Toms River (48 page)

And that, Michael Berry assumed, was the end of the Toms River investigation.

All three men who received copies of Michael Berry’s study in the mail during the first week of September of 1995 recognized that they were holding the epidemiological equivalent of a lit stick of dynamite. Yet they responded in three very different ways.

Steve Jones, whose request had prompted the study, talked to his supervisors at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and began thinking about how the agency might conduct a health study in Toms River in cooperation with the state health department. The perennially strapped ATSDR rarely got involved in residential cluster investigations. But if the state supported the idea, Jones thought, there could be a follow-up study in Toms River in a year or two.

At the Ocean County Health Department, meanwhile, Herb Roeschke was frustrated and more than a little worried when a copy of the cancer incidence report landed on his desk. Berry’s letter, he remembered later, “was based on sketchy information from a very small sample, and we had no way to verify any of it.” Roeschke raised the issue briefly with his senior staff but did not tell his bosses on the board of health about Berry’s findings. Roeschke had worked for the county and town health departments for seventeen years and had
been through the environmental wars of the 1970s and 1980s. He remembered Pleasant Plains, the pipeline, Greenpeace. Over the years, he had been the target of several verbal lashings from Linda Gillick over drinking water issues. How would she react if she found out about Berry’s letter?

He would soon find out, because Linda Gillick had the letter too. She got it from her friend Bob Gialanella, the physician. Michael Berry had sent Gialanella a copy of his 1995 letter as a courtesy, because the doctor’s request in 1991 had prompted one of Berry’s earlier studies of childhood cancer in Toms River. Gialanella was on the board of Gillick’s group, Ocean of Love, but that did not matter to Berry. His studies were public documents, and Gialanella had been interested back in 1991, so Berry sent him a copy. “When I looked at the new data, I could see there had been a change,” Gialanella remembered. “All of a sudden it looked like something was really going on that hadn’t shown up before.” He called Gillick right away. “I don’t think either one of us were surprised,” he recalled, “but it confirmed what our gut feelings were.”

For almost ten years, Linda Gillick had been convinced—“in my heart and in my mind,” as she later put it—that there was a childhood cancer cluster in Toms River, but the authorities had always told her she was wrong. Now the State of New Jersey, via Michael Berry’s letter, was confirming the cluster. The state’s decision not to do a follow-up study only made Gillick more determined. It was a transformative moment in the Toms River story: Alarming and scientifically credible information was now in the hands of someone who was dead set on forcing the authorities to act on that information.

The only question now for Gillick and her allies was how best to catch the attention of the state’s political power brokers. Here Bob Gialanella had an idea: He was a longtime friend of Tom Curran, who had just been hired as special projects editor at the largest paper in New Jersey, the
Star-Ledger
of Newark. Curran’s wife had graduated from medical school with Gialanella, and the families got together for dinner occasionally. Linda Gillick had easy access to the
Observer
and the
Asbury Park Press
thanks to her years of cancer fund-raising and activism in Ocean County, but the
Star-Ledger
was
in a different league. It was required morning reading for Governor Christine Todd Whitman and her commissioners, including the health commissioner, Leonard Fishman. Linda Gillick knew that if she could get the Toms River cancer story into the
Star-Ledger
, she would catch the attention of the entire state.

So Bob Gialanella called his old friend Tom Curran, the editor. It was the final link of a remarkable chain of highly improbable personal connections: The Toms River kids in the oncology ward in Philadelphia happened to have an exceptionally committed nurse, Lisa Boornazian, who happened to have a sister-in-law who worked at the EPA, Laura Janson, who happened to know how to reach the ATSDR’s Steve Jones, who happened to pass on her concerns to the one man who could investigate them, Michael Berry, who happened to send an unsolicited copy of his results to Robert Gialanella, who happened to know both Linda Gillick and an editor at the state’s top newspaper, Tom Curran. If any of those links had been missing, it is hard to imagine how the Toms River childhood cancer cluster would ever have become such a big deal.

A few hours after Gialanella spoke to Curran at the
Star-Ledger
, Linda Gillick got a call from the newspaper’s medical reporter, Gale Scott, who was both experienced and aggressive. She spent the next few months working on the story, in between other assignments. Initially skeptical, she reviewed Berry’s report and made calls to dozens of people in Toms River. Scott called Roeschke and several current or former Ciba workers, including George Woolley. She researched the groundwater contamination at the chemical plant, reading old state and federal studies detailing what was in the factory dumpsites. Over time, her skepticism faded. The more people she spoke to, the more convinced she became that the undisclosed cluster of childhood cancer in Toms River was an important story. Her main concern was how the town would react. “The thing we wrestled with,” Scott remembered, “was that we knew it was a good story and we knew everyone would be very upset—panic is not too extreme a word, really.”

Early on Sunday morning, March 10, 1996, a senior official at the state health department awoke to a phone call from a press aide with
an urgent message about a story on the front page of that morning’s
Star-Ledger
. “It was a horrible shock,” the official recalled. The headline of Gale Scott’s story was “Kids’ Cancer Rate Alarms County.” The article’s more than twenty-five hundred words were carefully chosen, but their overall effect was incendiary. Beginning with an anecdote about the then-anonymous oncology nurse in Philadelphia (“Cancer nurses are hard to shock.…”), the article detailed the findings of Berry’s incidence analysis and then shifted to a lengthy explanation of the soil and groundwater pollution discovered on or near the Ciba factory. There was no mention of Reich Farm and the Parkway wells, which were overlooked as usual. Steve Jones was quoted saying that the ATSDR wanted to do a health study because “there’s something going on out there.” His position was endorsed both by Linda Gillick—“finally, someone is listening,” she said—and by a researcher at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Michael Gallo. “There is a significant increase there, no question,” Gallo told the
Star-Ledger
. But there were no comments from the state health department, and Herb Roeschke, the county health official, was quoted skeptically. “Certainly we are concerned about all disease in Ocean County, but this letter is talking about three cases of children with brain cancer,” Roeschke said, apparently referring to the three cases in children under age five in the Toms River core zone. “That’s not many cases.”
¹

