Toms River (5 page)

As in Basel, however, there were limits to what the local government was willing to tolerate. Cincinnati municipal officials, and business leaders, too, were embarrassed by the condition of the Ohio and the ruination of the small streams that carried so much toxic sewage into the river. The St. Bernard plant, for example, was responsible for nearly one million gallons of wastewater per day. Exactly what was in that wastewater remained as much of a mystery as it had been in Basel, but company chemists knew that it contained high volumes of sulfuric acid, which along with nitrobenzene had replaced arsenical acid as a major pollutant in almost all types of dye manufacture.
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Once it reached the Ohio River, the acidic wastewater from the two Cincinnati Chemical Works factories mixed with effluents from dozens of others enterprises that were, in some cases, even more noxious. Collectively, all that waste made the stretch of river near Cincinnati the most polluted section of the entire thousand-mile Ohio.
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When long-overdue testing confirmed that disease-carrying bacteria were thriving in the foul mixture of untreated sewage and chemical waste, the fouling of one of America’s great rivers became a regional scandal and the subject of four congressional hearings between 1936 and 1945.

The Swiss owners of the Cincinnati Chemical Works, in which Ciba was the senior partner, had been through all this before in Basel and elsewhere: the talk of cancer among employees, the pollution complaints from neighbors, and the government crackdowns that would inevitably follow. The Swiss could see what was coming, and they reacted in time-honored fashion: They made plans to skip town. By the time the City of Cincinnati finally built three large sewage treatment plants in the 1950s and passed a law requiring manufacturers to either pre-treat their waste or pay huge fees to the city, Ciba had already shifted most of its production elsewhere.

Instead of moving to another big, boisterous city like Basel or Cincinnati, Ciba found a much more remote location, a sleepy town where hierarchies were respected and authority trusted, a place where the Swiss could do coal tar chemistry on a grand scale without interference from outsiders, where the river was theirs for the taking. The new property was virgin territory, deep in the New Jersey pinelands,
virtually untouched but for a single tumbledown farm along the river. That farm was known as Luker Farm, and its former owners claimed to be descended from a legend named Tom Luker and his Indian princess bride, who long ago had shared a wigwam a few miles away, alongside the same river, according to the old story.

Two hundred and fifty years later, something new was coming to Tom’s river.

The monument to coal tar chemistry that Ciba raised in the New Jersey pinelands was like no manufacturing complex the company had built in Basel, Cincinnati, or anywhere else. For one thing, the property it purchased in June of 1949 was immense. The irregularly shaped parcel (it was vaguely triangular) consisted of almost two square miles, with a meandering mile-long stretch of the Toms River forming part of the eastern border. Except for the old farm near the river, Luker Farm, it consisted almost entirely of dense pine and oak forest. At 1,350 acres, the site was large enough to hold more than three hundred factories the size of the original Ciba plant that Alexander Clavel had built back in 1864 on the outskirts of Basel.

Normally, in order to reduce infrastructure costs, factory buildings would be situated as close as possible to existing roads and utility lines. But after almost a century of conflicts with neighbors, the Swiss executives directing the project took the opposite approach in New Jersey. They decided to clear thirty-five acres right in the middle of the vast property, leaving forested buffers of a half-mile or more between the buildings and the outside world. No matter how large the complex grew—and by the 1970s there would be twenty-two buildings, five waste lagoons, and more than a dozen dumps on the property—passersby
would see nothing but the front gate and a solid wall of pine and oak. A careful observer might notice, in the middle distance, the top of the water tower and the roofs of the production buildings peeking over the concealing blanket of green. From the windows of a moving car, however, they would be practically invisible. For everyone who did not work there, the plant would be out of sight and out of mind.

The first three buildings were large and low-slung, totaling four million cubic feet (a bit less than the ocean liner
Titanic
). The Swiss had correspondingly expansive expectations for them.
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The buildings cost $18 million (roughly $150 million today), but Ciba executives thought that the potential payoff was worth the investment. There was just one purpose for all the construction: to produce thousands of pounds of vat dyes every day, around the clock, as cheaply as possible. Ciba had been making vat dyes in Basel since 1907 and in Cincinnati for almost as long, but never at the scale the company envisioned in Toms River.

Vat dyes were an innovative product from a familiar source: coal tar. Their chief building block, a yellowish brown powder called anthraquinone, could be derived from three coal tar components: anthracene, naphthalene, and benzene. There was nothing new about that, of course. Chemists had been making dyes from the ubiquitous tar since William Henry Perkin first did it in his parents’ attic in 1856. What was different about the anthraquinone vat dyes was their durability. Vat dyes got their name not because they were made in vats (they were not), but because of their peculiar chemistry. The dyes would not dissolve in water, yet in the presence of a catalyst could perform the nifty trick of converting to a soluble salt, known as a vat, while coloring a fabric. When the fabric was dried, the dye would revert to being insoluble. That made vat dyes incredibly useful because they bound tightly to fabrics in just one immersion yet were highly resistant to water and sunlight. Almost anything they dyed
stayed
dyed—even cotton, the bane of dyers ever since the invention of the modern cotton gin in 1793 popularized the fabric.
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Military uniforms had been the dominant use for vat dyes during World War II—many khakis, browns, olives, and blues were
anthraquinone-based colors—and now that the war was over, Ciba was sure that civilian demand would soar. Toms River, company managers decided, should become the center of vat dye production in the United States, challenging bigger rivals like DuPont and Allied Chemical. When the plant opened in 1952, it was capable of producing thirty-five colors and four million pounds of dye per year, about 10 percent of all vat dye production in the United States. That was enough to generate about $6 million a year in sales for Ciba, or $50 million in today’s dollars. Moreover, the company was careful to design the road grid and the rest of the plant infrastructure so that production could be doubled or even tripled if demand grew as much as Ciba hoped. Its predecessor companies, starting with Alexander Clavel’s, had been in the dye business longer than its competitors, but Ciba usually lagged behind BASF in Europe and DuPont in America in both innovation and production. Vat dyes were an opportunity to close the gap, and Toms River was the place to do it.

