Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE and LYNN DUCEY
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- The battle lines have been drawn.
On one side are four lawyers, who last week filed a class-action suit claiming the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. is responsible for contaminating the water supply in Dover Township and should pay for medical monitoring to detect potential health problems in people exposed to polluted water.
"We felt it was time to hold the company accountable for their past conduct," said West Orange lawyer Michael Gordon. The former lawyer for the state Department of Environmental Protection is one of those who filed the suit in state Superior Court, here, on Thursday.
On the other side are officials at Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corp., the successor to Ciba-Geigy, who say the company "fully intends to defend" its belief that there is no connection between past pollution at the company's Toms River site and any health problems that have been experienced by Dover Township residents.
"We don't believe the site has impacted public health," said Ciba spokeswoman Donna M. Jakubowski.
Christopher Placitella, a Colts Neck lawyer who filed the suit along with Gordon, Norman Hobbie and Angelo Cifaldi, said Friday that he expects the legal battle to be "hard-fought" and lengthy.
But the timing of the lawsuit, filed in the midst of an ongoing state and federal investigation into elevated levels of some childhood cancers here, has raised concerns among members of Toxic Environment Affects Children's Health, or TEACH, a group of nearly 70 local families of children with cancer.
TEACH members have been represented for more than two years by lawyers Jan Schlictmann, Mark Cuker and Esther E. Berezofsky, but the group has chosen to enter into agreements to share information with Ciba, Union Carbide Corp. and United Water Toms River, and has agreed not to sue the three companies while information is being exchanged.
Berezofsky said the group's second 18-month agreement with the three companies will not expire until January 2001.
Schlictmann became famous when his eight-year battle to prove that polluted drinking water in Woburn, Mass., had caused a childhood leukemia cluster was documented in the best-selling book, "A Civil Action." Schlictmann has since advocated attempting to reach negotiated settlements between parties in environmental cases, instead of taking matters to court.
Schlictmann has not ruled out filing suit on behalf of the Toms River families, but he has repeatedly said that cooperation among the parties leads to a greater information exchange than legal action.
That opinion is not shared by Placitella, who said he is disappointed that some people seem to feel that the class-action suit will hurt the investigation into childhood cancers here.
"The problem is there is only so much material that a company is going to give you outside of litigation," Placitella said. "Even with the power of the subpoena, it's hard to get information. No company out of the goodness of their heart is going to provide everything."
The suit was filed on behalf of Linda S. Breen of Central Avenue; George D. Trustan, formerly of Cranmore Drive and now living in Lacey; and Laura Piccirillo, Cedar Row. The plaintiffs represent a larger group of residents who lawyers Hobbie, Cifaldi, Gordon and Placitella claim were exposed to volatile organic contaminants that leached into drinking water from the Ciba site.
The suit seeks unspecified amounts of compensatory and punitive damages, and claims Breen, Trustan and Piccirillo were "exposed, via ingestion, inhalation and dermal contact, to said contaminants."
Breen, Trustan and Piccirillo declined to comment, referring all questions to the lawyers.
In a statement released Friday, TEACH members said they have been able to "establish lines of communication with potentially responsible parties as well as governmental agencies" in their ongoing search for answers as to why so many Dover children have developed cancer.
"We did not authorize and we are not participating in the lawsuit that was filed," the statement said. "We also fervently hope that the filing of this lawsuit will not shut down the flow of information between those parties actively involved in the investigation of the childhood cancer cluster in our community. ... It is also our hope that the progress we have made is not impeded and the search and inquiry into the reasons for the childhood cancers is not thwarted."
Gordon said the lawyers decided to file their suit following the February release of a public health assessment on the Ciba site by the state Department of Health and Senior Services, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
The health assessment, completed as part of the ongoing study of elevated levels of childhood cancer, concluded people who lived in Dover Township in 1965 and 1966 may have been exposed to traces of aniline-based dyes and nitrobenzene from the Ciba-Geigy Corp. that seeped into three wells used by the Toms River Water Co., now known as United Water Toms River. About 35,500 people used public water in Dover in the 1965-66 time period.
Another pathway for toxins from the Ciba-Geigy property was contaminated ground water pumped into homes in the Cardinal Drive neighborhood through private wells. Cardinal Drive is next to the plant property.
Gordon said that the report documents, for the first time, a "completed exposure pathway for thousands and thousands of residents who were exposed to those chemicals through the public water supply."
None of the plaintiffs are ill now, but Hobbie said Thursday the lawyers are considering filing another suit on be-half of those already stricken.
The suit also names as defendants officials who worked for Ciba-Geigy, including William P. Bobsein, manager of the environmental technical depart-ment at the Toms River plant, and James A. McPherson, of Toms River, the plant's former supervisor of solid waste processing.
Bobsein could not be reached for com-ment, but a woman who answered the McPherson phone yesterday said the family already "went through this" and said she was very upset by the news of the lawsuit.
In 1985, Bobsein and McPherson were among four Ciba officials indict-ed by the state and charged with illegally disposing of toxic wastes from the plant in landfills and the ocean from 1974 to 1984. Bobsein and McPherson entered guilty pleas and paid fines of $25,000 each.
The four lawyers have said the public health assessment was the impetus for filing the suit, but state health officials have repeatedly stressed that such assessments are not designed to determine the cause of disease in a community. Instead, consultations "document what is known about site contamination, human exposure and the implications for public health," health department spokesman Dennis McGowan said.
Gordon said the lawyers did not want to wait for the completion of the childhood cancer investigation, which has been going on for more than three years. A massive epidemiological study of families of children with can-cer, which compares them to families whose children did not contract the disease, is scheduled for completion in late spring or early summer 2001.
"My experience is that the comple-tion of this investigation by the gov-ernment is subject to the availability of funds and political whim," Gordon said.
Staff writer Lynn Ducey contributed to this story.
Published on May 21, 2000
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