Authors: Dan Fagin
The winter and spring of 1995 were uncharacteristically busy at the old dump, where there had been so little activity the previous twenty-four years. In March, contractors finished digging up and treating more than fourteen thousand cubic yards of tainted soil, at a cost of $3 million to Union Carbide. It was not much in comparison to the planned cleanup at Ciba—enough soil to fill only twelve jumbo jets instead of one hundred and thirty—but it was far more elaborate than the slapdash cleanups of the 1970s at the old egg farm. This time, the EPA-supervised effort took six months and required dumping hundreds of truckloads of excavated dirt into a steel-walled device mounted on a trailer. The device, called a thermal desorber, looked like a giant spider with a smokestack rising from its belly. Dirt was poured in one end of a tubular kiln and came out the other end ten minutes later after being heated to 700 degrees Celsius—hot enough to vaporize chemicals like trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene. The vapors were captured, blown through a series of filters, and then sent up the smokestack.
The thermal desorber did its job but could not solve a fundamental problem: The worst of the pollution had long since left the Reich Farm property. Attempting a soil cleanup at the farm now, almost twenty-four years after the dumping, was like locking your doors after thieves had already taken everything you owned. Having finally mapped the huge swath of tainted groundwater seeping southward beneath Pleasant Plains, Union Carbide discovered that it stretched more than a mile, in a band four hundred feet wide and one hundred and fifty feet deep. At its southern end, the plume lurched eastward and made a beeline for the two closest Parkway wells. Now there could be no more ambiguity about what was happening: The wells, slurping up nearly two million gallons of groundwater every day, had
altered the plume’s direction and were sucking up its chemical constituents. If nothing changed, almost every drop of chemical waste in the plume would be drawn into the intake screens of those two wells and then—unless the air stripper removed them—distributed to the people of Toms River. A lot was riding on that solitary air stripper tower at the Parkway well field—too much, according to the EPA.
Unwilling to place its faith entirely in the air stripper, the EPA had initially insisted on a much more comprehensive cleanup. In addition to heat-treating tainted soil at the dumpsite, the agency told Union Carbide to drill extraction wells to intercept the groundwater plume before it reached the Parkway well field. The contaminated water would then be run through carbon filters (to remove semivolatile compounds) and at least one additional air stripper (to remove volatiles). Then the cleansed groundwater would be injected back into the ground, just as Ciba would be doing at its factory site. The EPA’s cleanup plan for Pleasant Plains, the agency estimated, would cost Union Carbide another $3 million (in addition to the three million it was spending to heat-treat the soil) and would require eleven years of pumping, treating, and reinjecting.
Union Carbide had reluctantly accepted this EPA cleanup plan in 1988, but the matter was not closed as far as the company was concerned. Its new map of the plume, company officials argued, showed that the EPA plan was not the best approach. So much pollution had already moved so far south of Reich Farm, the company contended, that it was too late to try to intercept it with extraction wells. Thanks to the powerful suction of the Parkway wells, the center of the plume was now more than four thousand feet south of Reich Farm and just seven hundred feet from the closest public well. “The EPA wanted to cut off the plume, but we showed that the plume had already arrived. It was already at the well field,” recalled Jon Sykes, a Canadian hydrologist and consultant to Union Carbide. “Even if you tried to cut it off, an awful lot was still going to slip through.”
Union Carbide had a simple, if brazen, counterproposal. The better approach, the company’s experts told the EPA, would be to do no additional groundwater cleanup at all. The air stripper at the Parkway field was already successfully removing trichloroethylene and other
volatile chemicals from the two million gallons of water that were sucked up daily by the two tainted Parkway wells, so why change anything? Why not let drinking water wells continue to serve as pollutant-recovery wells too?
