Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- Lawyers have filed additional complaints against United Water Toms River and the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. on behalf of 100 more people who believe they were harmed by contaminated water and air from the chemical plant.
The latest suit was filed yesterday by lawyers Norman M. Hobbie, Christopher Placitella, Michael Gordon and Angelo Cifaldi.
Last month, the four lawyers filed an initial suit alleging that 201 people lost loved ones, suffered severe emotional distress, or live in fear of contracting cancer because Ciba, now called Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corp., was negligent in disposing of hazardous waste from its dye manufacturing operations, while United Water Toms River failed to protect the purity of the public water supply.
"The additional people who are filing . . . against Ciba-Geigy and the water company fulfill our worse fears that this problem is massive in nature and that thousands of people apparently suffered unnecessarily through their exposure to hazardous chemicals," Gordon said yesterday.
The same four lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit earlier this year, claiming Ciba contaminated Dover's drinking water, and seeking payment from the company for medical monitoring to detect potential health problems in people exposed to polluted water. United Water was not included as a defendant in the class-action suit.
The lawsuits filed last month and yesterday also seek medical monitoring, and also name the water company as a defendant. The most recent suits also seek compensatory and punitive damages for more than 300 people, who include those who have lost family members to cancer and other illnesses.
Hobbie said the additional suit resulted from more people coming forward to claim injuries caused by exposure to hazardous chemicals from Ciba's dye manufacturing operations. Hobbie said he expects additional suits to be filed on behalf of more clients.
The suit also names as defendants officials who worked for Ciba-Geigy, including William P. Bobsein, former manager of the environmental technical department at the Toms River plant, and James A. McPherson, the plant's former supervisor of solid waste processing.
"While everybody was worrying about the big pipe going to the ocean, no one was worrying about the little pipes going into their houses," Placitella said yesterday, referring to Ciba's ocean outfall pipeline.
Ciba's Dover Township site has been on the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list of hazardous waste sites since 1982. Roseland-based lawyer Michael Rodburg, Ciba's corporate attorney, said company officials were aware additional lawsuits were to be filed.
Rodburg said yesterday that he has not seen the latest suits and could not comment on them, but he stressed again that Ciba intends to vigorously defend its belief that it has never harmed anyone in Toms River.
United Water spokesman Richard Henning said United Water officials would have no additional comment, preferring to again reiterate previous statements stressing that drinking water supplied by United meets all state and federal drinking water standards.
Exhibit "A" in the lawsuit filed yesterday is the Feb. 29 public health assessment on the Ciba site, completed by state and federal health officials as part of the ongoing childhood cancer investigation in Dover.
The health assessment concluded that people who lived in Dover in 1965 and 1966 may have been exposed to traces of aniline-based dyes and nitrobenzene from Ciba that seeped into three wells used by 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.
Exhibit "B" in the lawsuit is the same as it was in the suit filed last month - a 1961 memorandum by J.A. Meier, a former employee of Toms River Chemical Co., Ciba-Geigy's predecessor.
Meier toured the plant with a newspaperman and several representatives from the New Jersey Fish & Wildlife Commission on Aug. 8, 1961, and observed a fungus condition in the Toms River that manifested itself in a slimy, brownish, organic matter.
"I feel we are constantly skirting on the thin edge regarding our wastewater treatment problems," Meier wrote following the tour. "Furthermore, these problems will get greater in the future, as the population of the area increases and presumably our plant operations become greater."
As the lawyers have continued their research, additional internal docu-ments have come to light, including a Jan. 30, 1970 memorandum from Bobsein to Meier in which Bobsein discusses the opinion of Toms River Chemical's chemical dump operation expressed by Charles Gingrich, then director of the state Department of Health's solid waste disposal program.
Noting that Gingrich had commented that "Toms River Chemical has the only captive landfill for chemicals which is any good; they never give us any trouble," Bobsein added that Gingrich had never even seen the compa-ny's landfill.
"We have had visits by 'dump detectives' from his office who obviously didn't understand what we were burying," Bobsein wrote.
Hobbie said, "The documentation that we have reviewed to date establishes air, water and soil contamination, the magnitude of which is staggering."
He said the four lawyers have made a motion to consolidate all the lawsuits into one larger suit. The motion is scheduled to be heard by Ocean County Superior Court Judge Edward M. Oles on Sept. 22.
Published on September 7, 2000
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