Authors: Dan Fagin
Where to put it? Ciba made the cheapest and most obvious choice, if not the safest one. The company would get rid of its solid waste in Toms River the same way it had in Basel (at first) and the same way its competitors did it at their own plants if they were lucky enough to have sufficient room. Ciba would dump it on the factory grounds—all of it, enough to fill more than a thousand fifty-five-gallon drums every year. (By the late 1970s, the annual total would be closer to ten thousand drums.) Drums were buried in pits and trenches or just dumped in unmarked clearings within the dense forest. Often, the waste would not be contained at all. A half-mile south of the production buildings, for instance, the company dug a pit (and later two more beside it) for arsenic acid, which was mixed with lime and dumped in what came to be known as the Acid Pits. Other dumps acquired nicknames like the Moon and the Smudge Pots; there were too many to name them all. They proliferated like a pox, eventually covering more than forty-eight acres in more than a dozen locations. The exact number of dumps will never be known because company officials did not bother to map the locations of the smallest ones, which were subsequently forgotten. With almost two square miles of woods at their disposal, there did not seem to be any reason to keep track. “Back in those days I don’t think anybody ever really thought about landfills, period,” said Jorge Winkler, a senior executive at the Toms River plant in the 1970s and 1980s. “You just put [waste] someplace that one thought was suitable, and suitable was basically any cheap land that was out of the way.”
Liquid waste at the Toms River plant could not be handled quite so blithely; there was just too much of it. As in Basel and Cincinnati, it included large amounts of sulfuric acid, anthraquinone, and other acids and solvents. To reduce its toxicity, the liquid waste was diluted with water taken from the river, typically in a ratio of about two hundred gallons of water for each gallon of chemical waste. As a result, the volume of wastewater generated at the Toms River factory was
tremendous: more than two million gallons per day by the mid-1950s and five million by the 1970s. Even compared to other dye factories, the Toms River discharges were a deluge. The extra steps required to produce anthraquinone vat dyes generated almost one thousand gallons of wastewater per pound of finished dye—more than ten times as much as any other type of dye manufacturing.
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The river was the obvious place to dump the wastewater, but the Toms was not a wide, fast-flowing river like the Rhine or the Ohio. It was, and still is, a serpentine, languid stream, with a current slow enough to encourage cedar swamps and beaver dams. The stretch beside the factory is less than fifty feet wide, and the river stays narrow until it reaches the heart of town two miles away. There, the Toms finally widens and becomes tidal as it nears Barnegat Bay. In 1952, fishing and small-scale tourism were the cornerstones of the struggling local economy, and the river rolled right past the pillared 1850 courthouse that was the seat of power for State Senator William Steelman “Steets” Mathis, the county’s political boss and, not coincidentally, an avid fisherman.
To preserve good relations with the locals, the company needed the community’s namesake river to continue to look, as Harry B. Marshall put it at the 1953 dedication ceremony, “clear and pure”—or at least as clear and pure as the Toms had always looked. On that point, Mother Nature had given Ciba a gift. Upstream from the factory property, cedars grew thickly along the river’s banks, and their roots lent the water a tea-colored tinge. In addition to being tinted, the river water was also murky because the sandy soil and verdant swamps added so much organic material to the water. The Toms River was a flourishing and nearly pristine ecosystem before the factory started discharging chemical waste into it, but the river had never
looked
clean to the locals. Ciba capitalized on this incongruity. Some of the news articles in those early days included comments from company officials disparaging the quality of the natural river water. One even claimed that the corrosive acids in Ciba’s wastewater would make the river water taste better to fish and humans alike because in its natural state the Toms was too alkaline.
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By the mid-1960s, that claim would be laughable, but in 1953 it was taken at face value.
