Published in the Asbury Park Press
BY KIRK MOORE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER — A consultant for Dover Township this week began drawing the first water samples from monitoring wells at the old Ciba-Geigy Corp. plant as potential evidence in a civil lawsuit against the company, a lawyer working for the township said Tuesday.
"We're about halfway through the sampling process," lawyer Lori Grifa told residents at the Township Council meeting. "The samples will be submitted to a laboratory for testing and analysis," with results available in about a month, she said.
Council President Gregory McGuckin said he asked Grifa to brief the council and spectators about the status of litigation the township is pursuing against Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corp., the corporate heir of the old Ciba dyes and epoxies manufacturing plant that operated for nearly 40 years in western Dover.
Grifa said she grew up in the Toms River area and is a 1981 graduate of Toms River High School East. The case has her digging into the history of Ciba and her hometown too, particularly criminal investigations that state officials opened against the company in the 1980s.
"We have discovered by documents we received from the DEP (state Department of Environmental Protection) and the company that chemicals were found in the wells as far back as 1988," Grifa said. However, company lawyers deny a key point of the township's claim, that the contaminated water came from a newer, lined landfill that was in use at the plant site in the 1980s.
Now Grifa said she is seeking access to the names of all former Ciba workers and others who had knowledge about what kind of wastes went into the lined landfill, a request that will be the subject of a hearing Friday before Superior Court Judge Edward Oles, who is handling the case in Toms River.
Meanwhile, the township is seeking to subpoena all the state's old criminal files from the 1980s investigations, Grifa said. Since taking on the case last summer, Grifa said, the long process of exchanging requests for information between the township and the company has been "very contentious. . .and we're probably going to wind up fighting over almost everything."
Published in the Asbury Park Press 04/26/06
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