Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- Sharon Miller sees it as a validation. Linda L. Gillick describes it as vindication.
On Tuesday, other interested residents will be able to review public health assessments of Dover Township's old landfill and the Reich Farm Superfund site, being released by the state Department of Health and Senior Services and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry after three years of research.
The documents, which also will be available tomorrow to people who attend the monthly meeting of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster, label both sites as past public health hazards because contaminants from the two sites leached into ground water and reached private and public water supplies.
The conclusions of federal and state health officials are no surprise to Miller, a Silverton Road resident whose private well was contaminated in the late '80s by pollutants state environmental officials linked to the landfill.
"I think it validates what we were feeling all along and what we've known all along," Miller said yesterday. "It also helps the people of Dover Township realize that it's not just a Silverton Road problem. It's a Dover Township problem."
For Gillick, who heads the citizens action committee, the reports vindicate the committee's aggressive pursuit of information about past contamination, as well as remediation to clean up pollutants that have been discovered more recently.
"We knew that there was a possibility of contamination in the past," said Gillick, whose 20-year-old son, Michael, has battled neuroblastoma, a form of cancer, almost since infancy. She said committee members have worked hard to make sure all past and present "pathways of exposure," to potential cancer-causing agents are brought to light.
But while the reports say the landfill and Reich Farm posed a health hazard in the past, they do not make a direct connection between past contamination of private and public drinking water supplies and the elevated levels of some types of childhood cancer here.
Any such links will have to wait for the conclusion of a massive epidemiological study of families of children with cancer, state and federal health officials say.
"It was never intended to be a process or a product that tries to establish a causal relationship," Juan Reyes, director of regional operations for the Atlanta-based Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said of the health assessments.
Health assessments on the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. Superfund site off Route 37 West and the township's public drinking water supply are due in the fall.
The reports also conclude that Reich Farm and the landfill no longer pose a public health hazard because of ongoing mitigation efforts at the two sites.
Private wells polluted by a plume of groundwater contamination from Reich Farm were sealed and capped in the mid-1970s, and public wells also contaminated by the plume had air stripping systems installed in 1988 and additional filtration put on over the past three years. The farm site, which has been cleaned of contamination, is located about a mile north of a public well field off Dugan Lane.
In the landfill area, private wells that were contaminated by chemicals from the old dump were condemned and sealed in the late 1980s.
Dover Township Committeeman George E. Wittmann Jr., who regularly attends the monthly meetings of the citizens action committee, said he was pleased that the landfill is no longer considered a public health threat.
"I was very pleased by their conclusion," Wittmann said. ""It's important to note that after they studied the landfill, they found it no longer poses a health hazard."
Township officials have been working with the state Department of Environmental Protection to investigate the landfill's impact on ground water in the area near the dump, which is located between Church Road and Bay Avenue.
Reyes said researchers classify a site by weighing all available evidence, including environmental and health data, as well as community concerns, to determine whether exposure to hazardous substances at a particular site can cause harm to people.
The public health assessment helps researchers to decide what follow-up actions should be taken regarding contaminated sites. In the case of Reich Farm, researchers recommend continued monitoring of United Water Toms River's parkway well field, which has been contaminated by pollutants from the farm site off Route 9.
Potential exposures to chemicals caused by both the landfill and Reich Farm will be considered in the ongoing epidemiological study.
Drums of Union Carbide Corp.'s chemical waste were dumped at both Reich Farm and the landfill in the early 1970s. Volatile organic contaminants from Reich Farm reached private drinking water wells in Dover's Pleasant Plains section as early as 1974, researchers said.
By 1986, volatile organics, including trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, were found in public drinking water wells.
Scientists also believe styrene acrylonitrile trimer, a chemical compound related to plastics production, was present in the wells by 1986, even though scientists first discovered the compound in the parkway well field in 1996, using more sophisticated tests.
The trimer's toxicity is not known, and Carbide is paying for an ongoing study that will attempt to determine if the compound can cause cancer in humans.
Dr. Jerald A. Fagliano, a state epidemiologist, said Reich Farm was deemed a past public health hazard because of the potentially large number of people exposed to contaminants in drinking water, and previous epidemiological studies of other communities that indicate that exposure to trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene may increase the risk of some childhood cancers and adverse neurological problems.
He said, however, that the low levels of contaminants found in drinking water polluted by the Reich Farm plume are not normally linked to adverse health effects. But researchers are uncertain about the levels of past chemical exposure, and also cannot pinpoint exactly when the plume reached the public water supply.
The township's old landfill also posed a public health hazard in the past, after pollutants seeped into at least nine nearby private wells by the late 1980s. Volatile organic contaminants and lead were found in the wells, which were capped and sealed.
Levels of lead found in three of the wells were high enough to be hazardous to a developing fetus or child, Fagliano said.
Researchers also looked at an area in the Silverton section where volatile organic chemicals were found in 20 private wells. Fagliano said this area is about one mile east of the landfill, but the source of the pollutants has never been found.
In 16 of the 20 wells tested, levels of volatile organics were high enough to cause public health concern, Fagliano said. Damage to liver and kidneys, and a low increase in cancer risk, can be associated with the levels of chemicals found, researchers said.
The length of time people were exposed to the pollutants is not known, so health effects are difficult to judge, Fagliano said.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: August 1, 1999
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