Toms River (50 page)

Toms River did have one perverse advantage: It was the home of two thoroughly investigated Superfund sites. As a result, the EPA knew the names of dozens of arcane chemicals that had been dumped at Ciba and Reich Farm and were not on the standard checklist for drinking water testing. Some of them, in fact, were so obscure that there was no reliable test for them in drinking water. But even if regulators were not sure of the exact molecular structures of those arcane industrial chemicals, they could tell that almost all of them contained nitrogen or phosphorus. So Health Commissioner Fishman told Gillick’s committee that the state health department, in addition to testing for the usual suspect chemicals, would also look for more than fifty other nitrogen- or phosphorus-containing compounds in Toms River’s drinking water. In all, the state would be testing for about two hundred and fifty chemicals instead of the usual eighty-three. It was still only a few drops in the bucket, considering that there were thousands of other potential pollutants that also contained nitrogen or phosphorus, but it was a start.

The first results became available just two days after the water samples were collected from twenty-one schools and twenty public wells in Toms River. This was itself a huge change, since the results of drinking water tests usually were not available to the state for weeks or even months after sampling. The usual procedure in New Jersey was for water companies to hire private laboratories to do the testing and then, eventually, to send the results to the state Department of Environmental Protection. (The DEP did not have nearly enough staff to conduct the required quarterly tests on its own, since there were more than two thousand public water wells in the state.) The DEP normally did not insist on a quick turnaround, so samples often sat for weeks at the private labs before they were analyzed. Now, however, Toms River was getting special treatment. Governor Whitman had
promised fast, trustworthy information about what was in the town’s water, so the samples collected at local schools on March 28 were tested directly, and immediately, by the DEP’s analytical laboratory in West Trenton.

The results were a shock. For starters, there was trichloroethylene in the drinking water at ten of the twenty-one schools. None of the samples exceeded the state’s limit of one part per billion, but two schools equaled it. The findings suggested that the all-important air stripper at the Parkway well field was not doing its job perfectly. The bigger surprise was that water in thirteen schools was slightly radioactive. The levels were not an immediate hazard; the safety limit was fifteen picocuries of radiation per liter, while the highest school reading was twelve. But any reading over five was supposed to prompt extensive testing, and all thirteen schools were over it.
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Four of the town’s five public well fields were also over the limit; the two highest were twenty-six and twenty-nine picocuries.
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What that meant is that many of the ninety thousand people served by United Water Toms River were drinking water the government considered unacceptably radioactive and may have been doing so for years without anyone knowing. This alarming discovery deepened the sense of crisis among officials working on the Toms River testing. The radiation almost certainly came from naturally occurring radium in soil, not pollution, but there was no quick way to confirm that. Besides, jittery residents were sure to be terrified, no matter the origin. Even more than industrial chemicals, radiation was a source of psychological dread because of its long association with nuclear weapons and cancer. One of New Jersey’s three nuclear power plants, Oyster Creek, was in southern Ocean County and had been a source of community anxiety ever since it opened in 1969.

“It was a real challenge when the radiation was found,” remembered James Blumenstock, a senior state health official at the time. “With the contaminated sites you could blame corporations or midnight dumpers, but how do you deal with something that Mother Nature put there?” United Water was completely unprepared for the uproar, he added. “They weren’t accustomed to dealing with this level of scientific scrutiny and pressure. They were out of their league.”
What was especially puzzling was that a private lab had been testing local water for radiation for years and had never found such high levels. Later, the state would learn that naturally radioactive soil—and therefore water—was all over southern New Jersey, but the problem had been hidden by the slowness of the typical water-testing process, which Whitman had just ordered sped up for Toms River only.
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As far as anyone knew in April of 1996, however, the radioactivity problem applied exclusively to the star-crossed town of Toms River, which now had yet another unwanted distinction: chemical town, cancer cluster,
and
home of radioactive water.

Governor Whitman had promised to keep the town fully informed of the investigation as it proceeded; now she was going to have to announce another scary surprise that defied an easy solution. Simply shutting down the affected wells was not an option, since almost every well field in town was affected. There had been a drought emergency the previous summer, and United Water was operating at the edge of capacity, as always. No governor wanted to risk the political consequences of depriving ninety thousand people of water. The imperative in Toms River had always been to keep the water flowing, no matter what. That was true in the 1960s, when Ciba’s dyes invaded the Holly well field, and it was true in the 1980s, when the Reich Farm plume hit the Parkway wells. Now, in 1996, even in the midst of a cancer scare, it was still true. Federal law required corrective action only if radiation levels averaged more than fifteen picocuries per liter over four consecutive quarters; a single test was not enough to trigger a well closure. So the state told United Water to temporarily shut down only the two wells where readings were highest—closures the company could manage without disrupting service.

As she had promised, Whitman traveled to Toms River to deliver the bad news in person. She tried to put the best face on the discovery of a known carcinogen in the town’s drinking water. “One thing I’d like to stress is that people can still drink the water,” Whitman told reporters. She was obliged to add, however, that the two wells were being shut down immediately. There was no question about which storyline would dominate the television news that night. “Wells Shut over Radiation” was the front-page headline the next morning in the
Star-Ledger
. The smaller print below added, “Officials assure Toms River water use is safe.” The following day, the same newspaper reported that demand for bottled water in Toms River was “skyrocketing” and quoted a distributor whose sales had tripled overnight. “Right now, everyone is our customer,” he said.
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It was hard to imagine that Toms River could become an even more anxious place, but the disclosure that the town’s water was radioactive did the trick. Could the situation get worse still? Everyone involved in the state’s emergency water testing program knew that it could. If the tests found industrial chemicals that were manmade and unique to Toms River, then life would become much more difficult for the public officials struggling to manage an already volatile situation. The EPA and the DEP had known about groundwater pollution at Reich Farm and Ciba for more than twenty years, yet as recently as 1995 agency officials had assured anyone who asked that there was nothing to worry about. If an enterprising scientist now managed to identify carcinogenic pollutants in the water supply and then traced those contaminants back to waste dumping at Reich Farm or Ciba, there would be recriminations all around—and probably lawsuits, too. In that case, the wrath of Toms River would fall upon not just the dumpers but also the politicians and government regulators who had let them get away with it for so long.

