Toxic Secrets: N.J. community faces high rates of cancer, rare illnesses

By the time Rick Orefice reached the surgeon’s table in August 2014, his spleen had grown to 15 times its normal size.

Two months earlier, the 23-year-old college student from Pompton Lakes began feeling unusually fatigued. Then came night sweats. And soon, a pain in his left abdomen grew so bad he quit his job waiting tables at TGI Fridays in Wayne.

A healthy spleen normally weighs 5 to 6 ounces. When surgeons at Hackensack University Medical Center removed Rick’s spleen, it weighed between 5 and 6 pounds.

“The surgeon took a photo of it, because he said it was the largest spleen he ever removed,” Rick said.

Rick was diagnosed shortly thereafter with a rare and aggressive form of cancer: hepatosplenic gamma-delta T-cell lymphoma, which had caused his spleen to swell so much.

His family doesn’t have a history of cancer, Rick said. And given how rare his lymphoma is, Rick is convinced cancer-causing pollution that migrated from a shuttered DuPont munitions plant under his neighborhood is to blame.

Rick is among scores of current and former Pompton Lakes residents who say DuPont’s pollution — which included mercury and lead, as well as the cancer-causing solvents TCE and PCE — has sickened them.

DuPont had opposed testing homes for several years over concerns that it could affect a major lawsuit brought in the 1990s by hundreds of current and former residents against the company, an investigation by The Record and NorthJersey.com has revealed.

A review of 40 years’ worth of government documents shows DuPont engaged in a pattern of delay and pushback when regulators prompted the company to investigate the extent of its pollution in Pompton Lakes.

There has been no study that shows a direct cause and effect between any resident’s illness and the toxic solvents that DuPont used to clean machine parts. The chemicals were found in 26 private wells, some of which were used for drinking water. Years later, those chemicals were found vaporizing from polluted groundwater under the neighborhood. They have been detected in more than 100 homes.

But state health officials in a 2009 report said the chemicals “cannot be ruled out as a potential cause” for elevated rates of kidney cancer among women and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, like the kind Rick has, among men in the neighborhood south of the DuPont plant.

“Even if you can’t exactly connect the dots, that’s still a legitimate concern,” Judith Enck, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator whose office oversaw the site in recent years, said of the link between pollution and disease.

Chemours, a spinoff company tasked with managing some 170 polluted sites once owned by DuPont, including Pompton Lakes, downplayed residents' health concerns in an email response to The Record and NorthJersey.com in December.

“It is an unfortunate fact that illnesses, including cancer, occur in all communities and neighborhoods in the state and the country,” Robin Ollis Stemple, a Chemours spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The company cited a 2014 study by the state Health Department that said the rate of cancer in the neighborhood from 1990 to 2008 was not “significantly different” from that of New Jersey overall, although the 2009 study that showed elevation of kidney cancer and lymphoma covered a different time period, and in the case of kidney cancer, a longer time period.

That same 2014 study showed that cancer rates among Pompton Lakes women were 8 percent higher from 1990 to 2008 compared with New Jersey overall, and residents older than 80 died more frequently of cancer than those throughout the state and six surrounding towns. The number of hospitalizations among Pompton Lakes
residents diagnosed with cancer "was statistically significantly higher than expected," according to the 2014 study.

While the Health Department said some other diseases were similar or lower than the state average, The Record went door-to-door in recent years interviewing 53 families, many of whom reported widespread illness among their immediate relatives and even their pets.

There were multiple cases of kidney tumors, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain tumors, stomach cancer, thyroid cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease, fibromyalgia, immune system disorders such as Graves’ disease and polymiositis, skin rashes, nosebleeds, migraines and depression.

There were also cases of Barrett’s esophagus, esophageal cancer, sarcoidosis, renal failure, Crohn’s disease, pyoderma gangrenosum, endometriosis, colon cancer, Legg-Calves-perthes disease and cholesteatoma.

“There are so many strange, weird diseases in that neighborhood that shouldn’t all be from one town,” said Tina Marsh, who grew up in the neighborhood and whose father worked at the plant.

In tests done by DuPont almost a decade ago, 90 percent of 147 samples taken from homes had PCE vapors under the foundations, while 52 percent had TCE, according to a 2010 company report submitted to regulators. Indoor air tests of 393 homes found PCE in 34 percent and TCE in 7 percent.

DuPont said the levels were consistent with those typically found in homes not above polluted water. However, that same 2010 report also says the range in concentrations of the vapors in indoor air samples was consistent with those found at other vapor intrusion sites across the country.

