Toms River (27 page)

Ciba-Geigy’s security guards would surely be child’s play for a man who could outsmart the Australian Air Force, Rapaport thought. Sprunt was not so sure. Even if he made it up the water tower, Sprunt knew that he would eventually be arrested for trespassing. He worried about what his parents would think, and whether the university would cut off his doctoral stipend. But Sprunt liked his Greenpeace friends and believed in their cause. So, a few hours before dawn on Monday morning, July 30, he and Bev Baker put on hard hats (so that they would look like workers from a distance) and slipped over the fence and onto the vast factory grounds. Thanks to the earlier reconnaissance missions, they had a hand-drawn map and knew how to maneuver through the road grid to reach the water tower. They ran in a
crouch, stopping only to duck behind some drums when they saw the headlights of a patrol car. After what felt like a long time to Sprunt, they made it to the center of the complex and saw the shadow of the tower looming in front of them. First, though, they had to cross an open area beside two buildings. The lights were on, and they could hear the voices of some night shift workers. The two paused to consider their options. “We had the element of surprise,” Sprunt said, “and I figured that even if they saw us they wouldn’t know what to do, so we decided to continue the crouch run. We just had to hope there wasn’t something locked, like a gate, at the bottom of the ladder.”

They were in luck. There was no lock. The pair started climbing the ladder, which was more than 120 feet high. Their backpacks would not fit underneath the protective cage that encircled the ladder, so they decided to try to carry their sleeping bags, food, and a large banner up by hand. That proved disastrous when, halfway up the ladder, Baker dropped the banner. “I watched it sickeningly spiral down the tube and hit the bottom, and I thought, ‘Oh God, that’s the one thing we can’t lose,’ ” Sprunt said. He waited to make sure that no one was coming to investigate, then climbed down to grab it while Baker continued to the top. A few minutes after beginning his second ascent, Sprunt dropped his sleeping bag and had to go back down a second time. By the time he finally made it all the way up he was exhausted, and collapsed on the narrow catwalk that would be his home for the next two and a half days.

At the eight o’clock shift change, several hundred Ciba-Geigy workers looked up in the sky and saw something shocking: two figures silhouetted against the water tower, and just below them a giant white banner with a spray-painted message: “Reduce It, Don’t Produce It.”
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Some factory employees were amused; most were angry. John Talty, who would later be the president of the union, was only half-joking when he later recalled, “I had to talk some of the chemical operators in Building 102 or 103 out of shooting them.” Up on the catwalk, Sprunt and Baker viewed the hubbub below with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety. “We could see it was a crisis down there, and that no one was sure what to do,” Sprunt remembered. “I figured we
would last through the morning and then they would send the cops up to get us.”

That did not happen, because the executives at Ciba-Geigy feared a confrontation. Forcing the two activists back down the long ladder would be dangerous, and the company did not want to turn them into martyrs. Instead, “we offered them lunch,” remembered Ciba-Geigy executive Jorge Winkler. A foreman met Sprunt halfway up the ladder and gave him blankets, a flashlight, and safety ropes as well as some peanut butter sandwiches. Sprunt was especially grateful for the sandwiches because the only edible items he was carrying were nuts and berries packed by a granola-loving volunteer. The workers below, meanwhile, were furious about the coddling. “We couldn’t believe it when they gave them blankets and food,” remembered Talty, the union leader. “We told the managers that was a mistake, that these Greenpeace guys were bullies and that the story would get bigger the longer they stayed up there. And that’s exactly what happened. It got bigger.”

When the first news helicopters arrived in the afternoon, their crews were rewarded with eye-catching video of the water tower, the banner, and the two figures at the railing. The protest was featured that evening on newscasts in Philadelphia and New York City, marking the first time—but not the last—that the Ciba-Geigy factory was the subject of a big-city television report. The residents of Toms River were not yet accustomed to living in a notorious town, and they didn’t like it. The factory in the woods was no longer their secret.