Even the canard that its wastewater was “cleaning” the river did not give the company free rein simply to channel all of its wastewater into the Toms, however. The river was just too narrow, too slow, and too important to the community’s identity and economy. Even in a town as deferential as Toms River, dumping two million gallons of acid-laced waste every day into a small stream that cut right through the center of town would be a provocative act. The company needed to find a way to reduce its direct discharges into the river. Here, nature bestowed a second gift, one Ciba would repay with decades of torrential dumping. Underneath the topsoil at the factory site, as it turned out, the ground consisted of highly porous sand and gravel that was saturated with groundwater starting just a few feet below the surface. This meant that the company could dig shallow wells and withdraw millions of gallons of water every day to produce dye and dilute its waste. Just as importantly, wastewater dumped directly onto the sand would seep into the ground and seemingly disappear. Every gallon that vanished into the ground was a gallon that would not have to be dumped directly into the river via a large and very visible outfall pipe. The two great benefits of porous soil—as a source of clean water and as a dumping ground for liquid waste—seem contradictory: Why would the company risk contaminating its own water wells? The answer was that company officials thought they could both pump and dump without fouling their own nest if the wastewater lagoons were a few thousand feet away from Ciba’s water wells. They were wrong about that, too.
Even before the plant was built, the company’s intention to dump most of its wastewater onto the ground, in a place no outsider could see, was clear to everyone involved. Privacy was crucial, one Ciba executive wrote in a 1949 memo: “There is a psychological factor involved in locating the sewage treatment area at considerable distance from the river.… Such area is better located in the deep wooded area, well screened from any outside observation.” The same memo suggests that Ciba knew that much of its liquid waste would disappear into the sand: “we expect considerable seepage into adjacent area from ditch, which will reduce the volume of effluent carried into the river.”
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Another memo from 1949 is even blunter: “At Toms River, all
objectionable sewage can be disposed of by irrigation of the sandy soil with only a minimum treatment, without difficulty and at very moderate cost.”
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The company was far less forthcoming in describing its plans to the state health department, which could have forced improvements but did not. In a 1949 letter to the state, a senior Ciba manager named Philip Kronowitt acknowledged that solvent-laced wastewater would be disposed of “by irrigation of a suitable acreage of sand beds.” But he also asserted that the volume would be “very small, probably not over a few thousand gallons per month” and would occur “at such distance from the river and neighborhood development as to make harmful seepage impossible.”
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Both of those assertions would soon prove wildly inaccurate—by 1955, his staff was telling Kronowitt that more than one million gallons were seeping into the ground
every day
—but the state accepted them at face value and issued the operating permits Ciba needed to open in 1952.
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The wastewater “treatment” process the company built at Toms River took full advantage of the sponge-like characteristics of the pinelands soil.
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It consisted of a series of basins in which the factory wastewater was mixed with treated sewage, blended with lime to reduce its acidity, and then sent to what was essentially a huge manmade lake with a surface area of about ten acres and a depth of ten feet.
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This unlined “settling lagoon” had a theoretical capacity of twenty-nine million gallons, but because there was nothing underneath it except sand and gravel, it was more like a bottomless pit. At first, company engineers predicted that solid material in the waste would settle on the bottom of the lagoon and reduce the seepage, but their self-serving assessment was quickly proved wrong. The lagoon should have filled up in a couple of months, but instead took more than eighteen months to fill because so much wastewater was seeping down through its sandy bottom into the groundwater beneath. On days when it was not replenished with fresh effluent, the lagoon’s water level dropped by more than five feet. Finally, in mid-1954, the lagoon filled enough for the wastewater to begin flowing over the top of a weir and into a rectangular basin into which air was bubbled. From there, the wastewater was sent to a chlorinating basin and then
into a long ditch that led toward the river. This ditch emptied into a “fish pond” that the company announced it would stock with perch in order to demonstrate that the effluent was safe before it reached the river. The pond, in turn, emptied into the Toms River through a large outfall pipe.