There was, and still is, only one major drawback to the production of anthraquinone vat dyes. They are, in the words of dye industry historian Robert J. Baptista, “undoubtedly the class of dyestuffs that involves more hazardous materials, and more hazardous wastes, than any other.” The durability of the finished dyes was hard won. Building those rugged, long-chained molecules required a multistep manufacturing process that was complex and very dangerous. Almost every chemical required for the various reactions was either explosive or poisonous, or both. The list of necessary raw materials included prodigious amounts of hazardous solvents (nitrobenzene, naphthalene, and benzene among them), muriatic and sulfuric acids, lye, ammonia, and heavy metals such as mercury, chromium, vanadium, copper, and the seemingly inescapable arsenic. Nitrobenzene was a special problem. It was toxic when inhaled or touched, but it was used in so many different stages of vat dye production that company memos described it as the “blood stream” of the operation.
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Performing all of the various steps of manufacture not only required huge volumes of hazardous materials, it also took up a lot of space—far more than was available at the two cramped factories in Cincinnati, where Ciba could make vat dyes only in small batches. (Those two Ohio plants
continued to operate in the 1950s, though at lower production levels because of the shift to Toms River.) In the wilds of central New Jersey, however, there was enough room for buildings so cavernous that they could accommodate the entire production process under one roof. So that is what the company built in Toms River: a mini-city optimized for the manufacture of a single product.

For all the care the Swiss lavished on its efficient design, however, the mini-city in the pinelands had one incongruous characteristic: It wasted much more than it produced. Dye manufacture had always been a waste-intensive business; that was obvious from nearly a century of dumping into the Rhine, the Ohio, and other rivers. But even by the dismal standards of dye manufacture, vat dyes were a new low. A maxim of the chemical industry is that every step added to the manufacturing process decreases efficiency and increases waste. Making anthraquinone vat dyes required more steps than any other type of dye process. Various combinations of solvents, acids, and metals were boiled in huge kettles, run through high-pressure autoclaves, squeezed through filters, stirred in tanks, and dried in ovens and vacuum chambers. At each step, the volatility of the required ingredients ensured that some of the chemicals would not react properly, creating unwanted byproducts. Some unreacted chemicals could be reused, and a few byproducts could be sold, but most were useless waste. The process was so inefficient that at Toms River, making brown vat dye, a typical example, required five and a half pounds of raw material to produce one pound of finished dye, with almost all of the remainder discarded as waste.
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In other words, the Toms River plant’s production capacity when it opened in 1952 was not really four million pounds per year. It was actually four million pounds of dye and approximately eighteen million pounds of hazardous chemical waste.
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Shipping out the finished dye would be simple enough: Trucks and freight cars (a spur from the Central Railroad of New Jersey ran right up to the production buildings) would cart it off to textile plants in the Carolinas and New England. But Ciba was not about to give the same treatment to the much greater quantities of toxic waste it would produce at Toms River. To cart it all to an off-site landfill would be very costly, and the company’s plans to catch up to DuPont and its
other competitors left no room for unnecessary expense. The dye would leave Toms River, but the waste would stay.

Four hundred and twenty years before the dye makers of Basel came to Toms River, a cantankerous and mostly self-taught physician with unorthodox beliefs about the uses of chemistry and the nature of illness left the same Swiss city in the dead of night. He was fleeing for his life. Despised by his peers, the itinerant healer was certain that his ideas would triumph in the end, though he surely never conceived of the central role they would someday play in the defilement and belated redemption of a small town on the other side of the ocean. He was poor but carried a noble name, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, which he further embellished several times before settling on a pen name that reflected his supreme self-confidence: Paracelsus, which was Latin for “surpassing Celsus.” (An encyclopedist who lived in the first century, Celsus wrote a celebrated compendium of Roman medicine.)

Long before Basel was the cradle of the chemical industry, it was a center of learning. Interrupting a lifetime spent wandering Central Europe, the thirty-three-year-old Paracelsus was summoned there in early 1527 to treat an eminent patient, the printer Johann Froben. At the time, Froben was sharing lodgings with the even more illustrious Erasmus, the humanist theologian, who was also ailing. Paracelsus temporarily cured them both, and in gratitude the two luminaries secured an appointment for him as city physician and lecturer at the University of Basel. He quickly wore out his welcome. Forever scowling and prone to crude insults, especially when drinking wine to excess, Paracelsus never missed an opportunity to alienate those with whom he disagreed and to prophesy their ultimate humiliation.
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At the St. John’s Day bonfire on June 24, 1527, Paracelsus told his students to burn the writings of Avicenna, a Persian healer who lived five hundred years earlier and was still revered by Renaissance physicians, including those at the University of Basel.
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Soon after, Paracelsus’s patron Froben fell ill again and died, and Paracelsus became enmeshed in a lawsuit with a sick cleric who had not paid his bill. Upon losing the suit in early 1528, Paracelsus insulted the judge and was obliged to
flee to avoid imprisonment or worse. He never returned and died in 1541 while treating another church official (despite having vowed never to do so again), this time in Salzburg.