Toms River (9 page)

Because the Talty brothers and George Woolley all worked in laboratories at Toms River Chemical and not in a production building, they had a chance to see the entire factory complex. They quickly learned which places to dread. Building 102, the main vat dye production area, “was all benzene, chlorobenzene—all these solvents in this
really big dark building. It was the worst building that you could work in or even just walk through,” said Ray Talty. Explosions were a constant risk: On December 22, 1960, for example, on the second floor of Building 102, a pressurized kettle containing an explosive mixture of eight thousand pounds of tar, dye, and nitrobenzene burst and crashed through the floor to the ground level, blowing out dozens of windows and hurling chunks of iron forty feet in all directions. Workers “took cover wherever they were, some lying flat on the floor,” according to a company memo that blamed operator error for the accident.
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George Woolley was especially worried about the building where resins and specialty chemicals were made. “Some of the stuff that came out of Building 108 was very bad: epichlorohydrin, ethylene oxide and also toluene and xylene, but the epichlorohydrin overshadowed everything, it was bad stuff,” said Woolley. The phosgene gas was intimidating too. Even the labs could be dangerous places; the technicians were handling chemicals they knew almost nothing about. One day in the early 1960s, John Talty was accidentally soaked with dimethyl sulfate, a derivative of sulfuric acid that was later determined to be a likely carcinogen. The foreman sent him to the nurse, who told him to go home and take a shower. Afterward, while lathering up for a shave, he discovered that bleeding sores had opened up all over his face. Soon afterward, he decided to get involved in the factory’s union; his brother and Woolley later joined him.

Lurking behind the more conspicuous fears about fires, explosions, spills, and melting stockings was something darker. “You would hear stories about people working in the plant who got cancer, even back in the sixties. It wasn’t something people talked about back then, but it was there,” said Woolley. Most were older workers who had transferred from Cincinnati or Kimberton and had thus been exposed for decades. A few were much younger, including Jackie Talty, who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was twenty-six, four years after quitting the factory to have children. Another twenty years would pass before the first tentative efforts to find out whether the number of cancer cases among employees of Toms River Chemical was unusually high. No one wanted to ask during the go-go 1960s, when the community and the company were growing like crabgrass in
full sun. It was one thing for managers and employees to acknowledge the risk of fires and spills; it was quite another to face the possibility that merely breathing the factory’s air was a serious long-term health risk. “They were much more concerned about acute safety, about somebody getting burned or blown up, than they were about the exposures to toxic fumes day after day,” said Woolley. “As long as you didn’t drop dead on the spot, they didn’t care.”

If Paracelsus and Bernardino Ramazzini essentially invented occupational medicine, laying the foundations for all the environmental health research that would follow, it fell to others to turn their unconventional observations into a disciplined science. One of the first to do so was a physician with the mellifluous name of Percivall Pott, a short-statured dandy who always wore his powdered wig in public. He prospered as a surgeon catering to London’s upper classes in the mid-eighteenth century, but Pott was also an innovator who developed new surgical instruments and dressings as well as improved treatments for ailments ranging from hernias and spine injuries to skull fractures. He had a deep distrust of conventional surgical practices, many of which were akin to sanctioned butchery. In 1756, when he was forty-three years old, Pott fractured an ankle after being thrown by his horse. He insisted on lying on the cold ground for hours so that he could direct the construction of an improvised stretcher made from a carriage door and the poles from a sedan chair. Having thus devised a safe way to reach the hospital, Pott managed to avoid the standard treatment of the time, which was amputation.
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Despite his cultivated airs, Pott had the social conscience of a man who had grown up poor. His father died when he was just a toddler, so Pott relied on patrons to finance his medical education. He later returned the favor by housing destitute students and by treating the poor as well as the wealthy (his famous patients included the writer Samuel Johnson and the painter Thomas Gainsborough). As chief surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, founded in 1123, Pott was moved by the dire circumstances of London’s chimney sweep boys. As he would later write, “they are thrust up narrow, and sometimes hot chimneys, where they are bruised, burned and almost suffocated; and
when they get to puberty, become liable to a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease.”
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After the Great Fire in 1666 destroyed large parts of the city, London’s chimneys were rebuilt as long and narrow flues with tight turns and sharp angles. The passages were so narrow—sometimes no more than nine by fourteen inches—that only young boys, typically four to seven years old, could fit inside.
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Many were half-starved orphans exploited by avaricious masters, who justified the abuse on the grounds that dirty chimneys were a fire risk. Cleaning the flues was agonizing work; it was not uncommon for a “climbing boy” to get stuck and suffocate. Clothes increased the risk of becoming trapped, so sweeps in England generally worked in the nude, scraping their knees and elbows raw as they squirmed inside the brick labyrinths.
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They labored in a hellish murk of dust and smoke and often had to maneuver while carrying a mortar and trowel so that they could fill in cracks between the bricks and chip away the hardened soot. Because the boys bathed extremely rarely—in some cases just once a year—the soot clung to their bodies and was ground into any exposed abrasions.

