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Firms Settle with Parents of Ill Children
The New York Times
December 14, 2001
A group of parents in Toms River, N.J., whose children were stricken with cancer have reached a monetary settlement with two chemical companies and a water utility that they accused of causing the disease through pollution, lawyers for the two sides announced yesterday.
The agreement, in which the companies did not acknowledge any responsibility for the cancers, ends four years of negotiations. None of the parties would disclose the size of the settlement, or how it would be divided among the families. In all, 69 families, each with a member who developed cancer in childhood, will share the payments from the companies: Union Carbide Corporation, Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corporation and United Water Resources Inc., a private company that distributes water in the area. Sixteen of the ill young people have died since the first alarms about a high incidence of childhood cancer were raised in Dover Township more than 10 years ago.
The Toms River agreement is unusual not only in the cooperative way it was reached -- through negotiation and mediation rather than a lawsuit -- but also in the way the companies settled without the existence of proof that pollution they caused or distributed through the water system was responsible for the cancers.
Steven Fineman, a lawyer who helped the parents, said the settlement was reached without regard for what that report might say, but the prospect of the state settling the question of the companies' responsibilities, once and for all, did hang over the negotiations.