New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection officials say any threat to human health has been contained in more than 330 homes that have had DuPont install basement venting systems. They say the threat remains for 83 households that have not installed the devices.

Many residents are desperate to leave, but fret that few would want to buy homes in a neighborhood on top of a plume of polluted groundwater. 

On some Pompton Lakes real estate listings outside the neighborhood, the first thing written is: “NO PLUME.”  

Former Councilwoman Lisa Riggiola, an outspoken critic of DuPont, bought her home on Orchard Street, about 1,300 feet from the DuPont property, for $287,000 in early 2005 as the housing market was still surging. She sold it last year for $180,000, deed records show, despite making $77,000 in improvements.  

“We lost a lot of money,” Riggiola said. “So be it.” 

The common thread among many families is fear and sadness. Nearly every current and former resident interviewed by The Record over the past six months spoke about the joy and pride of either growing up in the neighborhood or raising a family there. But they say that’s all gone, taken away by DuPont.  

Here are some of their stories.  

The first memory Cheryl Rubino has of her hometown is the girls on her block dressing up as Betsy Ross for the 1976 Bicentennial. Summer evenings were spent playing kickball on the grassy island splitting Durham Street. But her favorite memory from her childhood is climbing the mountain near her house, to sit on a rock and look down at the DuPont munitions campus where workers would be detonating blasting caps.  

“Growing up, nobody ever thought that they were being poisoned or that there was pollution seeping into the ground around them,” she said. “It just wasn’t a thought. You never saw pollution. All you heard was a bang in the woods and then that was it.” 

The basement of her Perrin Avenue house near the DuPont plant was a playroom for Cheryl and her sister. Their dad, Daniel, an architect, was often down there working at a drafting desk. In 1981 Daniel complained of back pains. He was diagnosed with spinal sarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. He died two years later after being paralyzed for six months. Daniel was 42. Cheryl was 12.  

“It’s a very unique form of cancer,” Cheryl said. “He used to drink the water from the hose, which was from the well, which was from the ground. Did that have any effect on him? It wasn’t a hereditary cancer. It was an anomaly.” 

Her mother, Diana, widowed at 38, raised the two girls. Diana, now 72, has early onset dementia and needs round-the-clock care. But she’s still able to live in her own home.  

Now, Cheryl is worried DuPont’s proposal to flush clean water into the plume in an effort to dilute the pollution would instead raise the water table and flood her mother’s basement.  

She’s worried about her mom’s health — and her own.  

“What has the effects of living here done to me?” she said. “That’s what concerns me the most when I think about it. And then the town. It was such a great town growing up. It really was. And now I look at the town. It’s heartbreaking to see what happened to this place.” 

When Helen Martens was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in March 2007, she had no idea that cancer-causing vapors from the nearby DuPont plant could be seeping through the ground under her home.  

That’s because the threat of vapor intrusion was kept secret for years between DuPont, the New Jersey DEP and the U.S. EPA as the parties went back and forth over testing methods.

Helen, 72, didn’t find out about the threat until June 2008, when a community-wide letter was sent out by DuPont. By then she had already gone through eight grueling months of chemotherapy in which her hair fell out and nausea set in. After two more years of treatment, her cancer went into remission, where it remains.  

There is no evidence to directly tie Helen’s cancer to DuPont pollution. But the two toxic solvents — TCE and PCE — that leached from DuPont’s plant under Helen’s neighborhood have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Helen and her husband, John, also didn't know vapors could be seeping into their home when they settled a lawsuit in 2004 along with hundreds of other current and former residents. They signed away their right to sue DuPont in the future unless either one was diagnosed with cancer — which became an unfortunate reality for Helen.  

Now, John, 74, is having trouble speaking. At first they thought it was a cold. Then doctors suggested a condition called dysphonia, in which the vocal chords spasm. Now doctors are suggesting he may have Parkinson’s disease, which has been linked to long-term exposure to TCE.  

“These are our homes,” Helen said. “If you don’t feel safe in your homes, where the hell are you going to feel safe?” 

One of the joys of Ron and Renee Merlino’s semi-retirement is being able to look after their 3-year-old granddaughter. But Ron always gets an uneasy feeling whenever they take her to their Pompton Lakes home, a short distance from the DuPont plant.  

This is the house where Renee ran her photography business in her basement and later contracted a rare form of skin cancer. It’s where they raised their daughter, Jessica, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer two years ago. And it’s where Ron lives as he undergoes treatment for kidney ailments.  

