Free Toms River by Dan Fagin Page A

if they had been finely etched by dust particles. But these were small inconveniences, easily overlooked.
    There was talk on Cardinal Drive about unexplained illnesses, just as there was more than a mile away in Pleasant Plains, in the shadow of another toxic waste site at Reich Farm. But unlike the residents of Pleasant Plains, the families who lived on Cardinal Drive and in the rest of the Oak Ridge subdivision got their water through the pipes ofthe Toms River Water Company, not from their own backyard wells. The neighborhood had been hooked up to public water since the early 1960s, and it tasted fine most of the time. Some homeowners still used their old backyard wells or drilled new ones to save money on their water bills. They used this backyard water to irrigate their lawns and gardens or fill their swimming pools, though rarely for drinking or showering because the well water had a faint but unpleasant odor, a bit like paint thinner.
    Toms River Chemical had said nothing to its neighbors about the risk of well contamination, even though on the other side of the fence, the aquifer beneath the factory property had been so contaminated for so long that the company had resorted to drilling a well more than two thousand feet deep in its neverending search for unpolluted water for the factory’s own use. The company was acquiring so much expertise in groundwater testing, in fact, that in 1980 two of its executives, Jorge Winkler and David Ellis, bought a local water-testing firm and set up their own private testing business, staffed by their wives, both of whom also had some scientific training. The firm’s clients included the Toms River Water Company and several homeowners in Oak Ridge. Winkler and Ellis did not consider this to be a conflict of interest because no one could say for certain if Toms River Chemical was responsible for the contamination in Oak Ridge and also because their wives—not they—did the analytical work at the firm, known as J. R. Henderson Labs. “It was very clear that eventually one day Henderson Labs potentially would find things that Ciba-Geigy was responsible for. Until that happened, I didn’t see any reason to change course,” Winkler recalled. To Winkler, the arrangement made perfect sense: Who in town had more expertise with groundwater contamination than they did?
    At first, the test results from the Cardinal Drive irrigation wells were comforting: Henderson Labs conducted the county health department’s standard battery of tests for bacterial contamination and found nothing. Starting in 1982, however, the lab started urging its clients to pay for a more expensive analysis capable of detecting toxic chemicals, not just bacteria. The new tests found dozens of hazardous compounds. All of a sudden, the same wells that neighbors had beenusing for years to water their lawns and gardens—and occasionally as sources of drinking water—were regarded as so contaminated that the county health department declared that they had to be immediately abandoned and plugged. 1 Of course, no one could say for certain how the chemicals had gotten in those backyard wells, or whether they had made anyone sick.
    By the time Randy Lynnworth was twelve years old, he could outrun his equally athletic father in a five-mile race; sometimes, just to keep things close, he would spin around and run backward until his father caught up. Randy was bright and funny, an excellent student who seemed destined to become an equally accomplished adult. He was almost never ill, so when he got a splitting headache and nearly collapsed during a relay run in late 1982, his parents were worried. They got their answer three weeks later, from a brain scan: Randy Lynnworth, at thirteen, had an advanced case of a highly malignant cancer known as medulloblastoma. As with Michael Gillick’s tumor, Randy’s was a blastoma, which meant that it began with the malignant transformation of precursor stem cells—in his case, the cells