Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [45]
State and federal environmental agencies spent years investigating all of it. One paper trail led to the Edison municipal landfill, another to a warehouse in Maine, another to a shipping facility in Florida and at last to the garage at Arnold Livingston’s house. Along the way, state regulators learned that Agent Orange, the witches’ brew of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T was mixed at CIC’s Edison site.*
Dioxin, arsenic, and lead were found at all three chemical lagoons on the site. Livingston himself recalled at least one small explosion there.
None of it seemed to concern Arnie Livingston, who stored drums and sacks of chemicals beside the family station wagon in his garage. He was not so much defensive as aggressive when questioned by authorities.
Q: Can you correlate that to any ownership of dogs and their presence at—
A: I will tell you for the record, some God damn motorcyclist killed my dog. My dog was in fine shape until somebody ran overthe dog on South Maple Avenue. Cut its guts out. So it wasn’t any chemicals. And the dog had lived there for twelve years.
State and local authorities weren’t so comfortable with Livingston’s chemicals. They spent decades gathering information about the CIC site. But no one ever warned the people buying homes near or downstream from CIC—later known as Blue Spruce, Bio-Aquatic, Tifa, and other corporate identities Livingston used. Adults hunted on the abandoned site, and children played there. In the summers the kids splashed through the brooks just downstream from the chemical dumps.
One day in 1991 an ice sculptor named John Shersick and a pastry chef named Bob Spiegel were working together at a catered banquet when Shersick made Spiegel an offer he couldn’t refuse. “Do you want to go out and see some green rabbits?”
Spiegel baked elaborate cakes, taught martial arts, took care of his family, and minded his business. He had never paid much attention to the environment, which can be hard to ignore in New Jersey. But green rabbits seemed so over the top that he followed Shersick to the CIC site. “The rabbits were actually green,” Spiegel reported. “The dinoseb had turned the skin and the coats of the rabbits that lived around the site a green color. If it was turning the rabbits green, what was it doing to the children?” Dinoseb, which produced this startlingly verdant shade of lapin, is one of the insecticides Arnold Livingston mixed and marketed. It’s also one of those delightful “better living through chemistry” products that promised to make farmwork so much easier: an insecticide that kills insects or an herbicide that kills plants.
Shersick is an environmentalist who knows his way around central Jersey’s toxic hot spots. Spiegel recalls following him onto the CIC site. “Nothing grew there. It smelled of rot and decay and pesticides and death.” Spiegel saw children playing, runners jogging, and homeless people sleeping on the site. He followed the same trail of greenish yellow water Fred Lacik had found to the source of the chemicals that had killed the cows twenty-two years earlier. The same greenish yellow water—colored by dinoseb—was running out of the CIC plant into a drainage ditch that emptied into a brook. Down a slope and across a parking lot is the commercial bakery that makes hamburger buns for McDonald’s restaurants in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
INTO EVERY GOOD STORY about the environment must fall one major pain in the ass. And we’ve got ours: Bob Spiegel, the baker-environmentalist Gail Horvath calls “my man Bob.” The man who dug into Arnold Livingston’s files and the chemical slop-pits he abandoned behind the Horvath house. In order to become