Toms River (52 page)

Genicola chose an unorthodox way to try to find out. One day in August of 1996, he picked up the phone and called Union Carbide—a highly unusual step for a state agency that usually communicated by memo, often through lawyers. Actually, Genicola called a contracting firm, Radian International, which was monitoring groundwater in Pleasant Plains for Union Carbide. Genicola asked for chromatograms
of any unidentified compounds the company had found in groundwater at Reich Farm that had molecular masses of 115, 129, 156, or 210 daltons. It was a cheeky request because there was no regulation requiring a company to supply that kind of information. “I didn’t think there was any way they would do it, but they did,” Genicola remembered. “Surprisingly, they faxed it over right away.”
¹¹
When the chromatograms from Radian International emerged from his office fax machine, Genicola could barely contain his excitement. They were identical to the chromatograms the state had generated from samples of Parkway drinking water. Whatever mystery compound was in the wells was also at Reich Farm. In fact, there was a lot more of it at the dumpsite. In one monitoring well just south of the site, Radian International had measured the mystery compound at a concentration of about one part per million—almost two hundred times higher than what was in the Parkway drinking water.

To Genicola, it was obvious what was happening: The mystery compound was flowing south from Reich Farm straight to the Parkway wells—and was not being removed by the air stripper. Whatever that mystery chemical was, the citizens of Toms River had been drinking it for years. In fact, they were
still
drinking it.

All that was left was to identify the TIC, but even someone as self-confident as Genicola knew by now that the task was beyond his expertise. He needed a world-class mass spectroscopist to crack the puzzle and determine the molecular structure of the mystery compound. Some EPA chemists suggested a candidate: If anyone could do it, G. Wayne Sovocool could. Sovocool’s reputation inside the EPA was similar to Genicola’s inside the DEP. He was stubborn, quirky, and an absolute whiz at interpreting mass spectra. At Cornell University, Sovocool had taken a class from Fred McLafferty, who had ushered in modern analytical chemistry by pairing liquid-gas chromatography with mass spectrometry and then writing the standard text on interpreting mass spectra. Sovocool went to work for the newly created EPA in 1972 and had been analyzing pollutants for it ever since, working in North Carolina and then Nevada. His triumphs included being the first to find highly toxic dioxins in fly ash from
coal-burning power plants and the first to find chlorobenzene in the blood of Love Canal residents. Sovocool liked challenges, and he was about to get one.

It took weeks for Floyd Genicola to get his wary supervisors to agree to let him contact Sovocool and send the data and new water samples to his lab in Las Vegas. The samples had to come from the state health department because the DEP’s laboratory had just been shut down in a budget-cutting move. If it had closed just a few months earlier, the mystery TIC would never have been found because the older equipment at the health department could not have detected a compound at levels as low as five parts per billion.

The lucky timing with the DEP lab was one more indication that nothing about the Toms River case—from the detection of the childhood cancer cluster to the decision to investigate it and now the identification of a possible cause—had been preordained by consistent, proactive government oversight. Instead, a fortunate combination of the right equipment, at the right time, in the right hands had found the TIC. Now its identity would be unmasked by the right person.

Wayne Sovocool had spent a quarter-century running pollutants through spectrometers, and he very rarely encountered a chemical he could not quickly identify. The one from Floyd Genicola was tricky, though. So many combinations of atoms could add up to 210 daltons, and shared some of the fragments of the TIC’s mass spectrum, that Sovocool decided to try to reduce the number of suspects by making some educated guesses. Like a child with a Tinkertoy set, Sovocool started building models of the molecule, atom by atom, to try to find an arrangement that matched what little he knew about the TIC. He worked in two dimensions, with pencil on paper, but he was thinking in the three-dimensional, submicroscopic world of molecular structure. Sovocool knew that nitrogen was almost certainly an important component of the TIC and that industrial chemicals that contain nitrogen often do so in the form of a nitrile group, which consists of a nitrogen atom and a carbon atom connected by a triple bond. Further, he knew that the mass spectra of compounds containing two nitrile groups frequently yielded spectrometer fragments at 156 daltons,
just as the TIC did. So Sovocool guessed that the TIC had two nitrile groups and began searching spectral libraries for industrial compounds that had two nitriles and a mass spectrum similar to the TIC.

By mid-October, Sovocool thought he had fingered the perpetrator: a dye ingredient called 1,2-benzenediacetonitrile. The chemical was a logical suspect for Toms River because it was used in dye manufacture and contained two nitrile groups plus a benzene ring of six carbon atoms, another ubiquitous feature of industrial solvents. The chemical’s mass spectrum, including the fragments, was very similar to the TIC’s. But it was not a perfect match, which bothered Sovocool. He wanted confirmation, and the EPA’s Las Vegas lab had just developed a new technique (it carried the unwieldy name of Mass Peak Profiling from Selected Ion Recording Data) that might be able to provide it. Developed by a colleague of Sovocool’s, Andrew Grange, it was a form of spectrometric wizardry that could determine the precise mass and abundance of even the smallest molecular fragments. Sovocool asked Genicola to send him additional superconcentrated water samples from the Parkway wells, and then Grange set to work.

It took only a few days. By the beginning of November, Grange had solved the central mystery of the TIC by deducing its chemical formula: fourteen carbon atoms, fourteen hydrogen atoms, and two nitrogen atoms, or C
₁₄
H
₁₄
N
₂
. Even more usefully, he determined the exact molecular masses, to the fourth decimal point, of
ten
molecular fragments broken off during the TIC’s trip through the spectrometer, not just the four most common fragments Genicola had tried to match. Several of those fragments were so small they had never even been measured before. When he saw the new data, Sovocool knew that his earlier guess about the dye chemical was wrong. But he was not discouraged; he was excited. At last, he had a formula and a precise spectral signature of the TIC. He was closing in. Floyd Genicola was even more excited. With barely concealed glee, he relayed the discovery to Union Carbide. “I told them that we had the molecular formula, and that we were going to identify it,” Genicola recalled.

