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10-year fight leaves mistrust, worry
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Published in the Asbury Park Press
BY JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
Dover cancer committee carries on
DOVER TOWNSHIP — Don't count on the government to keep you safe.
If local cancer activists have learned one thing during the past decade, it's that the community must remain vigilant to protect itself.
"The voice the government hears needs to be a strong one," said Linda L. Gillick, who has led the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster since it was founded in 1996. "A strong voice comes from the community. Don't expect someone else to be involved. Get involved yourself. People don't become interested until after they are affected."
Township resident Bruce Anderson is president of Toxic Environment Affects Children's Health, or TEACH, a group for families of children with cancer. He shares Gillick's skepticism about government officials.
"You're the last line of defense for your family," said Anderson, whose 25-year-old son, Michael, is in remission after being diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia when he was 10. "We're all brought up to think that government is going to protect us, but it's not true."
Resident Joseph Kotran agrees.
"Government isn't there to solve our problems," said Kotran, whose daughter, Lauren, 11, has battled cancer of the nervous system. "They are there to manage them."
Gillick, Kotran and Anderson speak from long experience dealing with sometimes-reluctant government agencies.
Ten years ago, this sprawling suburban community was hit with frightening news: a state Health Department report that showed there were three times the expected rate of childhood brain and central nervous system cancers in a section of town bounded by Vaughn Avenue, Bay Avenue, the Garden State Parkway and the Toms River.
A plight ignored
The health department report caused a furor in a town where residents like Gillick had been attempting to sound the alarm about higher-than-normal cancer rates for years. Gillick had founded Ocean of Love, a support group for families of children with cancer, in 1988, and for years before 1996, she had expressed concern about the number of children with cancer in Dover.
She had also spent years lobbying state officials to update the New Jersey State Cancer Registry, which by 1997 had a seven-year backlog of unrecorded cancer cases. She pushed for Ocean County to be included in federal epidemiological studies of childhood cancer, but, until March 1996, nothing happened.
When news about the health department report broke 10 years ago, Herbert Roeschke, who then headed the Ocean County Health Department, at first noted that the report was based on a small number of cases that should not necessarily be cause for alarm. Roeschke quickly amended his statement to one of concern, but it was too late.
Residents responded by picketing the health department, and, at an emotional public meeting that drew more than 1,200 people, would not let then-state Health Commissioner Len Fishman speak for more than 90 minutes.
A short time later, the state health department and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Control announced the start of a massive study of childhood cancer in Dover, a study that cost $13 million and lasted for nearly six years.
The study drew associations between exposure to contaminated drinking water from United Water Toms River's Parkway well field and air emissions from the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. plant to elevated levels of leukemia in girls.
Scientists were unable to find an explanation for the higher-than-normal rates of brain and central nervous system cancers. They also were unable to explain why exposure to polluted water and Ciba's air emissions were not associated with elevated leukemia levels in boys.
Researchers have stressed that the small number of cancer cases studied in Dover Township makes it possible that the associations seen between air and water pollution and leukemia development in girls could be caused by mere chance.
"A high number"
The final epidemiological study was released three years ago. Gillick is pleased to note that the number of childhood leukemias diagnosed in Dover has fallen over the past several years, but is frustrated that there has been no corresponding reduction in brain and central nervous system cancers.
Gillick said she is aware of eight cases of children diagnosed with cancer in Dover last year, what she termed "a high number." In a town of Dover's size, with about 95,000 people, four to five new cases of childhood cancer can be expected to be diagnosed each year, state health officials have said.
"I think there has been a big improvement in the leukemias," she said. "But our biggest concern is the neurological, and it's still high in the county. It alone says, "We're not done.' "
Gillick's own son, Michael, who is also a member of the citizens committee, has battled neuroblastoma, a nervous system cancer, for almost all of his 27 years.
Gillick, Anderson and other activists point out that much more work needs to be done to protect Dover, and other communities, from environmental hazards.
Preventing contamination
"Is there something in place to prevent what happened here?" asked Kim Pascarella, a member of the citizens committee who lost his 14-month-old daughter, Gabrielle, to neurological cancer in 1990. "There is nothing."
Pascarella, the treasurer of TEACH, continues to press for legislation that would require water systems located near hazardous waste sites to be tested for the chemicals that are dumped in those sites. There is no requirement to do so, and Pascarella and other members of TEACH believe such a testing program could have prevented much of the water contamination problems here.
"The Toms River case was preventable," Pascarella said. "They found the contamination right away, they knew the chemicals that were dumped, and they just didn't test for them."
Pascarella is referring to the history of United Water Toms River's Parkway well field.
In the summer and fall of 1974, Ocean County's public health coordinator, Charles I. Kauffman, asked that a carbon filtration system be installed on Well 26, a public drinking water well then owned by the Toms River Water Co.
Kauffman made his request 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, a former poultry farm off Route 9 where 4,500 drums of chemical waste from Union Carbide Corp.'s Bound Brook plant had been dumped by an independent trucker in 1971.
State officials began an investigation after receiving Kauffman's request, but eventually the state Department of Environmental Protection determined there was no evidence chemical contaminants had reached the public drinking water supply.
Researchers now estimate that the plume of contamination reached the Parkway well field by 1982, but the pollutants were not found until 1987. At that time, chemical contaminants, including tricholoroethylene, were found in three wells, including Well 26.
New controversy
Unless residents remain vigilant, something similar could happen again, the activists fear.
They say that recent developments involving United Water show the need for residents to become involved.
"Be involved, get involved, help out by writing letters to senators, the governor, etc., whatever it takes to get things done," is the advice Anderson gives to concerned residents.
In October, United Water was fined $104,000 by the state Department of Environmental Protection for exceeding its state water allocation permit in three of the past five years. The DEP banned new connections to United's system in early September, a move that has essentially stopped almost all construction in Dover, South Toms River and the Holiday City and Silver Ridge sections of Berkeley.
Published in the Asbury Park Press 03/20/06
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