>> today on "earth focus" -- chemicalal pollutionon. an american city fights back. and the toxic legacy of gold mining in peru. oming up on "earth focus." >> on a warm summer night, you can s see where people choose t live on toms river, riverboats, beaches, the promise of relaxing days and good health. but years ago the town became famous for a different reason, chemicals and cancer. >> w we had no idea theyey were discharging toxic chemicals. >> they never should have let

the people of toms river drink that water. >> i know where my son's cancer came from. >> the company got caught. >> it's part of the duty of government to protect the public health and that didn't happen. >> if it happened here, it really can happen any place. >> the chemical history of toms river began in 1962 when giba geigy, a chemical dye compan built a industrial l manufafacturing plplant. >> there wasn't t much happepen at t toms river. chicken farming was the biggest industry. there was a little bit of tourism but not much. when this very large c chemical concern said we want to build a factory to make dye in your town, we sasaid come alolong. >> thehe company brougught jobs brought about poor waste management practices. >> it was very clear as much of the major dye manufacturers in

that era t that they had big issueses with pollution. they creatated contamination problems wherever they were and ciba was no exception. ciba een 1962-1966, geigy had about 20 sites. on the days the plant was operating, over five million gallons of chemical waste were dumped directly in the riviver. thesese were days whenen the philosophy was out t of siight, ouout of mind and didn't have proper waste disposal. >> don bennett grew up in toms river and ran in the river as a young boy, just downstream from where the plant dumps. dd >> it was bizarre to a teenage kid swimming in what looked to be just another river. the e water was alwayays ice co evenen in the m middle of the summmmer. when you came over here, the

swinging bridge, it was a popular swimming place with young people. if youour nose e was w working your eyes were working, y you would ceainly recognize something was really wrong. >> don's connection to toms river isn't just water. for over 30 years, he worked at the local newspaper and was one of the first reporters to ciba geigy chemimical dumping. >> according early on to the report ciba geigy comommissioio was about a million g gallons a day was seeping in the seepage pits they had creaated on the plant site. i was going i into the ground water. that w was a million gallons an they thought that was 40% of the waste thehey were creating every day.y. >> thehe rest, the 60% were bei discharged directly into this river. >> when they come here in 1962,

there wasn't anybody nearby to notice as the garden state parkway brought more and more people to the area and more and more homes were built closer to the plant. more people became aware of the nighttime boaters that sometimes we had to close your windows it was so obnoxious. >> the plant was portrayed by the local politicians as a good neighbor and was supposed to be no problems with it. so yeah,e felt faiairly safe moving in because the political struructure said it was safe. >> it fences the boundary of the ciba geigy property and you can see in the backgkground the proximity of some of the homes along cardinal drive. the homes you see were all built long after ciba geigy began its chemical dye makingng here. and i would venture most of the people whoho bought here h had ididea who their neighbor was. i mean, there was no requirement to disclose anything in those days. >> part of the reason ciba

chose to move to this area was the ideal condition, dumping waste, the sandy soil in the nearby river. but that also made the area great for finding fresh drinking water. the water provider, toms river water company, supplied the entire township from a shallow well field just two miles downstream from the plant. if you lived in town and were a customer, it was quite possible you would drink whatever contom nationals ciba was dumpingng in the ground and river. >> we had evidence by 1964 they had contaminated the well field. >> in the summer of 1965 was particularly dry and the demand for water was high. the water company chose to continue operations despite warnings of contamination, which the local water company and ciba geigy concealed from the public. the following year, ciba geigy obtained a permit from the u.s. corps of engineers to construct

a 10-mile pipeline. for the first time, they coulul dump their chemical waste directly into the ocean. ciba thought their troubles were over. but the chemical problems in toms river continued to grow. >> the second bibig thing that happppened in toms river t that ermane to the story is illegal dumpers started coming down in central and southehern new jers where there was lolots of open space and not a l lot of people watching, carrying trucks with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of barrels of hazardouous waste. that they didn't want to dispose of legally because it was too expensive. there was one very fateful illegal dumping incidentnt that occurred in the early 1970's in the back two acres of a chicken farm. this trucker took several thousand rusting barrels of hazardous waste from union carbide into north jersey and

just started digging trenches in the bacack of this chickenen farm and dumping these barrels, many of which were already coming apart. and union carbide did not t tak a lot of interest in what this guy was doing, they were happy to be rid of their barrel also. >> in just three months, september-november, 1971, over 5,0000 barrerels were ilillegal dumped. that december, the culprits were arrested for dumping without a permit. but it took another seven months before the barrels were removed from the ground by union carbide. no other efforts were taken to clean the site. that summer of 1972, the water mpany added six new wells, miles out from the farm. for the next 12 years, toms river would remain a normal american town, and in fact the beaches incurred population growth. but for some families, cancer was c causing their worst