Amazingly, the Toms River Water Company agreed with Union Carbide. The whole point of the EPA plan was to protect the water company’s wells, but Toms River Water was much more worried about running out of water than they were about chemical contamination. The Parkway field was still the mother lode, supplying more than one-third of the town’s water. In fact, Toms River Water—shockingly, in light of past history—was planning to drill
more
wells at the Parkway field to double its capacity and keep pace with the town’s explosive growth. The EPA’s plan was a direct threat to this expansion. If Union Carbide drilled extraction wells farther north to intercept the plume and pump up millions of gallons per day of tainted groundwater, there would be much less water available for the Parkway wells. To ensure the water company’s support for its counterproposal, Union Carbide promised to reimburse Toms River Water for all past and future expenses associated with operating the air stripper tower. How much the water company would be paid was not disclosed, but the EPA later estimated that Union Carbide’s do-nothing approach would cost the chemical company just $1 million in groundwater-related expenses, instead of $3 million under the EPA plan.
All Union Carbide needed now was the approval of the EPA—the only party to the negotiation that was supposed to be looking out for the general public, not stockholders. In January of 1993, after a friendly preliminary meeting with Toms River Water and the EPA, Union Carbide’s Craig Wilger made his formal proposal to the agency. The company’s leave-it-alone plan “assures continued containment and recovery of Reich Farm contaminants while providing a vital need for safe municipal water,” Wilger wrote.
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Union Carbide was, in essence, asking the EPA to reward the company financially—to the tune of $2 million—for its extreme tardiness in cleaning up the mess at Reich Farm. The company’s plan would allow a public well field to double as a cleanup system for a toxic spill, and would take sixteen
years to complete instead of eleven, leaving the water supply vulnerable for an extra five years if the air stripper ever malfunctioned.
The irony was striking: Back in the 1970s or early 1980s, Union Carbide could have contained the plume by drilling extraction wells at Reich Farm and pumping up and treating the tainted groundwater. Instead, the company had convinced regulators that the contamination was not a proven risk to drinking water supplies. Now that the plume was huge and the risk to the town’s drinking water was proven, Union Carbide had come up with an entirely different rationale for avoiding the expense of additional treatment. The best approach, the company now claimed, would be to keep relying on a single air stripper at a public well field—the same idea the EPA had rejected in 1988 as a potential “long-term risk to the community.”
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By July of 1995, the EPA was ready with its answer to Union Carbide’s audacious counterproposal: yes. The company would not have to do anything else to clean up the huge toxic spill beneath Pleasant Plains, the agency declared. “What happened is that Union Carbide came to us and showed us that they were the problem at the well field, so that was the right place to control the plume,” remembered Jon Gorin, the EPA’s project manager for Reich Farm. The agency was also worried, Gorin said, about triggering water shortages if it stuck to its earlier plan to force Union Carbide to intercept the groundwater before it reached the water company’s wells. “We would have been competing with Toms River Water for available water, and we didn’t want to do that,” Gorin said. To the EPA, what mattered was that by the time the water was distributed to residents, it would meet all state and federal standards. Thanks to the air stripper, the “finished” Parkway water was apparently clean, so why build a new cleanup system on the assumption that something might go wrong with the current one?
Viewed in hindsight, it was “a mind-boggling decision,” as a lawyer would later put it, to deliberately allow carcinogenic chemicals to reach public wells, when there was an alternative—already approved by the EPA—that would have intercepted at least part of the plume and cut the period of risk by five years. Instead, the EPA allowed drinking water wells to be used as pollutant recovery wells, putting its
trust in a single air stripper without requiring more protection, including the carbon filters that had been discussed since the 1970s but never installed. For all its riskiness, however, the EPA’s reversal was not controversial at the time. “We had done this before at other sites,” recalled the agency’s Carole Peterson, who oversees Superfund cleanups in New Jersey. “It just wasn’t considered something strange to do.” Reich Farm would be the last place such shortcuts were attempted in New Jersey, for reasons that would soon become ferociously obvious.
The final step to change any Superfund cleanup plan was a required public hearing, scheduled for August 16, 1995, at town hall. Though it was advertised in advance in the
Observer
, almost no one showed up. The only people who spoke for more than a minute or two were from the EPA, Union Carbide, and United Water Toms River, which was the water company’s new name.
