Toms River by Dan Fagin Read Free Book Online Page A

nearby egg-farm-turned-dumpsite known as Reich Farm. Like most residents of Toms River, the Gillicks lived east of the chemical plant—downwind, since the prevailing winds came from the west. And like many other families in town, their water came primarily from two well fields operated by the Toms River Water Company: the Holly wells, just downstream from the chemical plant, and the Parkway wells, a mile south of Reich Farm. In the early 1980s, those geographic proximities had no particular resonance to the Gillicks or anyone else in Toms River. The air smelled all right, and the tap water looked fairly clear—even if the water pressure was annoyingly low during the summer. So many people were moving into town that the water company always seemed to be struggling to keep up.
    It was not surprising that the condition of the air and water in Toms River had escaped the attention of even alert citizens like the Gillicks. Some of the contamination problems were invisible and others were masked, such as the nighttime smokestack emissions. Behind its thick curtain of trees, Toms River Chemical was spending as little money on pollution control as it could. The company’s executives had been explicit about this in 1968, according to an internal memo describing their reaction to a report on various waste treatment options: “After review of this report by top management, the policy of making these expenditures only as fast as absolutely necessary was stated.” 12
    Environmental upgrades were “all money losers,” as one managerput it, and in the early 1970s Toms River Chemical was making more money than ever. In 1973, the company produced a record 131 million pounds of dyes, resins, and other chemicals—up from 78 million in 1963. Fourteen hundred employees, also a record, toiled in thirty buildings on the huge factory complex, which was now owned by a new corporate entity: the newly merged Ciba-Geigy Corporation. 13 For all the growth and change, however, the company’s waste-handling practices had changed very little, except that most of its wastewater now went into the ocean instead of the river. Toms River Chemical still sent liquid waste to unlined lagoons and dumped almost nine thousand drums a year “over the edge of a cliff” and into an unlined pit, spilling their toxic contents. 14 Until the state finally put a stop to it in 1970, workers still ignited solvents in “smudge pot” standpipes and burned an “almost unbelievable array” of waste chemicals in an archaic tepee-style incinerator. 15 The company actually had two tepees, but one blew its top, volcano-style, when a drum inside it exploded. “Now they have a topless tepee,” observed a bemused contractor. 16 There were other accidents, too, including three fires at the drum pit in 1968 alone.
    In a brutally frank presentation to company managers in 1969, a newly arrived engineer named William Bobsein detailed all of the pollution-related messes at Toms River Chemical. Sixteen years later, Bobsein’s career would take a turn for the worse, but back in 1969 he had inherited James Crane’s role as in-house doomsayer, a teller of hard truths who lacked the power to fix the problems he saw. Tougher state regulations were coming soon, but the company was unprepared for them, Bobsein told the managers, punctuating his toxic tour of the plant with what he called “dirty pictures”—color slides of “drum mountains” and “drum cemeteries … despoiling the countryside” plus rooftop photos of “intense smoke” emitted by the factory’s many stacks. 17
    Few residents of Toms River knew or cared about a litany of environmental ills they could not see or even smell most of the time. But in the world outside, attitudes were changing. The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, was an epochal event, attracting twenty million Americans to hundreds of rallies and rocketing environmental protectionfrom obscurity to a top-tier national concern. In Toms River, the