nightmare. >> i was 30. the first 30 years of our lives were carefree, like any young couple, trying to pay your bills, enjoy life and d doing hings. then you get a child that has cancer and y your whole life changes completely. it now is surround and revolves a around your child th is sick. >> i was diagnosed with a cancer of the synthetic nervous system and still have effects of it today. >> michael is alive. he's a miracle. he's received the last rite many times. he's 34 years old. he has very limited normalcy to his life. >> the t tumor is pushing my spine pretty much out of my

body, like it's wearing away the skin. t's a also encompassed, it wras around like all my organs, heart, lungs and kidneys and all that and there's no surgicical way to r remove it. without me either bleeding out on the table or becoming a vegetable, i was told. >> i would buy the powdered similac and i would mix i it wi tap water. and so everything that my son got was mixed from the toms river tap water. i really belelieved th that is where his cancer came from. >> in the late 1970's when michael was first diagnosed, there initially was no connection made to drinking water. it wasn't until a dramatic day in 1984 that would spur linda and any others in the community to investigate their water quality.

ciba's ocean pipeline that had now been operating for 18 years burst at the intersection of bay and vaughn, right in the iddle of one of toms river's busiest intersection. the stink of the pipe couldn't be ignored. >> a lot of people were new to this area and weren't even aware this pipeline existed and the e reality wawas that thehe pipeline ran from the toms river chehemical plant 10 miles across the mainland of toms river and then out into the ocean.n. into some of the most heavily used tourist beaches along the east coast. it was the leak heard arouound ththe wororld i have sometimes called it because it mobilized citizenry bototh here and on th bebeach and what we banan that april day still hasn't stopped. >> journalists, including don,

took the break as a reason for further investigating the chemical life of toms river and for the first time, ciba's plant and the dumng at the farm were made public attention. >> the people in the town started to realize something was going on. that was within the first two years a after the p pipeline br >> it was probably more than 10 years bebefore we understood th full consequences of what was going on. >> between 1986-1996, the facts slowly emerged about the chemical pollution, all the while, more kids got cancer. >> my third daughter was born in 1989, and unfortunately, shs became sick relelively quicickl when she was about 10 months olold, we discovereded she had cancer. and unfortunately, only y survived untilil she was 14 months old. at that titime in 199090 when s passed away, there was really not a thought that it was

related to any type of the environmental problems. >> by this time linda gillick had started her own cancer assistance nonprofit, ocean of law. and it was her early observations of cancer in the cocommunity that d drove furthe investigation. >> i put up a mamap of the w wh county so thatat we could see where our chihildren were locat for our case workers. and as thehe yearsrs went on,n, noticed that toms river had . come one big dark area and it was a big concern. i did reaeach out to the s stat health department numerous times s and told them of my concern and was told over and over again that there w was not problem. > only later in the 1990's, the midd 1990'0's was there mor and momore information that was comingng out. but, you know, some of the water supply had been contaminated with certain chemicals.

>> 1996 was particularly crucial for people of toms river. the state health authorities reported the rate of childhood brain and central nervous systemem cancer was excessive. with iver is now a town cancer. >> 69 families, 69 children and their parents are usually y coconsidered a cluster. but epidemiology tells us in a communit there may be an unusual pattern of disease, either defined in space, geographically, or in time that develops over a period of t tim when that hahappens we c call i cluster and a c cluster is a clue, a piece of evidencece tha something g may be happening in that communityty. that's what happened in toms river. >> because off the unusual number of rare childhood cancers, the community demanded answers. and the finger pointed back to ciba geigy and the toxic waste

drums union carbide dumped at the farm. a decade earlier, two wells at e farm had been t tested and trichloralethylene was found. >> once it was found coming from the farm, the goverernment sosolute droropped the b ball. that never should have let happen and let the people drink that water. >> the e.p.a. and union carbide adopted a remediation plant. it's a superfund site. we will let these chemicals go into the public drinking waters and aerate them out and then the water will be safe to drink.k. someone said, why don't we put carbon filters on that water just to make sure nothing gets through. they said it's going to aerate out, you don't need carbon. well, that was a mistake that cost lives. because it turns out the only

thing, there was a lot of other stuff in the water they weren't looking for because they weren't on e.p.a.'s priority pollutant list so the group included other chemicals, thyrene and acilorites is known to cause cancer and they let it go 10 years and it wasn't until they saw the high rate of cancer that they took another look at the water and they found this. every c critical fact community need to learn. you may think you're safe. you're not safe because there may be things in there you're not looking for. the priority pollutant list of the e.p.a. >> in 1996 when these cancer causing chemicals were found, all eight wells of the parkway were shut down. and it was the first step in cleaning up the pollution. over the next five years, union carbide would install carbon

