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Earth Focus
A Town Fights Back: The Toms River Story
Toms River had a problem. Children in this coastal New Jersey town were coming down with rare types of cancer. And because of the unusual number of cancer cases, the town was designated a "cancer cluster." For more than 40 years, the town's drinking water was polluted by chemicals like styrene-acrylonitrile (SAN) trimmer and by-products from dye manufacturing--chemicals thought to cause cancer. Their source? Dumping by Ciba Geigy and Union Carbide. But the town's people — like Linda Gillick and her son Michael, who was born in 1979 with neuroblastoma — fought back. And it's largely because of the heroic efforts of its citizens, that the water in Toms River today safe and clean. "Earth Focus" visits Toms River to tell the story.
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