Toms River (39 page)

The Save Our Ocean Committee celebrated its victory with more rallies on the Lavallette boardwalk, where a plaque in memory of Frank Livelli would be placed after his death in 1995. He lived long enough to see the ocean portion of Ciba-Geigy’s pipeline cut into pieces, towed to deep water, and dropped to the sea bottom—at a spot six miles east of the beachfront mansion where Larry Bathgate’s fundraiser had doomed any hope of keeping it open. As for Bathgate, he never again flew quite so high as he did in the late 1980s. His real estate empire had been partially financed on zero-collateral loans from the First National Bank of Toms River, but the bank—which had grown at breakneck speed to fifty-five branches from its original Main Street location—abruptly failed in 1991. It was the state’s largest-ever bank failure, triggered by more than $300 million in delinquent loans. A few days before it was declared insolvent by federal regulators, the bank sued Bathgate, who was late on more than
$16 million in loan repayments. He would eventually bounce back, but the lawsuit was an embarrassment for President Bush. Bathgate cut back his involvement in Republican politics, resigning as national finance chair in 1992.

After thirty-six years of uninterrupted production, the Toms River factory produced its last batch of dye chemicals at the end of 1988, its last resins in 1990. By then, fewer than three hundred people were working at the vast complex. Some were engaged in tearing down buildings or assisting with cleanup operations, while the rest mixed and tested dyes manufactured elsewhere. Whenever local business leaders would entreat plant manager John Simas to try again to win approval for the pharmaceutical plant, he would curtly refuse. “We’ve had a lot of disappointments,” he told reporters in 1991. “We’re here. We’ll continue to be here. We have to remediate. But I don’t think we’ll operate in a community where we’re not wanted.”
¹⁶

In the spring of 1988, a cylindrical tower appeared at the edge of the Parkway well field, a flash of dull white barely visible through the trees to drivers whipping past on the Garden State Parkway. About twelve feet in diameter and three stories high, the tower was stuffed inside with plastic packing material. It also carried the fervent hopes of the Toms River Water Company, which was counting on the contraption to help it survive the summer without another contamination crisis. It was called a packed tower air stripper, and it cost $350,000.

The technology was simple but effective, which was why similar towers were sprouting at hundreds of other polluted sites around the country. Contaminated water was pumped to the top of the tower and sprayed down onto the plastic packing material. As the droplets dribbled down through the nooks and crannies of the plastic stuffing, a fan at the bottom of the tower blew heated air upward through the material. When the rising hot air met the falling water, highly volatile chemicals in the water evaporated and were expelled into the atmosphere through a vent at the top of the tower. The cleaner water was then pumped out of the bottom of the tower and distributed to customers.

The Toms River Water Company could have dealt with its contamination problem in a much more comprehensive way, instead of relying solely on the air stripper, but that would have been much costlier. It could have abandoned the contaminated Parkway wells and drilled new ones elsewhere, or it could have finally added carbon filters to those wells, a move state and county health officials had first recommended—but had never insisted upon—in the mid-1970s. But the water company desperately needed its Parkway wells, and adding a carbon filtration system would have raised the total cost by several hundred thousand dollars. Besides, the contraption worked. In May, just in time for the start of the peak tourism and lawn-watering seasons, the water company restarted the three tainted wells and pumped their water through the new air stripper before distributing it to customers around town. The process lowered TCE levels from fourteen parts per billion to just one part per billion, New Jersey’s new safety standard. Breathing easier, the water company’s managers resumed their frenzied pumping of the affected wells, pulling more than a million gallons per day out of them that summer.

As far as the EPA was concerned, though, the air stripper was only a temporary fix. If they were maintained properly, air strippers worked well for TCE and other volatile compounds that vaporized easily. But TCE was just one of several dozen chemicals detected in the Reich Farm plume, and some of them did not vaporize so easily. They were what chemists called semi-volatile organic compounds, and air stripping could not remove them from groundwater—only carbon filtration could. Later, that fact would become very important. So the EPA, which in September completed its long-awaited Superfund cleanup plan for Reich Farm, ordered Union Carbide to remove volatile
and
semi-volatile compounds from the groundwater beneath Pleasant Plains and to do so by intercepting the contamination plume before it reached the Parkway wells. The water company’s air stripper, which treated the water only after it had reached the wells and was capable only of removing volatile chemicals, was insufficient, the EPA concluded. A proper groundwater cleanup in Pleasant Plains, the agency estimated, would take eleven years and cost Union Carbide about $6 million—a modest sum compared to the massive cleanup planned
for Ciba-Geigy, which was supposed to take almost three times as long and cost more than twenty-five times as much.

After almost forty years of unchecked dumping, Toms River was finally about to become a place where people pulled toxic waste out of the ground instead of putting it in. The pollution wars were over. The chemical plant was winding down, the cleanups were starting up, and the initial cancer surveys of the factory and the town were at least somewhat reassuring. The worst seemed to be over for Toms River, as long as everyone had finally absorbed the hard lessons of the previous four decades.