filters on the wells near the farm, a settlement would be reached by the families in the cancer cluster and ciba geigy paid $92 million to begin the 30-year process of making the contaminated ground water safe. today toms river water is clean. but from the mistake made and lessons learned could not be ignored by other communities. >> the overall societal cost and actual dollar cost would have beeeen a lot less if back the 1970's that we had a problem here, we can't keep this well field a anymore. the chchemical companies may be big dollar item right now, but you're going to have to fund moving this well field to another spot. that's not what we've done here. and, you know, i think that the overall citizens of toms river paid a very heavy price over that 40-year span. >> you need to have tests and

you need to have levels of safety for all of these chemicals that we're ingesting. as long as we do not have this information and regulation on these thousands of chemicals that are being ingested all over the c country in water supplies, we are not going to be able e to protect the future of this cocountry. of these children. >> no corporation, no politician is bigger than a combined voice of people. when people join together and form their voice into one that's loud, we're not going to stand for this, there's no standing up against that. ♪

>> chemical pollution isn't limited to industrialized nanations. inin peru, south america, mercu poisoning is impacting human health and it's the mining of gold driving this contamination. a new film "amazon gold" documents a deadly twist in an's quest foror gold. >> the jungle begin with a patch here and a patatch here a a patch here and then there's chunks of trees here and chunks of treree there is and it's m m. becacause you have motorsrs dow over there.. so wee walk across here and com upon this enormous hole. >> the gold mining is an issue that's hit bigtime the image of

peru and concern. >> mercury is one of the most toxic naturaral s substances s knowow of. the amouount of mercury that go into gold minining is estimated to be on the order of about 30 tons per year. that's a trememendous amount of mercury. > what we see today about go mining are no different than the drug trade. illegal gold mining and drug trafficking and the mafias are tied to there. > we went do t to have a loo at goldd mining b because gold mining iss onene of the underer things that's desestroying this enormous forest. >> what we're seeing here is an

example of something that's happening where there's been a boom of destruction. > amazing. >> it has taken the miners a week to destroy a habitat that took millions of years to volve. >> for over ounce of gold extracted, the m miners add an equal amount of mercury. the metal mercury is generally a liquid and has a particular affity for gold. poured into a slurey with tiny flececks of gold, the mercurury binds to them, making themem ea to retririeve. >> merercury poisoning affffect

ththe human body by affectining nervouous system. when you have high levels of mercury that are in the blolood hair, oror urine whichch are th major bioindicators, it indicates therere is going to b an effect t on the brain, peopl have lower i.q. levels. they have balance issues, aggressiveness issues. they have problems with hearing, with sight, with taste. much of the mercury that's used in the process of concentrating that gold is lost, dumped into the rivers and lakes of the area that you have the mining. mercury hahas the unusualal abi of concentrating and magnifying. and as it moves up the food chain as one animal eats another, in this case fish, it concentrates and accumulates. they have concentrations that are millions or tens of

millions of times higher than the water that they live in. it's a perfect mechanism to be able to concentrate it in a form that affects the next consumer, and in many cases hose are people. the cararnegie institutition fo science has s crubblingted -- conducted research since 2008 and found the levels of merercu are incrcreasing in line with t gold production that's been occurring in the region. in a study published in match in the we found that capital, not 60% of the species old i in the food markets exced e.p.a. limits for safe consumption of fish because of mercury. the problem is a very difficult one. because it is not just an environmentatal problem o or an economic proroblem, it't's a so problem.

these are people that are poor, subsistence farmers trying to find a better life and taking advavantage of the opportunniti thatat they have, namely y that price of gold d is nearly at an all-l-time high. they're using the technology that they have availablele, whi is one thahat's been used for nearly 2,000 years. but t they are unaware of ththe price that they pay for doing this, not just for themselves but for the aninimals a and pla that are affected. because of the economic opportunity, no one wants to hear badad news about something that's making hem hundredsds of times more money than they did the year before.

[speaking a forereign language] >> yeah. >> this is our fufuture. >> i don't know. one of the most real experiences i've ever had in my life and it was breaking my heart. i know they fallll one by one. in this place we're looking at it. and there were these machines and just hell. things s i e, all the know arere fading teterritories.

♪ >> there is a message of hope and that's one of the things i want to emphasize. you may feel hopelessness but truly speaking there is a good reason for hope. weeks ago, there was a city demonstration in the streets. and it made a very important statement. it's where the movie takes place. this is the first time there were p people demonstrating in the city demanding action. and this is very strong and is something motivating me bigtime because this is what is going to make the change. isó ?a?a?a?a#@#@

narror: the st