What appalled Percivall Pott even more than the nightmarish working conditions, however, was the “noisome, painful and fatal disease” that many former chimney sweeps developed after puberty: cancer of the scrotum. Exactly when and how Pott first made the connection between the cancer patients he was treating at St. Bartholomew’s and their former occupation as chimney sweeps is unknown; he did not elaborate on that point in his extensive writings. We do not even know how many young men with scrotal tumors Pott treated before he was convinced. But it was a landmark moment nonetheless: the first medically documented identification of a cancer caused by a pollutant. Pott was not the first to speculate correctly about a cause of cancer; Ramazzini, for example, in 1700 rightly guessed that nuns had higher rates of breast cancer because of their childlessness, though he did not know why.
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But Percivall Pott moved from guesswork to meticulous observation and documentation of cases.

In 1775, when Pott finally wrote up his conclusions in an essay that
began with a tribute to Ramazzini, he evinced little doubt about the cause: “The disease, in these people, seems to derive its origin from the lodgment of soot in the rugae [skin folds] of the scrotum.” James Earle, in a biography of his father-in-law he published thirty-three years later, was even more specific: “This species of cancer, which Mr. Pott has so accurately described, appears to be produced by some peculiar acrimonious quality in soot, when incorporated and fermenting with the secretions on the skin on some persons, whose constitutions are disposed to undergo a certain change, or receive a new modification of their inherent properties.”
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In other words, there was something about soot, or something
in
soot, capable of causing cancer, and there was something about certain people, or something
in
certain people, that made them vulnerable to the assault.

In that single groping sentence, Percivall Pott’s son-in-law presaged the next two centuries of research into the carcinogenic effects of organic (carbon-based) chemicals. Chemists would spend the next two hundred years sorting out the components of soot and other byproducts of incineration. They would first separate those components into broad groupings like “coal tar” and “soot,” then smaller families such as “amines,” “phenols,” and “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” and finally a galaxy of specific molecules such as anthraquinone, benzidine, and benzo(a)pyrene. Most of the scientists engaged in those tasks would do so in the hopes of creating new manmade hydrocarbons—initially for dyes and then for medicines, plastics, and thousands of other uses. But a few unconventional researchers would choose the harder path, taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Paracelsus and Pott by searching for the “peculiar acrimonious quality” that made some of those manmade compounds so dangerous to the humans who handled them.