The Merlinos now have a special ventilation system installed that is supposed to clear the home of any potential cancer-causing vapors emanating from groundwater polluted by DuPont. But it doesn’t give Ron any peace of mind.   

“What does it say about where you live when you don’t want your granddaughter coming here?” Ron said.  

The couple moved into their two-family house on Grant Avenue in 1983. Like many in the neighborhood, they heard about the DuPont pollution migrating offsite but thought it was confined to homes that are blocks away, along Acid Brook — the infamous waterway used by workers to dispose of waste.  

They loved the schools. They loved the small-town feel. They never saw themselves leaving.  

Then Renee, 60, was diagnosed in 1995 with dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans, a rare type of skin cancer. It took two surgeries to remove the cancer.  

Jessica, 34, had surgery to remove most of her thyroid and is cancer-free, Renee said. She is expecting her second child this year.  

Like Helen Martens, Ron was part of a lawsuit against DuPont and accepted the small settlement from the company because he was healthy at the time. Then, in 2010, he said he began having problems with his kidneys. He was eventually diagnosed with amyloidosis, a disease that affects the kidneys. TCE and PCE have been linked to kidney disease.  

Ron, 62, says he feels like a fool for accepting $950 in the 2004 DuPont settlement and waiving his right to sue for anything but cancer. He loved his house. Now he can’t wait to leave.  

“My kids had a great life,” Ron says one night, looking down his block. “I made great friends here. But this town is done for us.”  

Keith Orotosky pulls out a map of the toxic plume and its boundaries. “See that?” he says, pointing to a line going through the second-to-last house on a cul-de-sac. “That’s me.”  

Indeed, the dividing line drawn by DuPont between what’s contaminated and what isn’t goes straight through Orotosky’s well-appointed home on Broadway.  

He walks out to the driveway. “So this is clean,” he says pointing to half his home. “And this is contaminated. It’s absurd, isn’t it?” 

Keith’s parents moved from Paterson in 1956 to the Cape Cod less than a quarter-mile from DuPont and raised four children. There was a well in the backyard that his father used to water the vegetable garden. The kids often took swigs from the hose on a hot day. It was so cold and crisp that they called it “champagne.”  

No one knows for sure when the contamination spread under the neighborhood, but Keith suspects the “champagne” was contaminated for decades. The well was capped in the late 1990s after contaminants were found, he says. 

Orotosky, a banker, tried to sell his home in 2009, a year after news of vapor intrusion was made public. The house had been meticulously updated with new moldings, skylights, a landscaped backyard. He held several open houses. Everyone who stepped inside, he said, loved the house. 

Then they asked about the special vapor ventilation system that ran from the basement to the roof.  

“I had to explain what I knew about the plume,” he says. "The couple said they’ll think about it. We never heard from them again. Another couple came, and once they saw that [ventilation system] on the side of the house, they said forget it.”  

He was asking $379,000. The only offer he received was for $175,000. 

Orotosky took $5,000 from DuPont in the late 1990s and waived his ability to sue the company long before the cancer-causing vapors became an issue.  

“So I’m still here,” he said. 

Vojo Cogura became smitten with the row of cozy Cape Cods on Barbara Drive whenever he would play adult-league soccer on the nearby field next to the DuPont plant. They were old. They needed work. But they were on a leafy cul-de-sac that seemed a world away from the Paterson neighborhood where he was living.  

A contractor, he bought one of the homes in 1993 with his soon-to-be wife, Barbara, for $142,000, and spent years building a new living room and adding a third floor. It’s now the biggest house by far on the block. What he didn’t know is that he bought a home across the street from a massive toxic waste site whose pollution was leaching into the neighborhood. 

“The realtors told me they were going to put a golf course there,” he said, pointing to the DuPont property. “I thought that was great. Who doesn’t want to live across from a nice, quiet golf course?”  

Life was good. He and Barbara had a son. Anjela, Cogura’s daughter from a prior relationship, would move in with them.  

Then, in May 2009, Barbara complained of numbness, about a year after the community was told by DuPont about the threat of cancer-causing vapors. 

A longtime smoker, Barbara was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was very aggressive, spreading to her brain and spine. She soon lost her ability to walk and spent most of the time bedridden in a first-floor room while Anjela and Vojo took turns caring for her. 

From a bedroom window, Anjela said, she and Barbara would sometimes see workers in hazmat suits around the DuPont property across the street.  

“Here we are living across the street from a place where men had to wear those white suits from head to toe,” Anjela said.  

Barbara died just a year after her diagnosis. She was 46. 

Vojo and Anjela concede that Barbara's smoking probably caused her cancer. But they also believe DuPont’s pollution exacerbated the illness, causing it to spread quickly.  

