Death in Toms River

When I first saw Linda Gilik and I was told that I had to listen to her presentation I didn't fully realize how much it was going to move me. She is a woman who had a healthy baby boy, and then after loving this "normal" child for three months was told that he was diagnosed with cancer of the nervous system. She was very taken back by what she was told and knew that there was something wrong because it came out of no where. It is very rare for a baby to get cancer, this type of cancer occurs in one in a million babies.

She went to Sloan Keteran a world famous cancer hospital in New York City. She was sitting on her sons floor which had 40 beds filled with children patients, and saw that 7 or 8 of tough's beds were children from Toms River New Jersey. She started talking to some of the parents of the children from Tom's River and they decided to investigate and maybe find out the reason this was happening to their children. Her son Michael was diagnosed with this cancer in 1979. He is now 25 years old and lives at home. He is a 25 year old in a 7 year olds body because of the cancer and the procedures he has to go through.

After a couple of years of investigations and several years later, a nurse at a hospital in Philadelphia in the cancer ward saw that again a lot of the children that were there were from the same place, Toms River. She called EPA 3 to report what she was seeing; they called EPA 2 who called the New Jersey department of health. Then a man named Michael Berry made a report of what was going on called the Berry report in 1995. This was going on 16 years after Linda's son Michael was diagnosed, they still didn't have a clue and the cancer rates of children in Toms River were getting bigger.

Finally, they decided to start testing the water in Toms River to have some kind of clue as to what is happening. When they tested the water from the schools, they found many cancer causing chemicals.

What happened was a man named Mr. Fernicola was supposed to destroy drums full of chemicals. Instead, he was lazy and paid the sanitation workers off so that he can just take them and dump them in the landfill. This went on for a couple of years and then a fire occurred underground and he was told that he could not dump these things anymore. So, instead he paid off an old couple who owned a farm. When he dumped these things out they got into the water system through wells. The government was told by professionals that they had to put carbon filters to filter the water. This was not cost efficient to the government so they decided to do what was better for them. They used air strippers instead.

The water is filtered through carbon filters now, however, they still do not know exactly what is wrong with