Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
DOVER TOWNSHIP -- The questions were flying fast and furious yesterday morning in Ocean County College's Lecture Hall.
"The cleanup of all these sites is mandatory, right?" one young man asked.
"Once something is designated a Superfund site, you can't keep dumping on it, can you?" another teen-ager wanted to know.
A young woman asked, "Who's paid for all the testing that's been going on?"
Linda L. Gillick, who chairs the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster, and Bruce and Melanie Anderson, members of Toxic Environment Affects Children's Health, a group of families of children with cancer, attempted to respond to each question posted by the group of Wagner College freshmen, and one query posed by one of their professors, Jonathan Peters.
"Can we drink the water?" asked Peters, an assistant professor of business at the Staten Island college.
"Yes, today I think you can drink the water," Gillick said.
Peters and Donald Stearns, chairman of the college's Department of Biological Sciences, brought about 30 Wagner freshmen to the township yesterday for a look at the ongoing investigation into elevated levels of some childhood cancers here.
The two professors chose the cancer investigation as the focus for a semesterlong project that has the students looking at environmental issues from both an economic and biological perspective. All Wagner freshmen are required to participate in a first semester "learning community," which focuses on a common theme by using an interdisciplinary approach.
Part of the learning community experience, Stearns said, is taking the students into the community to "bring a dose of reality to their education." After a briefing on the childhood cancer investigation and a history of Dover's contaminated sites, including the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. chemical plant and the Reich Farm Superfund site, students toured the township yesterday.
Stearns and Peters chose the childhood cancer investigation as the focus of this semester's project because they were seeking an environmental issue to study and found the investigation "dramatic and compelling."
Yesterday afternoon, students spent several hours interviewing cancer victims, family members, and other people whose views could be important to research papers the students must complete by the end of the semester, Stearns said.
Students have been divided into groups that will study various aspects of the childhood cancer investigation and its effect on the township, including legal and political issues, human health issues, environmental effects and community response.
"The most important thing is to try to get them involved," Peters said. "This project has been great. (The students) tend to be simplistic at this age. They think there are very simple answers to problems. This shows them that there are no simple answers."
Stearns said the students did not come to the township with a "particular agenda, or a particular slant. We want them to form their own opinions. . . . We want them to learn how to investigate and think critically about an issue. That's our goal."
The students will return to town Nov. 5 to tour the former Ciba-Geigy site and for some other activities.
During a break after yesterday morning's presentation, 19-year-old Dedrick Dye said he is interested in how long residents in Dover may have been drinking contaminated water without knowing it.
"When they determine a well is contaminated, it doesn't mean the contamination just got there," said Dye, who is from Tennessee.
Josh Jones, of Potsdam, N.Y., said visiting Dover and speaking to people affected by cancer "really draws you in and gets you involved."
"You meet the people and see your pain," said Jones, 18. "It really gets you angry at the companies and even the government. If we even throw a gum wrapper on the ground, we get a fine, but it doesn't really seem like anything will happen to these companies."
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: October 2, 1999
|