The final step was not a simple one, however. More than three hundred thousand compounds were listed in digital spectral libraries,
including forty-six with a mass of 210 and the formula C
₁₄
H
₁₄
N
₂
. None was a perfect match for the TIC, which was too obscure to be listed. Instead, it would have to be found the old-fashioned way, via published abstracts. To conduct the search, Sovocool talked the EPA into hiring a specialist, Joseph Donnelly, who scoured hundreds of old scientific journals in search of an industrial process that would yield a C
₁₄
H
₁₄
N
₂
molecule with the required characteristics. Within a week, he found it. In articles published in the 1960s, Donnelly discovered references to a process in which two molecules of acrylonitrile were bound to one molecule of styrene to form a strong, flexible polymer, suitable for plastics. The process had since fallen out of favor, but during the 1960s and 1970s several Japanese and American companies had produced styrene acrylonitrile for use in products ranging from toys to piping.
¹²
What caught Donnelly’s attention was that the chief waste product of the process was a thick, smelly brown liquid called styrene acrylonitrile trimer that matched all of Sovocool’s criteria. “It quickly became apparent that this fit the data perfectly,” Sovocool recalled.

On November 13, Sovocool sent Genicola a triumphant fax. “I think this is it!” he scrawled on the cover page. On the very same day, another important fax arrived in Genicola’s office. This one was worded much more soberly, which, considering the source, was understandable. It was from Craig Wilger of Union Carbide, and it said that the company had identified a suspect based on the C
₁₄
H
₁₄
N
₂
formula Genicola had given Wilger ten days earlier. A search of old records from the company’s Bound Brook factory, the letter said, had discovered that Union Carbide in the early 1970s had made its polystyrene plastic by mixing in acrylonitrile. The process created useless trimer byproducts—formed by accident—that were discarded as waste. “The compound of interest may be trimers,” the company’s letter advised, adding that the company had no information about its toxicity.

Union Carbide was being truthful about that. No agency had ever ordered it to test the safety of styrene acrylonitrile trimer, and there was no indication that the company had ever tried to find out on its own. SAN trimer was an unwanted byproduct, something that was
thrown away instead of resold—why bother testing it? But now that it had been found in Toms River’s water supply, even at low levels, there was reason for concern. Its structure was similar to those of toxic aromatic compounds like benzene and naphthalene that were known or possible carcinogens. In fact, both of the trimer’s namesake components—styrene and acrylonitrile, the combination of which generated SAN trimer—had long been strongly suspected to be carcinogenic and probably mutagenic, too.
¹³

The identification of SAN trimer proved that Reich Farm waste was still tainting the town’s drinking water and probably had been for years—long after the DEP, the EPA, United Water, and Union Carbide had all claimed the problem was solved with the 1988 installation of the Parkway air stripper. As those agencies knew, an air stripper could be counted on only to remove volatile chemicals like trichloroethylene that vaporized easily. SAN trimer was a
semivolatile
compound; the way to remove it was carbon filtration. But as far back as the late 1970s, the water company had rejected requests to install expensive filters on the Parkway wells. The agencies did not insist, even after Reich Farm was finally confirmed as a source of TCE contamination in those wells. Instead, the EPA sided with Union Carbide and dropped plans to force the company to intercept the pollution plume before it reached the Parkway wells. The EPA had trusted solely in the air stripper to protect the water supply; the unmasking of SAN trimer now made that decision seem like a foolish gamble.

The identification of SAN trimer in Parkway water was like a perfect fingerprint left at a crime scene. It was definitive evidence implicating both Union Carbide and the agencies that were supposed to be protecting the town’s water supply. SAN trimer was so obscure that it could only have come from the five thousand drums of Union Carbide waste Nick Fernicola dumped back in 1971.
¹⁴
Its identification also strongly suggested that there were
other
strange compounds from Reich Farm in Parkway water. After all, the chromatographs Genicola examined showed many unidentified spectral signatures, not just trimer. The other mystery compounds were at even lower concentrations, but they were present—and Genicola was already making plans to try to identify them, too.

Now Union Carbide, United Water, and the state faced some very uncomfortable decisions. They would have to consider closing important water wells they had resisted shutting for twenty years. Union Carbide would also have to face the possibility of being sued for its role in polluting the drinking water of a town where a cancer cluster had just been discovered. Even for a company accustomed to dealing with catastrophe—the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India, killed thousands—the situation in Toms River was alarming.

Union Carbide’s belated admission that the mystery chemical was theirs was unprecedented in the tortuous four-decade history of chemical pollution in Toms River. For years, the company had denied that it was contaminating the public water supply, and state and federal regulators had backed them—and backed Ciba, too. Now those denials had been refuted. The residents of Toms River had drunk low levels of Union Carbide’s toxic waste in their tap water. That was no longer in doubt. Now the debate would shift to how much they had consumed and for how long, and to whether that pollution had anything to do with the unusually high numbers of childhood cancer cases in Toms River.

Floyd Genicola, a cantankerous state bureaucrat acting on his own initiative, had made it happen. Like Linda Gillick, the anonymous nurse Lisa Boornazian and a few others, he did not turn away from the evidence in front of him. Because he did not, the Toms River saga was about to enter a new and even more contentious stage.