“To waste away like that, at her age?” Vojo said. “You can’t say it was just from smoking. She went from healthy to suffering in just a few months.” 

Rick and his younger brother James moved to the neighborhood in 2000 when his mother bought the duplex house on Poplar Street in DuPont Village, the cluster of nearby homes built by the company for its workers. He was 9.  

He had known about DuPont’s pollution along nearby Acid Brook, but never really played there, as so many generations of Pompton Lakes children did.  

When news of the plume broke in 2008, DuPont contractors tested his basement for vapors, but said the amounts of toxic PCE and TCE were “not at a level to be worried about.” His family never installed a ventilation system. Unbeknown to them, two houses down the block and one across the street tested positive for TCE.  

When he was diagnosed with his lymphoma, Rick’s first thought was DuPont pollution. “It’s the rarity of this cancer,” he said. “Where else could it come from?” 

Long-term exposure to PCE and especially TCE can cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but there is no evidence to show DuPont’s pollution caused Rick’s cancer. 

Rick, now 26, moved in with his aunt and uncle in Fairfield in early 2015 — scared that staying in the Poplar Street home would continue to make him sick.  

He’s gone through 13 rounds of chemotherapy. He has had a bone marrow transplant and immunotherapy treatment.  

Rick received some good news last year. He’s cancer-free. For now. 

Hepatosplenic gamma-delta T-cell lymphoma is very aggressive and has a low survival rate.  

Rick still has to contend with the ravages of treatment.  

He has a severely weakened immune system that forces him to wear a surgical mask whenever he’s around people. He needs a cane to walk, because his medicine has eroded his joints to the point that he needed hip replacement surgery in late December. Rick’s dream of returning to the New Jersey Institute of Technology to purse an engineering degree is on hold.  

“Physically, I can’t even be on my own,” he said. 

On a recent visit to his old home on Poplar Street, Rick thought about his old neighbors.  

“There are still kids living around here,” he said. “They shouldn’t be here. People need to be moved out.”  

For many Pompton Lakes residents, DuPont through the decades was the good guy — the chemical company that provided secure jobs and pensions, often to multiple generations of a family.  

But some of those same DuPont employees — and their family members — were likely exposed in their own homes to the array of contaminants that migrated for decades off the DuPont property, whether lead and mercury washing onto backyards when Acid Brook overflowed, or cancer-causing solvents that tainted private wells and vaporized up through the soil into residential basements. 

Some, after winning settlement money from the company, would move away, to put space between themselves and the contaminated neighborhood they once loved and called home. 

Tina Marsh grew up on Walnut Street, just south of the DuPont plant and not far from Acid Brook, the small tributary that ran through the factory site and then through the adjacent neighborhood before emptying into Pompton Lake. 

Her father, Richard Marsh, worked for nearly three decades at DuPont, at first making primer cord, and later as an engineer in the boiler room. His own father had worked at DuPont for nearly 40 years. 

When Richard Marsh married, he bought one of the two-family homes on Walnut Street in DuPont Village that the company had originally built around 1918 for its workers. 

In a recent interview with The Record, he recalled that occasionally, when workers made a defective batch of blasting powder, he saw them put the powder in a bag and walk into the woods on the DuPont property, scattering the powder on the ground, to avoid getting in trouble with supervisors. 

While mercury and lead washed off the DuPont site into Acid Brook and ended up in nearby residential yards, the cancer-causing solvents PCE and TCE, used to clean machinery, was dumped for decades into four unlined lagoons on the DuPont property. The solvents seeped down into the soil, mixing with groundwater, and migrated off the site to create a contaminated plume beneath 400 homes, vaporizing up into basements. 

Growing up, Tina Marsh and her brother suffered nosebleeds and migraines. 

By the time she was 17, Marsh was battling cervical cancer. A niece who lived in the neighborhood also had cervical cancer, she said. And a friend a few doors down died at age 36 of cervical cancer, she said. 

Cervical cancer has been linked to TCE, classified as a known carcinogen, in at least one study. 

Marsh attributes much of her cancer, nervous system problems, migraines, anxiety and insomnia to DuPont’s pollution. 

“I kind of feel like DuPont ruined my life,” she said. 

Marsh’s family was part of the first lawsuit filed by some residents against DuPont, in 1992, related to the mercury and lead contamination that washed off the DuPont property onto backyards whenever Acid Brook overflowed. Her family received $500,000, and they have since moved to Virginia. 

One of Marsh’s neighbors during the 1970s and 1980s was Rebekah Mead, another Walnut Street resident. 

