Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
DOVER TOWNSHIP -- More than 25 years ago, Ocean County's public health coordinator asked that a carbon filtration system be installed on a well in the Toms River Water Co.'s parkway well field.
The filters were never installed, and eventually, a plume of groundwater contamination from the Reich Farm Superfund site seeped into the well field. The plume included volatile organic pollutants, including trichloroethylene, a suspected human carcinogen.
Researchers estimate that the plume reached the Parkway well field by 1982, but the pollutants were not found until 1987, when chemical contaminants were found in three wells, including Well 26, where now-retired county Public Health Coordinator Charles I. Kauffman had asked that a filter be installed.
The Reich Farm plume was in the news again last week, when officials from the state Department of Health and Senior Services and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry announced that an association had been found between exposure to high amounts of water from the Parkway well field and leukemia development in girls.
For the period of 1984 to 1996, girls in the study who developed leukemia were 15 times more likely to have been exposed to high levels of water from the parkway wells than "control group" children who did not develop cancer.
To many Dover Township families of children with cancer, the example of what happened at Reich Farm underscores their belief that government agencies did not do enough in the past to protect the safety of residents here.
"I feel that our government agencies let us down, especially with Reich Farm," said Bruce Anderson, whose 20-year-old son, Michael, is in remission after a struggle with leukemia that began when he was 10. "They failed to install filters in 1974 when they were first requested. . . . I don't think the government agencies have been looking out for us. If they had been, maybe we would not even be here in a cancer cluster now. Maybe the children wouldn't have had to go through what they've gone through, which is to hell and back."
State and federal officials were quick to point out that the limited number of cases included in the study make it impossible to draw concrete conclusions from the results. Mere chance remains a possible explanation for the study's conclusions, they said.
But to families of children with cancer, the association between leukemia in girls and polluted drinking water confirms a long-held belief that environmental contamination led to elevated childhood cancer levels here.
Along with that conviction is the equally strong belief that government agencies entrusted with protecting public health instead let the people of Dover Township down.
"I think we need to remind people of the mistakes that you can make," said Kim Pascarella, a member of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster who lost his 14-month-old daughter, Gabrielle, to neurological cancer in 1990. "Mistakes were made over a long period of time, not keeping a closer eye on these wells."
In the summer and fall of 1974, Kauffman asked that a filtration system be placed on Well 26, shortly after chemical pollutants, including trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, were found in dozens of private wells in the area. Eventually the state condemned 148 private wells in the area.
The pollutants had seeped into the private wells from Reich Farm, located off Route 9 in Dover's Pleasant Plains section. Well 26 was located closest to Reich Farm, where 4,500 drums of chemical waste from Union Carbide Corp.'s Bound Brook plant had been dumped by an independent trucker in 1971. It was also the well that had the highest levels of contamination from the plume.
State officials began an investigation after receiving Kauffman's request, but eventually the state Department of Environmental Protection determined there was no evidence that chemical contaminants had reached the public drinking water supply.
Two years ago, Gerald P. Nicholls, director of the DEP's Division of Environmental Safety, Health and Analytical Programs, told the citizens committee that monitoring wells, to test for the migration of pollutants, had been installed near the parkway well field from 1974 until sometime in 1975. The testing of those wells was then discontinued, Nicholls said.
After pollutants were discovered in the well field in 1987, air-stripping devices, which remove volatile organic pollutants from well water, were installed on parkway wells 26 and 28. As part of the Superfund cleanup at Reich Farm, the federal Environmental Protection Agency chose to use those two wells to control and treat the underground contamination plume.
Water from the wells was cleaned with the air strippers and then placed back into the public drinking water system, a practice used at Superfund sites nationwide, EPA officials have said.
Carbon filters can remove volatile organic pollutants that air strippers take out of water, but they are also effective at removing more solid compounds.
In November 1996, a previously unknown compound, styrene acrylonitrile trimer, was discovered in wells 26 and 28. The trimer, whose toxicity is not yet known, was not removed by the air-stripping system. Carbon filtration was eventually installed on the two wells, along with wells 22 and 29, two other shallow wells in the parkway field, which is now owned by United Water Toms River.
Published on December 23, 2001
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