By Scott A. Brinton
My latest #LIHerald.com column….
It’s rare that you get the chance to meet your professional heroes, so when one of mine, former Newsday environmental reporter Dan Fagin, now the director of NYU’s graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, recently came to Hofstra University to give an hour-long talk on his seminal book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation,” I had to attend.
His 462-page masterwork, published by Bantam, recounts the decades-long history of industrial-waste mismanagement and malfeasance in Toms River, N.J., a seaside community of about 94,000 an hour and a half south of New York City. I read the book shortly after it was published in 2014, and ever since, I had hoped to meet Fagin, now 58, of Sea Cliff.
Toms River is known for its high rate of childhood cancers, in particular leukemia among girls under 5, from the early 1970s through the 2000s. Government reports attribute the spike, at least in part, to the “public health hazards” posed by widespread soil and water contamination at a now-closed Ciba-Geigy chemical plant and a massive, illegal toxic-waste dump at Reich Farm, which has been cleaned up, but only came under consideration for removal from the federal Superfund Site list this year. Both the plant and the dump tainted local drinking-water wells, according to the New Jersey Department of Health.
In “Toms River,” Fagin details the sordid events that spread a witch’s brew of carcinogens among the good people of this otherwise safe community, which has a reputation for patriotism, a vibrant civic culture and a deep love of Little League baseball.
Toms River reminds me of so many Long Island coastal communities — earnest, hard-working, conservative-leaning but not extreme in its political views, inhabited by professionals and blue-collar workers alike. And, as is the case in more than one Long Island community, innocent residents there were forced to cope with an industrial disaster not of their making.
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