In the early years of the chemical plant in Toms River, it had been easier for managers to ignore or at least downplay signs that the factory was polluting groundwater and the river. But as the company expanded, the uncomfortable reality could not be avoided. The waste basins sometimes overflowed, and even when they did not, huge volumes of wastewater percolated down into the aquifer because most
of the holding ponds were unlined. Some of the worst chemicals used at the plant—including arsenic acid, which was supposed to be kept out of wastewater at all times, were sometimes poured directly into sewer drains in incidents the company invariably would later describe as mistakes.
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The wastewater system was not meeting the standards laid out in its permit, though there was still no indication that the state would enforce those standards.
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More ominous for Ciba were the signs that it had fouled its own water supply after just two years of operation. As early as the summer of 1954, employees complained that the water in the drinking fountains smelled and tasted awful. A few weeks later, the factory’s newly hired supervisor of waste disposal, Morris Smith, discovered the reason: Chemicals seeping out of an unlined wastewater basin had contaminated one of the wells that supplied the factory with fresh water.
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The well was 100 feet deep and 850 feet north of the closest wastewater lagoon—a startling indication of how quickly the liquid waste was moving through the porous soil. By 1956, Smith had determined that the chemical plume had spread more than two thousand feet from the lagoons and was expanding in all directions, including toward the river.
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Two years later, a consulting firm brought in by the company confirmed that all of the wastewater basins were leaking, even the lined ones; their supposedly impermeable asphalt bottoms had “become porous because of the corrosive nature of the waste water.”
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Worst of all, test wells at the eastern edge of the property showed that the plume of contaminated groundwater had spread beyond company-owned land and was creeping southeast toward the fast-growing Oak Ridge Estates neighborhood. The Toms River Water Company was gradually extending its mains into the subdivision, but some Oak Ridge families still got their drinking water from shallow wells in their backyards.

Just seven years had passed since the chemical plant had opened for business, but it was already obvious that even two square miles of land was not enough to contain its colossal waste flow. Something was going to have to change, especially after Ciba decided to close the Kimberton and Cincinnati plants in 1958 and shift more production to Toms River. If the company could not cope with the waste byproducts
of anthraquinone vat dye manufacturing, how could it possibly deal with the additional waste from azo dyes, epoxy resins, and all the other specialty chemicals that would soon be made at the newly renamed Toms River Chemical Corporation? The wastewater from azo dyes would be brightly colored and highly acidic, and the resin operation would add many new toxic compounds to the effluent. It could not be hidden or ignored.

The company could have responded to this challenge by redesigning its processes to reduce the amount of waste or by building a modern wastewater plant to provide more than rudimentary treatment. One of Ciba’s competitors, American Cyanamid, in 1958 had built an activated sludge treatment plant at its factory in Bound Brook, sixty miles north of Toms River. Ciba had considered building a similar one in Toms River as early as 1955, but building a modern treatment system would have been expensive.
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Even merely lining all of the existing basins with asphalt would have cost $100,000 and would have required shutting down the entire plant for three weeks.
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Toms River Chemical found a much cheaper solution: The company added a second liner to its initial holding basin and then dug a new set of unlined lagoons at the eastern border of its property, right beside the Toms River. Unlike the old settling lagoon, chemicals seeping out of the five new lagoons would not threaten the company’s remaining water wells, which were a half-mile away. Instead, waste leaking out of the new lagoons would go straight into the adjacent river.
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The riverside location was ironic, because the new lagoons were dug on the site of the “fish pond” that had been touted as an environmental showpiece in 1952 but had never been stocked with fish because of doubts that anything could survive. Now the pond was being bulldozed, enlarged, and transformed into yet another dump for barely treated waste. The State Department of Health could have insisted on a more effective treatment system, just as it could have back in 1952. But state officials did no such thing; instead, they rubber-stamped the company’s plan, concluding that it was consistent with the prevailing industry standard, and issued a new permit.

With the completion of the new lagoons by the river in 1959, virtually all of Toms River Chemical’s liquid waste was now ending up in
the beleaguered Toms. By now, the narrow stretch of river by the factory was little more than “a handy receptacle for chemical wastes left over from our manufacturing processes,” as a company newsletter candidly put it in 1961.
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The company had found a way to protect its own water supply, but more chemical pollution than ever was heading downstream toward the riverside wells on Holly Street that supplied the town with its public drinking water. It was a nice arrangement for Toms River Chemical, but not for the citizens of Toms River.