Sam Sprunt and Bev Baker stayed up on the water tower for two days and two endless nights. Life on a narrow, iron catwalk ten stories up was not comfortable. They were cold, and they were wet. Worried about slipping through the railing while lying down in their sleeping bags, Sprunt and Baker used the Ciba-provided ropes to tie themselves down, but it didn’t help much. “The whole thing was pretty scary,” Sprunt remembered. They took heart, though, in the chaos they were provoking down below.

At the front gate of the factory, workers and poster-waving activists traded insults and even a few shoves. Things got completely out of
hand on the second day of the protest, when a Ciba-Geigy worker broke the window of a car in which two activists were sitting, reached in, and struck a woman from Greenpeace. He was charged with assault. Another employee was charged with criminal mischief for destroying a Greenpeace sign. Inside the factory, a Ciba-Geigy worker made his own sign, which he waved at the water tower. It read: “Jump, Bev, Jump.” The news cameras caught it all. The story kept building on television and in the New Jersey papers,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, and eventually
The New York Times
. Worst of all for Ciba-Geigy, the Associated Press filed numerous dispatches that were published all over the United States and in Europe, the company’s home base. “It was really an enormous amount of coverage,” Rapaport remembered. “It was, in many ways, the best-staged sequence of a protest that I was ever involved with. We basically laid siege to the plant.”

On the third day, August 1, after long negotiations with Ciba-Geigy and the town police, Rapaport finally radioed Sprunt and Baker and told them to come down—this time wearing safety harnesses provided by the company. They were exhausted and more than ready to call it quits. They had not slept for more than two hours at a time and had to use a plastic bag in lieu of a toilet. (The bag burst when they tossed it down, which pleased no one.) That afternoon, Sprunt and Baker were taken to the police station and issued summonses for trespassing. Sprunt then went out for the hamburger he had been craving for days and ended the day with an ocean swim. In a few days he would leave Ocean County and never return.
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Sprunt would eventually become a physics professor at Kent State University in Ohio, where he studied liquid crystals and occasionally pondered his unique role in the Toms River saga.

Greenpeace, however, was just getting started in Toms River. As soon as Sprunt and Baker were safely sprung from the police station, a spokesman for the group announced to reporters that three scuba divers that morning had plugged thirteen of the fifty discharge vents in Ciba-Geigy’s pipeline, using foam gaskets with wooden plugs. It was not quite true. The jury-rigged plugs were not watertight and did not actually block the discharge; in any case, divers hired by Ciba-Geigy quickly removed them. But Rapaport managed to turn
the ineffectiveness of the attempted monkeywrenching to Greenpeace’s advantage by pointing out that the organization was careful to leave most of the vents open because it did not want to cause another rupture farther up the pipeline, like the one near Stephanie Wauters’s home that had started everything back in April. To Rapaport, nothing was more important than winning the goodwill of the town’s residents. He wanted Ciba-Geigy to be the bad guy, not Greenpeace.

By all accounts, his strategy was working. The leaders of Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water were still suspicious of Greenpeace’s radicalism but were happy to capitalize on the group’s highly publicized actions to boost their own membership. By early August, the citizens’ group was drawing more than 150 people to its meetings, which were now held in town hall instead of Stephanie Wauters’s living room. The union sometimes sent Ciba-Geigy workers over to try to disrupt the proceedings, but the environmental group’s supporters were usually able to outshout them. In the beach communities, meanwhile, the Greenpeace activists were treated like conquering heroes. The group set up a booth on the boardwalk where volunteers collected hundreds of signatures on a petition calling for the closure of the pipeline. By that time, Greenpeace had gotten hold of the damaging reports that regulators had produced about Ciba-Geigy’s wastewater. As a result, they were able to hand out “information sheets” detailing what the company was dumping. There was even a comic book–style pamphlet featuring drawings of fish skeletons in Barnegat Bay and spills of black liquid next to suburban homes. Much of the information was exaggerated; all of it was effective.