Floyd Genicola was an outsider within the dense bureaucracy of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. A solemn-faced man who favored crisp white shirts and solid ties, Genicola was a chemist by training and a dissenter by temperament, if not by dress. He had started his career with the state as a forensic analyst with the New Jersey State Police, where his job was to identify seized narcotics by analyzing their chemical structure. The scientific detective work played to Genicola’s strengths, which included precision, patience, and a deep-seated aversion to taking anything on faith. He would sometimes spend weeks on a case, subjecting a sample to dozens of tests to make certain that his identification was correct. He left for a job at a pharmaceutical company, but when a position opened up at the DEP in 1982, he jumped at it. By then, Genicola had a master’s degree in mass spectrometry and had learned how to identify compounds based on the masses of their component atoms. The DEP was getting its first spectrometer, and Genicola wanted to use his new knowledge for a good cause. Catching polluters, he figured, would be at least as interesting as catching drug dealers had been.

But the DEP was a very different kind of agency than the state police. Its job was not to investigate or prosecute but to interpret and
apply complicated rules governing everything from fishing and forestry to recycling and radioactive waste. The police solved crimes; the DEP negotiated compliance. It was a process-oriented agency, and Genicola was now immersed, uncomfortably, in the minutiae of environmental regulation. He was eventually put in the office of quality assurance, where his job was to check the accuracy of test results generated by the DEP or by the businesses it regulated, including water suppliers. Too often for his supervisors’ comfort, Genicola thought that the data was not up to snuff and was not shy about saying so.

In April of 1996, a few weeks after the near-riot at the high school, Genicola’s bosses invited him to sit in on meetings of the state task force that had been hurriedly assembled to manage the emergency water-testing program in Toms River. Prickly or not, Genicola got the invitation because he was one of the department’s in-house experts on identifying pollutants in water. Genicola was happy to be asked; he thought the project was interesting and a bit exciting, too. It reminded him of his days working for the state police. The health department’s focus was on making sure that no one in Toms River was being harmed right now, and the DEP was trying to make sure that the water company was following its rules. Both missions were worthy, Genicola thought, but he also saw Toms River as a
forensic
challenge. An unusually large number of children had gotten cancer, and now he would get a chance to try to figure out why, and who was responsible.

There was a huge amount of data to review. In their initial checks of the local drinking water, Genicola and the state team found little out of the ordinary besides the radioactivity and very low levels of trichloroethylene.
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After the trauma of the radiation announcement, the otherwise routine results were an immense relief. Whatever had caused the childhood cancer cluster—if anything had caused it—did not seem to be in the water. On May 7, Health Commissioner Fishman made a triumphant return to Toms River to declare that after “the most comprehensive, the most intensive, the most in-depth study of a public water system ever undertaken in New Jersey, the water is safe to drink, bathe in, and cook with.”
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But that was not quite the whole story, and at least some members of the state’s water-testing team knew it. Buried in the reams of data
generated by the emergency testing program was a subtle signal that something unusual was in Toms River’s drinking water, possibly something important. Months would pass before Floyd Genicola figured out what that signal meant, and years before others grasped its full significance.

The discovery Floyd Genicola and his colleagues eventually made in a droplet of Toms River water had its antecedents in the work of ancient Egyptian alchemists and all those who shared their obsessive quest to pull substances apart and identify their constituent parts. The Egyptians’ successors, first in the Arab world and then in Europe, drew inspiration from texts such as the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, said to be authored by the Egyptian god Thoth. “Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtle from the gross sweetly with great industry” is a line from an early English translation of the Emerald Tablet. The translator was a secretive alchemist of the seventeenth century who made a name for himself in other pursuits: Isaac Newton. His ideas about light and gravity formed the basis of modern physics, but Newton spent much more time trying to transmute lead into gold, recording his experiments in secret code in his private journals.

Alchemists knew that if they burned, boiled, dissolved, distilled, or otherwise disturbed a seemingly stable compound, they would often end up with two or more constituents. But it was a laborious process of trial and error, and it did not always work because many compounds were impervious to conventional chemistry. What was needed was an instrument that could fulfill the charge of Hermes Trismegistus by separating
anything
into its most fundamental components. Two Germans showed the way. The first, Robert Bunsen, did not invent the gas burner that bears his name, but he perfected it and used it to study the colors of the flames he generated by vaporizing various metals. In 1860, his friend Gustav Kirchhoff came up with the Newtonian idea of differentiating the flames more precisely by viewing them through a prism and studying the spectral lines produced by each hot gas Bunsen tested. When a beam of incandescent light was passed through a cooler version of the gas and then viewed through
the prism, it produced the identical set of lines except that they were dark instead of light. Kirchhoff was the first to read nature’s own bar code, with his discovery that each molecule emits a specific set of spectral lines when hot and absorbs light at the identical wavelengths when cool. He and Bunsen did not know
why
every compound has a telltale spectral pattern (that answer would not come for another half-century), but they quickly grasped the usefulness of their “spectroscope” in identifying unknown substances.
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