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There were just five questions from the public; none expressed any skepticism about the revised cleanup plan.
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Over the previous eleven years, Toms River had been the site of dozens of protests, acts of civil disobedience, and public hearings that had attracted hundreds of angry residents. But that was all in the past; the people of Toms River had moved on. It was summertime, and they wanted to go back to watering their lawns in peace.
Seeing no opposition, the EPA approved Union Carbide’s plan.
Fifteen days after the perfunctory public hearing on the weakened cleanup plan for Reich Farm, on August 31, 1995, Michael Berry mailed out his final report on childhood cancer incidence in Toms River. The recipient was Steven Jones at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, who had asked Berry to conduct the incidence study at the request of Laura Janson and her sister-in-law Lisa Boornazian, the Philadelphia nurse. It had been an unusually difficult report to write. Berry had come up with results that could not easily be dismissed as a fluke. Childhood cancer rates were higher than expected—sometimes much higher—in every category he analyzed. The confidence intervals were wide and often dipped below 1.0, but even when Berry applied the health department’s conservative approach
to significance testing, he still found statistically significant clusters of childhood brain cancer in Ocean County and the Toms River core zone. He wondered if he should push for a deeper investigation instead of just dropping it, as had always happened in the past with residential clusters. There was at least a chance that in-depth interviews with the affected population and a comprehensive assessment of local environmental conditions might unearth a likely explanation for what was happening in Toms River—and maybe even help find a way to stop the suffering.
Berry talked it over with his colleague and friend Jerald Fagliano, an epidemiologist at the state health department who would soon assume a central role as events unfolded in Toms River. Together, they decided not to push for a follow-up investigation. The uncertainty of Berry’s results made them uncomfortable. What if the apparent clusters really were just coincidences? Or what if a second investigation also failed to reach a clear conclusion? The two men also knew that they would get strong resistance from their bosses if they asked for a follow-up study. A deeper investigation would stir up the community and the press, which always made the top brass of the health department very uncomfortable. And besides, where would the money come from?
“Jerry and I had talked about what we should do next, if anything, and we decided not to try to scrape together the money for any more investigation,” Berry recalled years later. “I guess that was, in part, my fault. We could have defused a lot of the stuff that came later if we had done more in 1995, but we didn’t.” In any case, Berry had no reason to believe that the health department’s senior staff would have authorized a full-blown study even if he had asked for one. “It was clear that they would only support the least amount of effort, generally aimed at making the issue go away,” said Berry. “Meaningful follow-up to any of these investigations was only going to happen due to outside pressure.”
It was a paradox: Public pressure would come only if Berry’s incidence study was publicized, but the state health department made no announcement about his findings. His final report was a public record under state law, but Berry, Fagliano, and their newly appointed
supervisor—Elin Gursky, the senior assistant state health commissioner—decided not to take any affirmative steps to tell the people of Toms River about it, even though they knew that pollution and cancer had been high-profile issues in the town for years. “We were writing this to Steve Jones at ATSDR, so we kind of thought of it as an internal document, not something for the community,” Fagliano explained years later. “In retrospect, should we have organized some sort of formal release? Absolutely, we should have. The fact that we didn’t do that created an initial lack of trust, to put it mildly, between the state and the community once it all came out. We have learned a lot since then about the importance of involving the community.”
Instead of making a public announcement, Berry simply called Steve Jones to explain the results and then drafted a two-page letter to Jones summarizing his conclusions. After a delay of a few weeks, Gursky approved the wording. The key sentence of Berry’s letter appeared in the penultimate paragraph: “Because of the small number of cases included in this analysis, it is not possible to conduct studies to determine possible causes at the municipality or even county level.”
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In other words, investigation over. In addition to Jones, he also sent a copy to Herb Roeschke, who had replaced the retired Chuck Kauffman as the senior staffer at the Ocean County Health Department. As an afterthought, Berry made another copy and sent it to Robert Gialanella, the local physician who had asked for a similar analysis back in 1991. The doctor, Berry figured, might be interested in what the updated report had found.
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