingly drinking tainted water. The water company did add filters to its Holly Street pumping station, and Toms River Chemical took the unprecedented step of reducing production over the Labor Day weekend, when demand for drinking water was high and the river was full of fishermen. Both stopgap measures were soon abandoned, however. The factory went back to full-scale production, and Toms River Water stopped using the filters after tests at Toms River Chemical showed that they weren’t working: concentrations of diazotizable amines were as high as ever. In October, the water company finally, and quietly, shut down two of the Holly Street wells. By then, the weather had cooled and demand had declined enough that no one would notice the drop in water pressure. Even so, Toms River Water had to keep one of the Holly wells open—the one in which the amine concentrations were lowest. Again, water users were told nothing.

Toms River Chemical and Toms River Water had managed to keep their secret in 1965, but the summer of 1966 would pose a bigger challenge. They would have to worry about keeping odors down and water flowing for an entire summer, not just in August. As the two companies worked in secret to devise a solution, a long-awaited gift arrived from Washington, D.C.: A construction permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for Toms River Chemical’s pipeline to the sea. The permit came with several conditions, including a requirement that the inside and outside of the twenty eight-inch steel pipeline be lined with a thick enamel made from coal tar—an ironic choice, considering that most of the contaminants the pipe would carry were also derived from coal tar. (The liner was supposed to be leak-proof, though subsequent events would demonstrate the folly of that assumption.)

With the permit in hand, Toms River Chemical moved quickly. By January of 1966, it had beaten back a legal challenge from the shore communities, selected a contractor, and bought ten miles of piping for the project. By March, construction was under way. Meanwhile, lawyers and managers for Toms River Chemical and Toms River Water were secretly negotiating a plan to get through the summer
without water customers finding out that they had been drinking dye wastes.
²⁵
Here, they were fortunate again. Tests at Toms River Chemical showed that adding chlorine dioxide to the drinking water improved its smell and taste and reduced the diazotizable amines from 100 parts per billion to about 20 parts per billion—still far higher than would be permitted under a modern standard, but a major improvement. Adding lots of chlorine to the water also made it harder for anyone to smell the contamination. Plus, chlorination was cheap: just $2,000 to set it up, plus $50 a day for salt. Toms River Chemical readily agreed to cover the expense as long as it could reimburse the water company in secret and without admitting fault.
²⁶

Their luck held. The summer of 1966 was cooler and wetter than the previous years, and the chlorination treatment worked well enough that there was no outcry over smelly drinking water. On July 11, the ocean pipeline began operating, having overcome a series of glitches, including an incident in May in which a large section of pipe came loose from its moorings and bobbed to the surface of Barnegat Bay.