Toms River

I lived in New Jersey for over 35 years and I'm kind of embarrassed I didn't hear this story. I only knew Toms River as the home of a Little League champion and the last exit on I-195 before the shore, but for years it was the loci of a struggle between chemical companies and local parents whose children had an abnormally high rate of cancer.

Dan Fagin, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, has written an exhaustively researched story that at times is exhausting to read. He leaves no stone unturned, whether it's the founding of the town to a basic history of epidemiology. He dutifully takes us through each phase of the story, starting with the use of coal tar to make chemicals for dying fabric, which is the function of a factory that a Swiss company named Ciba set up in Toms River in the 1950s: "The monument to coal tar chemistry that Ciba raised in the New Jersey pinelands was like no manufacturing complex the company had built."

Being it was the 1950s, the company was welcomed with open arms, and there were several jobs. It was only slowly, over the years, that noticeable effects took place, starting with the workers: "The first people to make the connection between the malodorous tap water and Toms River Chemical were plant employees...For them, the smell was nauseatingly familiar. They knew it from the factory's own drinking fountains, which drew from company wells that had been tainted with dye wastes since the mid-1950s. Almost no one drank from the fountains of Toms River Chemical--not more than once, anyway--and now the familiar smell was in their water at home, too."

To add another wrinkle, Fagin tells us the story of minor hoodlum who took money to dump toxic chemicals. He promised a small amount of money to a struggling egg farmer named Reich, and dumped several barrels of chemicals that he had obtained from Union Carbide. Those barrels leaked into the groundwater, and found their ways into the wells of the Toms River Water Company.

It wasn't until the 1970s that a noticeable uptick in childhood cancer surfaced. One such child was Michael Gillick, and his mother, Linda, became an advocate and a thorn in the side of many government agencies over the years. Ciba, like any corporation looking to make every cent possible, denied accusations that they had anything to do with cancer, and then had the bright idea to dump directly into the ocean. This spurred the reaction of Greenpeace, who had a pair of intrepid souls climb a Ciba water tower and unfurl a banner, giving Ciba more unwanted publicity.

Fagin's book goes through the stages--first the battle against Ciba, which eventually shut down all manufacturing (and moved it to Alabama) and then on to state and federal agencies, whose chemists had to figure out just what it was that causing this cancer cluster (one prime culprit is something called SAN trimer, but there so many chemical names that would make great plays in Scrabble that I can't possibly summarize them). Eventually the townspeople who were not affected were getting angry with those who were, as they were seen as driving away tourists and making Toms River the butt of a joke, another Love Canal. When the Little League team won the World Series, one parent waggishly said, "It must be something in the water."

The final stage is the legal one. The parents hired Jan Schlichtmann, who was already famous for the case that inspired the book and movie A Civil Action. Schlichtmann was left ruined after that case, and resolved to try to settle this one. I won't give away what happens, but I don't think I'd surprise anyone to suggest that the parents don't get anywhere near what they lost.

The book is so chock full of information that at times it becomes confusing--if this were made into a movie it would certainly skip over some parts. At first I questioned why he included so much medical history--how exactly does Paracelsus figure in this? But it was fascinating nonetheless. For example, a doctor with the magnificent name of Percival Pott first put two and two together that chimney sweeps--boys who were sent down Victorian chimneys, often naked, coming out coated with coal dust--were developing high rates of scrotal cancer. Or, "In 1854, when John Snow decided to investigate the cause of the cholera epidemic in the Soho section of London, he walked ten blocks from his office on Sackville Street to the heart of the outbreak zone and started knocking on doors. Within four days, he had pinpointed a likely cause and launched modern epidemiology."

Though this a well-written book, it is somewhat disheartening. There are heroic efforts described, by parents, researchers, and attorneys, but it remains true that really can't get full justice when it comes to battling large corporations. And there may well still be toxic chemicals leaking from Reich farm.