The next day the state threw more gasoline on the fire. Instead of meeting with Gillick and other concerned residents, the health department called a press conference in Trenton. Elin Gursky, who was the top physician in state government as senior assistant commissioner of health, declared that the cluster “is statistically elevated, but not to the point where we are overly concerned.”
²
Gursky had known about the Toms River cases since the previous summer, when she saw Berry’s report and approved its wording. Now that the report was public knowledge, she said, the state health department would conduct another review of childhood cancer rates in Toms River but would not undertake a study of possible environmental causes. In Toms River, meanwhile, people were panicking. The Ocean County office of the American Cancer Society was flooded with calls from terrified residents, as were the radio talk shows. By Tuesday, two days
after the initial
Star-Ledger
story, many stores in town had sold out of bottled water; replacements were unavailable because the wholesalers had sold out too. Scam artists filled the void, peddling bogus water filters door-to-door. The anxiety was feeding on itself. The more people heard about the cluster, the more upset they became.

Kim Pascarella, who had stayed active in Ocean of Love after his daughter’s death in 1990, had a very different reaction to the
Star-Ledger
story. Like many of the affected families, the Pascarellas had long believed that the aggregation of childhood cancer cases in Toms River was not a coincidence, though they rarely talked about it with anyone outside of the group. “When I saw that story, I thought, ‘Ah, it all kind of makes sense now. We’re not crazy after all.’ As soon as that story hit, it gave us some credibility, some validation,” he remembered. The story also represented an opportunity, he thought. Years later, with the benefit of hindsight, he would express it this way: “Without the
Star-Ledger
article, there would have been no uproar. Without the uproar, there would have been no government involvement. Without the government involvement, there would have been no legal case. And without the case, there would have been no truth.” No one was ready to predict any of those subsequent events on the day after the first newspaper story appeared. But Kim Pascarella, Linda Gillick, and Bob Gialanella, among others, did immediately recognize that they now had a golden opportunity to press for an investigation. They resolved to make the most of it.

The families’ cause was aided by the seeming indifference of state officials, who were digging themselves into a deeper hole by the day. In a network television interview a few days after the initial story appeared, an uncomfortable-looking Elin Gursky, who had been ordered to do the interview by State Health Commissioner Fishman, tried again to explain why the health department would not conduct an environmental study: “To go on those kinds of fishing trips is very, very costly, and would probably yield nothing.”
³

Gursky and Roeschke were speaking in the language of probability: Local families almost certainly had nothing to worry about, and the payoff from an environmental study would almost certainly not
be worth the expense. But Toms River had heard those kinds of arguments before. “We were ripe for this because Ocean County had been the dumping ground for a lot of environmental hazards, and we had this long history of wells that were tainted with chemicals,” said Gary Casperson, a local banker who was the chair of the county board of health and Herb Roeschke’s supervisor. Now there was evidence—
official
evidence, not rumor—that the children of Toms River really did face a higher risk of cancer. Even if the increased risk meant only a handful of extra cases per year, that did not matter to many residents. Like Randy Lynnworth before him, Michael Gillick was not an abstract statistic to anyone who had seen his tumor-ravaged face on television. He was a flesh-and-blood reminder of the torment of a cruel illness and the terror that anyone’s child might be next. Yet the government experts, who were supposed to be the protectors of public health, were unwilling to do anything but justify their inaction by citing probabilities. They could not even say whether there was still a problem, since the last available incidence data was an inexcusable
five
years old. The people of Toms River were not only terrified, they were furious.

Linda Gillick quickly provided a way for them to channel their rage. She helped to organize a March 15 protest outside Roeschke’s office at the county health department and invited the press to attend. When Casperson and Roeschke walked outside to address the crowd, they faced a row of television cameras and about a hundred angry residents. “There are many causes of cancer …,” Roeschke began, but was quickly interrupted by a woman who yelled: “Stop giving me the old story! I don’t want to hear it!” When Roeschke tried to explain that the state and county were forming a task force, a man screamed, “We’re tired of committees, you’ve done nothing!” And when Roeschke said that the residents of Toms River should feel safe because Berry’s study had found only a handful of brain cancer cases—just five in the Toms River core zone, three times more than expected but still just one case per thousand children—another woman interrupted, shouting: “I don’t feel safe at all, my kids could get cancer!” Another mother held up a photograph of her son, who
had died the year before from brain cancer. “These kids don’t have time to wait. I have two other children, and I’m scared to death,” she said.
⁴

What especially infuriated the crowd was that so much information had been kept from them. The
Star-Ledger
article had disclosed not only Michael Berry’s 1995 Toms River study but also the 1994 statewide study that had identified Ocean County as having the highest childhood cancer rate in New Jersey. When Roeschke said that the reports were not released because they were “just statistics” whose meaning was unclear, he was interrupted by more shouting. “That’s unacceptable!” yelled one woman. “Clear out your office!” shouted another. (It was a prescient jeer: The beleaguered Roeschke would soon resign under pressure and take a job in a different county.) Years later, a state official involved in the initial decision not to release Berry’s report explained it this way. “We had done some good science, but we didn’t know how to use it,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity. “To use the information would mean sharing it, showing it, talking about it, and fixing it if there was something to fix. We weren’t prepared to do any of that, so we just held on to the information. That was a mistake, certainly.”