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 toll was worst among preschool girls. Brain cancers were at least 10 times the normal rates and leukemia rates were eight times the national baseline for girls that age. 

Scientists confirmed these weren’t random flukes. The data matched patterns near other toxic waste sites around the US. The Ciba-Geigy campus was designated a Superfund site in 1983.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried for the kids in towns along the river beginning their sailing programs every summer and the older long-time residents who still love to sail. 

I would also be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit of trepidation when I turn on the faucet at my grandparents’ house, where the water has a slightly odd smell. 

I ask myself now if it’s due to old metal pipes or a remnant of corporate wrongdoing. 

Ciba had lagoons where wet chemical waste was deposited and left to dry before being scraped off and stored into containers to be buried later

The plant shut down all operations in 1996. The chemical company BASF acquired it in 2009, inheriting all clean up responsibility. 

The EPA oversight has shrunk Toms River’s toxic plume, but full cleanup is years away. Alec Boss, communications and outreach coordinator for the activist group Save Barnegat Bay, called cleanup efforts ‘woefully inadequate.’ 

Contaminated groundwater is being pumped out, treated, and discharged back into the ground. 

Boss told DailyMail.com: ‘Imagine that you come up to a pond filled with this horrible pond scum and nasty bacteria, you get a cup of this dirty pond water and one of those iodine tablets that you would take if you were going camping, and you put that in that cup and you clean up that water, and then you just dump that back into the pond. 

‘That’s essentially what they’re doing.’

Diane Salkie, EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, told members in a webinar that ‘we’ve probably gone down about 40 percent, maybe there’s about 60 percent [of the toxic plume] remaining, but that’s very ballpark.’ 

However, the ocean is much cleaner now, Bardia said. 

‘I love jumping in those ocean waves. I love bringing my family and friends and showing them how clean the ocean is now, looking at all the dolphins and the whales and the rays.’ 

Alec Boss, communications and outreach coordinator for the activist group Save Barnegat Bay, called cleanup efforts ‘woefully inadequate’

The river is cleaner, too. I’ve noticed when I go back to Island Heights it’s bluer and I no longer see foam at the shoreline.  

Ocean County still suffers high cancer rates, with 524 cases per 100,000 compared to the state average of 474 per 100,000.  The national rate is still lower at about 444 cases per 100,000. 

A statement from BASF said: ‘We want to be clear that a significant amount of work has been done over the past 30 years, and the US EPA has determined that the site currently poses no risk to human health and the environment. 

‘BASF will continue to work with the US EPA and NJDEP until all federal and state requirements are met. While US EPA has stated that full remediation of the groundwater plume may take several more years, this is typical of larger groundwater cleanup efforts.’ 

But the EPA-supervised cleanup only treats the former plant site, not the broader community’s toxic burden. 

Bardia said: ‘What about the rest of Toms River? What about the area around the pipeline? What about all those backyards with all that soot that landed on people’s homes and yards?

‘I don’t want to scare people away, but I want them to know that this fight is still going on.’