Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- To say Linda L. Gillick was frustrated after a meeting of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster last night would be an extreme understatement.
"I am thoroughly disgusted with tonight's meeting," said Gillick, who has chaired the citizens committee for the past eight years. "I'm disgusted with what I'm hearing tonight."
Gillick's comments came after a string of reports by state and federal environmental officials that appeared to displease and disappoint both citizens committee members and residents who attended the meeting.
"This has turned my stomach. It's gone from bad to worse," said resident Joseph Kotran, whose daughter, Lauren, 9, has battled nervous system cancer.
Gillick and Kotran's comments followed an announcement by James S. Blumenstock, deputy state health commissioner, that four Dover Township children have been diagnosed with cancer this year.
Gillick, who also heads Ocean of Love, a support group for families of children with cancer, said she is aware of seven children who have been diagnosed with cancer.
Gillick frequently learns of cases before the state does. None of the cases are leukemias, but one is a central nervous system cancer, Blumenstock said. Leukemia, brain and central nervous cancers were found to be elevated in township children, leading to a massive epidemiological study, the results of which were released in December 2001.
State officials have said about five childhood cancer cases would be expected annually in a town of Dover's size, although slight yearly variations are possible.
At the beginning of the meeting, Dorothy Canter, of the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, announced a lengthy delay in the crucial portion of an ongoing study that will attempt to determine if styrene acrylonitrile trimer, a chemical compound found in some United Water Toms River wells, can cause cancer in rats.
The trimer is part of a plume of groundwater contamination emanating from the Reich Farm Superfund site off Route 9 in the Pleasant Plains section. A carbon filtration system removes the trimer and other contaminants from well water before it enters United's drinking water system.
Later in the meeting, Gillick and fellow citizens committee members Stefany Gesser, Kim Pascarella and Kevin Root grew visibly frustrated following a report on testing of United's well water by state health and environmental officials.
Gesser asked why the citizens committee had not been provided with updated testing information about Well 20, a well that has been offline for most of the past several years because it contains elevated levels of radiation.
Gerald P. Nicholls, director of the state Division of Environmental Safety, Health and Analytical Problems, said if a well meets the state standards for radiation for a certain period of time, it is not tested as frequently. He said the drinking water in United's overall system always met the state's standards for the amount of radiation allowed in drinking water, even though Well 20 exceeded the standard of 15 picocuries per liter.
Joseph A. Gowers, EPA's remedial project manager for the Reich Farm site, said the agency plans to do additional testing at the property after about 660 parts per billion of the trimer were found in the soil there.
The discovery was made during a five-year review of the clean-up at Reich Farm, where independent trucker Nicholas Fernicola has admitted he dumped more than 4,000 drums of chemical waste from Union Carbide's Bound Brook plant in 1971.
Gowers said the levels of the trimer were below the clean-up requirement of under 10 parts per million for semi-volatile substances. When residents asked why the site could not be entirely cleaned up to remove all traces of the trimer, Gowers said that without data proving the substance is toxic or poses a hazard to humans, it would be difficult to force Carbide to remove all tainted soil from the land.
With the delay in the rat study, it will likely be several years before the toxicity of the trimer is known.
The two-year study, which will involve feeding varying amounts of the trimer to rats before and during pregnancy, and after the birth of the rat "pups," is the centerpiece of an ongoing toxicity study that will attempt to determine if the tri-mer is a potential human carcinogen.
Preliminary studies of the tri-mer have indicated that the only effects seen in rats dosed with the chemical has been decreased body weight at the highest doses of the compound.
Canter said the rat study was aborted in July because not enough of the animals became pregnant, there were not enough rat pups in the litters of those females who did become pregnant, and the baby rats were not healthy enough to continue.
Canter stressed that even the control group of rat pups, those who had not received any doses of the trimer, were sickly, noting that the illness of the animals was not related to the chemical compound. Canter said the study is not expected to start up again until January.
Even after the rat study is completed, it is expected to take at least a year or two more to analyze the results.
Published in the Asbury Park Press 10/05/04
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