They knew it from the factory’s own drinking fountains, which drew from company wells that had been tainted with dye wastes since the mid-1950s.

For them, the smell was nauseatingly familiar. The first people to make the connection between the malodorous tap water and Toms River Chemical were plant employees, many of whom lived in Oak Ridge. When residents of the nearby Oak Ridge neighborhood turned on their kitchen taps, they could smell it in their household water now too-the water that was piped to them by the Toms River Water Company, which operated three shallow wells (two newly dug) beside the river on Holly Street, two and a half miles downstream from the factory. What was new was that the odor no longer came solely from the river and the waste lagoons at Toms River Chemical.

The Toms had stunk for the previous four summers, too. The stench was obnoxious, but that was nothing new. It was so low that about one-sixth of the flow under the Route 37 bridge originated not as rain or groundwater but as wastewater discharged by the Toms River Chemical Corporation two miles upstream.īelow the factory’s outfall pipe, the river was tinted and frothy, and a strange dark-brown fungus clung to its banks.

The river ran low during the parched summer of 1965, the driest in Ocean County in a century. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. This is an excerpt from the book ' Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation.' Copyright © 2013 & 2015 by Dan Fagin.

Toms river by dan fagin