“It was an awesome place to live,” Mead recalled. “There were kids everywhere. We always had somebody to play with.” 

Like most houses in the neighborhood, Mead’s had a basement. 

“We went down there all the time,” she said. “My dad had his workbench down there and my grandfather did work down there. I was down there doing laundry. 

“That’s where we’d put up the Christmas tree,” Mead said.  

Mead was 12 when she developed interstitial cystitis — a nerve-based disease that involves the lining of the bladder. The nerves that lead to the bladder are constantly energized — making the bladder feel infected. Some studies indicate it can be caused by an autoimmune disorder — and such disorders have been linked in some studies to PCE and TCE. 

“The pain is off the charts,” Mead said. 

Mead, now 38, said she has been bedridden for more than a decade. She takes multiple pain relievers for the cystitis and for fibromyalgia and migraines. “And, of course, medication for the depression that comes with it,” she said. 

She has also had multiple surgeries for adhesions — growths between organs that exert pressure. “It’s like a pound cake inside you that just brings everything together,” she said. “It puts pressure on the organs.” 

Mead believes the contamination from DuPont caused her illnesses. 

“There are times I just sit up in bed and rock in pain and beg God to take me,” she said. 

“If I could kill them and get away with it I would do it,” she said of DuPont. “It’s so disheartening they could do this to people knowing they were doing it. They weren’t stupid — they knew.” 

Mead’s father, Jack Gormley, worked at DuPont for more than two decades in a machine shop. He used solvents routinely at work. And each evening when he came home he was potentially exposed to those solvents in vapor form as he watched TV in his basement. 

He was 52 when he died from brain cancer, in 1991. 

In the early 1990s, during DuPont’s cleanup of the homes and yards near Acid Brook that were contaminated with lead and mercury, soil from around the Gormley home was removed and replaced with clean fill.  

Jack Gormley’s wife, Joanne, remembers the excavation was so deep in their yard that the workers needed a ladder to get down to the bottom. “It was like looking down to China,” she said recently. 

Joanne Gormley, who had grown up in the same house on Walnut Street — her father had worked at DuPont — was among those who sued the company in 1992, after her husband’s death. 

Like the Marsh family, Joanne Gormley received a settlement payment. DuPont also bought out her home, as part of a separate program. She and her daughter, Rebekah Mead, have since moved to Pennsylvania. 

“DuPont bought my house so I could get out,” Joanne Gormley said. After cleaning the homes they bought, DuPont resold them to new residents. “It’s ridiculous,” Gormley said. “They should have bulldozed them and been done with it.  

“My mom kept a book on all the family members’ birthdays and anniversaries, and in the back she listed all our pets,” Gormley said. “There was a list of dogs and cats. A lot died from cancer. We had a cat who died from jaw cancer. Just horrible things. 

“And the people — people who lived there a long time are all gone from not-nice things,” Gormley said. “There were eight brain cancers just in our area. 

“It’s not dying — it’s how you die,” she said. “Some were horrible. It’s just a scary thing.”

About the Project

James M. O'Neill joined The Record in 2008 and has covered environmental issues since then. He previously worked in the Providence Journal’s Washington bureau, covered higher education at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and had stints at the Dallas Morning News and Bloomberg News.

Scott Fallon has been a member of The Record’s environment team for 10 years, focusing on New Jersey’s legacy of industrial pollution and how it still impacts residents. He previously worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer and has written for Newsday and the New York Daily News.

Chris Pedota is a multimedia producer at The Record, where he has been since 2000. He has covered politics, news and sports including the events of 9/11, Operation Desert Shield as well as the Super Bowl and World Series.

Michael V. Pettigano joined The Record in 2012 and is currently digital developer and video producer for NorthJersey.com. His digital presentations include the Bridgegate scandal, The Record's award-winning heroin coverage, Superstorm Sandy, and presidential, state and local elections.

Daniel Sforza is the investigative editor at The Record and has been with the company since 1994. His previous work includes overseeing the coverage of the Bridgegate scandal, The Record’s Pulitzer-finalist heroin coverage, and award-winning investigative coverage of NJ Transit. Over the previous year, he has led investigative coverage of charter schools in New Jersey, the mob, and stories about a cold-case murder of a New Jersey woman that resulted in arrests in Oklahoma.

Susan Lupow is a digital producer and editor for The Record and NorthJersey.com who has a particular interest in environmental issues. She has worked for The Record since 1985.

Contributing Staff Steve Auchard, Sean Oates, Paul Wood, Jr.