PART III
COUNTING

It is no small challenge to spend long days and longer nights in a place where children die, but Lisa Boornazian had the knack. She began working at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1991, during the summer of her senior year of nursing school at Villanova University. The following year she found a home in the cancer ward at CHOP. Back then she was Lisa Davenport, and not much older than some of her patients. “I loved working in oncology. I saw plenty of nurses who came to work at the unit and it wasn’t what they expected. They just couldn’t stay. But I loved it,” she remembered. The ward was a surprisingly lively place, where little kids dashed down the wide hallways with their wheeled intravenous stands clattering beside them. The older children, though, were much more difficult to deal with. “The teenagers had a grasp of death, and what the diagnosis meant,” Boornazian said. “The younger kids mostly had no idea.” Those with brain or bone cancers faced long odds. Survival rates were better for children with blood cancers, principally leukemia and lymphoma, but their treatments took many months and were brutal: chemotherapy, often followed by radiation and bone marrow transplants.

The work shifts on the oncology ward were organized in a way that made it impossible for the nurses to keep an emotional distance
from their assigned patients, since the same three or four nurses would take care of a child for months on end. Their relationships with parents were equally intense. Many parents practically lived in the ward and went home only to shower and change clothes before rushing back. The nurses worked under the unforgiving gaze of mothers and fathers driven half-mad by lack of sleep and the sight of their children enduring a pitiless cycle of excruciating needle sticks, nausea attacks, and dressing changes. Parents would frequently take out their anger on the nurses, and the nurses who lasted on the ward learned to respond without rancor or condescension. The long shifts, especially the sleepless overnights, created an intimacy among nurse, parent, and child that no one else could share—certainly not the doctors and social workers, who were mere transients by comparison. The nurses were family. And when it was time for a funeral, the nurses did what family members do: They showed up, and they mourned.

Funerals were part of the ritual of life on the oncology ward, and Lisa Boornazian (she married in 1993) attended her share, in towns all over New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. One in particular stuck in her mind. It was for a vivacious young woman named Carrie-Anne Carter who was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, during her senior year of high school. She was in treatment for more than a year, and Boornazian grew very close to her family. When the teenager died on February 6, 1995, Boornazian decided to make the two-hour drive from Philadelphia to attend the funeral in a town she had never visited before: Toms River, New Jersey.

Although Boornazian had never been to Toms River, she knew the name well. By 1995, everyone who worked on the oncology ward at Children’s Hospital knew about Toms River. Many years later, she explained why. “We began to notice that we were getting a lot of kids from the Toms River area” in 1993 and 1994, Boornazian recalled. “It wasn’t just me. All of the nurses noticed it.” CHOP drew its young cancer patients from a vast geographic area of more than ten million people, and some families would travel even farther—from as far away as South America and the Middle East, if they could afford it. Yet when Boornazian and the other nurses would look at the charts of the two-dozen or so patients admitted to the oncology ward in a typical
month, there always seemed to be at least one or two from a town with a year-round population of just eighty thousand people, or from communities nearby. “There was a certain point where, for a couple of months, we would get a new admission from Toms River every week,” Boornazian said. It became a source of dark humor on the ward, with the nurses regularly asking one another: “I wonder when our next patient from Toms River is coming in?”

The doctors ignored the chatter. Boornazian raised the issue a few times with physicians she knew well. “I would ask them, ‘Have you noticed this? Do you think there’s something going on in Toms River?’ ” The doctors all told her the same thing: no. They said it in various ways, and with inflections that ranged from respectful to patronizing, but the core message never varied. “The general sentiment from the doctors was that it was just a coincidence, and that we shouldn’t worry about it,” Boornazian recalled. She did not take offense. The physicians ruled the hospital, and CHOP was not just any hospital. It was the oldest and most prestigious children’s hospital in the United States, regularly finishing at the top of national rankings for pediatric care. How could the doctors be expected to pay attention to something as trivial as a home address? They were far too busy to get to know the families the way the nurses did. “The doctors rotate in and out, and I don’t think they really realized how many patients there were who were from the Toms River area,” Boornazian said. “It’s the nurses who are there day in and day out, year after year. To us, it looked like a very unusual number of patients.”

When Boornazian told other nurses on the ward that she was planning to drive to Toms River for Carrie-Anne Carter’s funeral, they responded with wisecracks that were only half in jest. “People said, ‘Oh, don’t drink the water when you’re there, and don’t breathe too deeply,’ ” Boornazian remembered. From conversations with the Carters and other Toms River families, she had heard a little bit about the Ciba-Geigy chemical plant and its history of pollution. So she was a bit unnerved when, while driving to the funeral, she looked to her left at a stoplight on Route 37 and saw the fence and security gate of the sprawling factory complex. “I remember driving by and thinking, ‘That’s the plant that everyone talks about.’ ” For days afterward, she
could not stop thinking about that big factory in the woods and about all the local families she had met in the oncology ward.

The animal experiments and population studies of researchers like Wilhelm Hueper and Richard Doll were phenomenally successful at identifying an ever-lengthening list of carcinogenic compounds, but how and why those chemicals triggered malignant tumors was beyond the scope of their assays and surveys. Toxicology and epidemiology alone could not provide a convincing explanation of the inner workings of a cell as it transitioned from normal to malignant.