wondering whether they had been poisoned in 1974. “All of our wells were contaminated, and we did drink it for a period of time until we got city water,” recalled William Hyres, whose auto body shop was about two thousand feet from Reich Farm. “Did anyone get sick because of it? I don’t know. It did stain our clothes, I know that.”
The county and town health departments made a halfhearted attempt to find out whether an unusual number of people had gotten sick in Pleasant Plains that summer, but it was quickly dropped. In June, just after news of the contamination appeared in the local newspapers, the county health department conducted a cursory health survey, questioning twenty-three randomly selected families in Pleasant Plains. Fifteen reported at least one recent illness involving the kidneys, stomach, liver, or gallbladder, but that group included several whose water was unaffected; meanwhile, some other families known to have consumed tainted water reported no illness at all. Since there was no obvious correlation, the county dropped the investigation without any follow-up to look for longer-term health problems. “We didn’t have the expertise to do it, and I had almost no staff at all at that point,” Chuck Kauffman explained many years later. At the time of the Pleasant Plains contamination, Kauffman was still new on the job, having been appointed the county’s first health coordinator in 1973.
Twenty-five years later, when the entire town was in an uproar over cancer and pollution and a multimillion-dollar health study was under way to examine links to tainted water, no one ever tried to look back at what had happened to the residents of Pleasant Plains, despite the well-documented contamination there. Informally, the talk of illnesses would persist for years. At the butcher shop, Ernest Nagel’s father, also named Ernest, died of leukemia in 1976. The senior Nagel had drunk copious amounts of water from a shallow well behind theshop—and kept doing so even after it started to smell in 1974. The following year, the Nagels joined a class-action suit against Union Carbide that was eventually settled out of court with modest payments from the company—barely enough to repay residents for the expense of connecting to public water mains. “The lawyer said there was nothing else we could do,” Nagel said, “so the whole thing was just dropped.”
Elsewhere in Toms River, the tribulations of Pleasant Plains provoked sympathy but very little anxiety. The articles on the topic that appeared in the local papers during the summer of 1974 invariably described the contamination as a localized problem, one that would go away as soon as the neighborhood was linked up to the Toms River Water Company’s distribution system. The subtext could not have been clearer: Backyard wells were dangerous; city water was safe. The news stories avoided the awkward fact that six of Toms River Water’s newest and most important supply wells—three of them just 125 feet deep—were only one mile south of Reich Farm and therefore in the path of the contamination plume as it crept southward from the illegal dump. Nor was there any talk about how the speed and direction of that underground plume might be influenced by another uncomfortable fact: Those six new public wells in the Parkway well field were running at full capacity, sucking in more than two million gallons of groundwater every day, as the Toms River Water Company labored to keep up with burgeoning demand.
In truth, there was already reason to worry. In June of 1974, Union Carbide tested a water sample from one of the Parkway wells and found petrochemical concentrations of between three and ten parts per million—at least four times higher than the state’s informal guideline of no more than 700 parts per billion. The state Department of Environmental Protection then did its own tests and found solvents in four Parkway wells, though at lower levels. The highest
The county and town health departments made a halfhearted attempt to find out whether an unusual number of people had gotten sick in Pleasant Plains that summer, but it was quickly dropped. In June, just after news of the contamination appeared in the local newspapers, the county health department conducted a cursory health survey, questioning twenty-three randomly selected families in Pleasant Plains. Fifteen reported at least one recent illness involving the kidneys, stomach, liver, or gallbladder, but that group included several whose water was unaffected; meanwhile, some other families known to have consumed tainted water reported no illness at all. Since there was no obvious correlation, the county dropped the investigation without any follow-up to look for longer-term health problems. “We didn’t have the expertise to do it, and I had almost no staff at all at that point,” Chuck Kauffman explained many years later. At the time of the Pleasant Plains contamination, Kauffman was still new on the job, having been appointed the county’s first health coordinator in 1973.
Twenty-five years later, when the entire town was in an uproar over cancer and pollution and a multimillion-dollar health study was under way to examine links to tainted water, no one ever tried to look back at what had happened to the residents of Pleasant Plains, despite the well-documented contamination there. Informally, the talk of illnesses would persist for years. At the butcher shop, Ernest Nagel’s father, also named Ernest, died of leukemia in 1976. The senior Nagel had drunk copious amounts of water from a shallow well behind theshop—and kept doing so even after it started to smell in 1974. The following year, the Nagels joined a class-action suit against Union Carbide that was eventually settled out of court with modest payments from the company—barely enough to repay residents for the expense of connecting to public water mains. “The lawyer said there was nothing else we could do,” Nagel said, “so the whole thing was just dropped.”
Elsewhere in Toms River, the tribulations of Pleasant Plains provoked sympathy but very little anxiety. The articles on the topic that appeared in the local papers during the summer of 1974 invariably described the contamination as a localized problem, one that would go away as soon as the neighborhood was linked up to the Toms River Water Company’s distribution system. The subtext could not have been clearer: Backyard wells were dangerous; city water was safe. The news stories avoided the awkward fact that six of Toms River Water’s newest and most important supply wells—three of them just 125 feet deep—were only one mile south of Reich Farm and therefore in the path of the contamination plume as it crept southward from the illegal dump. Nor was there any talk about how the speed and direction of that underground plume might be influenced by another uncomfortable fact: Those six new public wells in the Parkway well field were running at full capacity, sucking in more than two million gallons of groundwater every day, as the Toms River Water Company labored to keep up with burgeoning demand.
In truth, there was already reason to worry. In June of 1974, Union Carbide tested a water sample from one of the Parkway wells and found petrochemical concentrations of between three and ten parts per million—at least four times higher than the state’s informal guideline of no more than 700 parts per billion. The state Department of Environmental Protection then did its own tests and found solvents in four Parkway wells, though at lower levels. The highest
Similar Books
