This American River

In August 1983, New Jersey attorney Michael Gordon filed two dioxin-related lawsuits on behalf of Newark’s Ironbound community.

He sued his old employer, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, as a way to compel the agency to modernize and organize so that it could properly direct Diamond’s cleanup efforts. He sued Diamond for damages, and for a peek into the company’s files. “This was one of the earliest hazardous waste cases in New Jersey,” says Gordon. “It was hard to get information then.”

Fortunately for Gordon, he wasn’t the only one eager to delve into the chemical company archives. A group of Viet Nam veterans frustrated by government inaction had just filed suit against Diamond Alkali, Dow Chemical, Monsanto and other manufacturers of Agent Orange. The plaintiffs – more than two million veterans – were after compensation for health problems they blamed on wartime exposure to Agent Orange. Their 1982 class action lawsuit forced Diamond and its co-defendants to hand over reports, memos, letters, invoices, manufacturing diagrams, every scrap of paperwork that might shed light on the claims. Conveniently for Gordon, the presiding judge in the Agent Orange suit, Jack Weinstein of New York’s Superior Court, had ordered that all company files be stored in the same place – the law offices of Diamond’s attorneys Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, which overlooked the Hudson at 200 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan.

Gordon’s discovery process and the decontamination of the Ironbound proceeded in tandem over the next few years. While teams of private contractors dismantled and sealed the Diamond plant site, and Ironbound activists agitated for more and better public health studies, Gordon spent his days in the Cadwalader offices sifting through box after box of yellowed paperwork. He was looking for a memo or a letter or a report, some written evidence that Diamond had been aware of its dioxin problem and yet had done nothing to address it. It was a tedious job. But one afternoon in 1986 Gordon found the smoking gun. It was a file of correspondence – and related internal memos – between Diamond employee D.J. Porter and officials at the C.H. Boehringer Sohn chemical company of Germany. The exchanges left no doubt that Diamond managers knew dioxin was contaminating their 2,4,5-T manufacturing process; that they knew dioxin was the cause of the chloroacne outbreak among workers at the Newark plant; that they knew how to eliminate the dioxin from the 2,4,5-T reaction; and that they knew all of this as early as 1957. “I went back and read [the file] a few times,” says Gordon. “And I remember saying, okay, that’s it. I’m done.”

Excerpts from This American River: Paradise to Superfund, Afloat on New Jersey’s Passaic are the copyrighted property of the book’s author Mary Bruno.