If all that was not enough to catch the attention of beachgoers, there was also the coup de grâce: a large jar filled with what was, by now, a familiarly opaque liquid the color of brown shoe polish. It was, according to Greenpeace, another sample of Ciba-Geigy effluent collected from one of the discharge vents. “It was really, really dark-brown and ugly,” recalled Michele Donato. “People would see it and say, ‘Oh my God,
that’s
what’s coming out?’ ” To passersby, the implication was clear: You are swimming in this stuff. Never mind that no one had any direct evidence of the discharge harming marine life (although the tests on mysid shrimp suggested it might). Never
mind that for humans, the risk was very close to zero because the effluent was being discharged more than a half-mile offshore and was drastically diluted by the surrounding ocean. None of that seemed to matter, especially when people read in the
Observer
that many of the discharged chemicals were carcinogens. “Even if there was a chance of just one child swimming out there and developing a cancer ten years later or, God forbid, a pregnant woman, I just knew we had to stop this,” remembered Nancy Menke Scott of Lavallette, who was so inspired by the tower-climbers and pipe-pluggers of Greenpeace that she spent the next seven years fighting Ciba-Geigy on an almost full-time basis.

The crew from Greenpeace stayed in Lavallette for a few more weeks, enjoying what was essentially a carnival of environmentalism on the boardwalk. Rapaport knew the group was scoring big when, one night during dinner at Rose Donato’s bungalow, a man who was later identified as a prominent member of the Ocean County Chamber of Commerce ran up to the front porch and grabbed one of the bottles of brown wastewater. He dashed back to his car, but Rapaport and several others from Greenpeace were right behind. They chased him down the borough’s main road until he was pulled over by the police, who forced him to return the jar of precious effluent.
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There were more press conferences, too, including one in which Greenpeace announced that a soil sample the group collected on one of its nighttime raids onto Ciba-Geigy property had tested positive for cyanide. The residents of Ocean County may not have recognized many of the tongue-twisting chemicals that Don Bennett was writing about in the
Observer
, but they knew what cyanide was. A company spokesman responded that cyanide had not been used at the factory for years but that same week had to acknowledge that Ciba’s own tests had just revealed that the inside of its pipeline was corroding and needed extensive repairs.
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It was more evidence that that effluent the company had described as “ninety-nine percent water and a little salt” was, in fact, strong enough to eat through steel.

By mid-August, things were winding down. Many members of the Greenpeace team had already left town with the
Aleyka
, though they promised to return the following summer. Rapaport was in New York
City, where on August 6 he and three cohorts generated another bonanza of publicity for Greenpeace by climbing the scaffolding surrounding the Statue of Liberty (it was being restored) and hanging a banner proclaiming, “Give Me Liberty from Nuclear Weapons—Stop Testing.”

The Toms River that Greenpeace left behind at summer’s end was very different than the one Rapaport had first encountered three months earlier. For one thing, the shoreline communities were radicalized. To Rose Donato, Nancy Menke Scott, and hundreds of thousands of other New Jerseyans, the ocean was sacred; it was what made their state something other than the butt of jokes by New Yorkers and Philadelphians. The outrage they felt was deeply personal, and they were ready to keep on fighting. On the other side of Barnegat Bay, the residents of Toms River were more conflicted. They, too, loved the ocean, but their ire over Ciba-Geigy’s discharges was tempered by their connections to the company and its importance to the local economy. Most were not yet ready to turn on Ciba-Geigy, but they were unhappy that their town had been labeled as polluted. Reputation meant everything in Toms River, and now their community was being portrayed on television and in the newspapers as no different from Newark, Trenton, and the other run-down industrial cities they had scorned for so long.

A threshold was crossed in Toms River during the summer of 1984, thanks to people like Don Bennett, Stephanie Wauters, Dave Rapaport, and even Rose Donato. The chemical plant was no longer something to be proud of, and it never would be again. Its executives were no longer controlling events, and they never would again. And for the people of Toms River, there were suddenly many reasons to question their town’s two-generation romance with the chemical industry. Soon there would be more.