For all its stages and basins, however, the system provided very little actual treatment of the factory’s liquid waste. The added lime reduced the wastewater’s acidity and chlorine killed pathogens, but beyond that the system relied solely on dilution, aeration, gravity, and time. The system did manage to remove some solids from the liquid waste, but those eventually ended up in groundwater too. This dried sludge, including muck periodically dredged from the settling lagoon, was dumped into an unlined ten-acre gully known as the Moon, located southeast of the lagoon. But the waste did not stay at the Moon; eventually, solvents and mercury from the sludge were found in the water table as well. Chemicals that did not seep into the ground went into the river, which is why the company quietly shelved its much-ballyhooed plans to stock the “fish pond” with perch. The tremendous volume of organic waste that remained in the effluent consumed all of the dissolved oxygen in the pond water. Nothing that needed oxygen—including perch—could have lived for long in that beleaguered pond, which emptied directly into the Toms River.
As ineffective as the system was, however, it was still an upgrade from the direct dumping Ciba was doing in Cincinnati and was typical for a large chemical factory in the 1950s.
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“The kind of treatment Ciba used was so rudimentary that it didn’t stand a chance of working, but that was true almost anywhere you looked at that time,” said James Etzel, a professor emeritus of environmental engineering at Purdue University and an authority on industrial waste treatment. “Based on what was in the technical literature at the time, Ciba would have known that the materials they were using, and that were finding their way into their wastewater, were not the kinds of things you’d put in your drink. Their hope was that if you discharge the chemicals [into the ground] they would just go away. As a result, they saved a lot of money on waste treatment.”
None of this would have mattered, at least not very much, if the
people of Toms River had gotten their drinking water someplace else. But the same characteristics that made the factory site so perfect for the company—sandy soil, a high water table, and the nearby river—also made the surrounding area the best place in town to find fresh drinking water. The township’s water provider, the Toms River Water Company, supplied the entire township from a shallow well two miles downstream from the chemical plant on Holly Street. In 1953, Toms River Water began using a second well at the same spot. The water company did not directly tap the river, but its two wells never ran dry because their constant pumping actually pulled river water out of the Toms. The water seeped through the riverbank and replenished the underground reservoir tapped by the two shallow wells, which were situated just a few hundred feet away.
Not everyone in town was a customer of Toms River Water. Many relied on their own backyard wells, including homeowners in the new Oak Ridge Estates subdivision, located about seven hundred feet east of the factory’s sludge dump and a half-mile from the settling lagoon, both of which had no protective liner and therefore leaked copiously. So if you lived in Oak Ridge Estates and got your water from your own well, or if you lived anywhere in town and were a customer of the water company, it was quite possible that you would eventually drink whatever Ciba was dumping into the ground and river.
Many years later, the question of whether the company should have known, even in the 1950s, that its waste-handling practices were dangerous was examined in a hard-fought court battle. After two trials and eleven years of litigation, a New Jersey superior court judge ruled in 1998 that Toms River Chemical had followed typical practices of the 1950s and 1960s and had not intended to contaminate the drinking water.
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Citing the testimony of a Ciba-Geigy expert witness who was a former top New Jersey environmental official, the judge declared that the factory’s wastewater treatment system at the time was one of the most advanced in the state among large manufacturers.
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Therefore, the judge ruled, its insurers would have to reimburse Ciba-Geigy for the full cost of cleaning up the company’s pollution between 1952 and 1984, when the insurance coverage ended. The total cost was reportedly more than $400 million.
But even if the pollution had not been deliberate, as the judge ruled, should the company have known better, even in the earliest years of the Toms River plant’s operation? After all, Ciba had been struggling with water pollution issues for decades in Basel, Cincinnati, and elsewhere, and there had already been many lawsuits over groundwater contamination from liquid waste dumped on sandy soil, including in New Jersey.
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By 1934, the standard textbook on chemical factory design was warning that “disposal of waste into a stream or river is no longer satisfactory” and that any factory that relies on “seepage through the ground” should make sure that water supplies are unaffected “in order to avoid trouble from neighboring plants or the local authorities.”
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“The risk to groundwater was very well known; any plant manager who was on top of his job should have been alert to these issues,” said Louisiana State University anthropologist Craig Colten, an expert on the waste-handling practices of that era.
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