Posted by the Ocean County Observer on 01/31/07

When the sea screamed for help two decades ago, Ralph Gorga got the message and did something about the torrent of toxics going into the ocean off New Jersey.

He was an unlikely general in the battle to end ocean dumping - a home builder on the Barnegat peninsula and the mayor of a small town.

But there he was, alone at the start, his heels dug in, ready to take on some of the most powerful institutions in the region to make a difference in the ocean that lapped endlessly at the beaches of his beloved Lavallette.

When others wilted under the challenge of the task, unwilling to even try, Gorga proved a formidable and resourceful champion for the environment.

Maybe it is something in the air in Lavallette that encourages independence.

Long before Gorga traded his council seat to become mayor, Alan L. F. Connor, another Lavallette mayor, was raising hell about plans by a mainland chemical company to build a sewer line under Barnegat Bay and the Barnegat peninsula and dump its chemical waste in the ocean off Ortley Beach - just south of Lavallette.

If the stuff was too deadly, too nasty, for the Toms River, why put it in the ocean, Connor wondered out loud. The mayors of Seaside Heights and Seaside Park were opposed to construction of the pipeline, too.

Other mayors tried to shut them up, just like they tried to shut Gorga up. Too much publicity about ocean pollution would hurt the tourist trade, those who played it safe insisted.

Gorga said it was more important to clean up the mess than to continue covering it up.

He inherited the toxic plume from Ciba-Geigy and the waste from several offshore dumps for everything from sewage sludge to acid plagued the New York Bight. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency endorsed the burning of contaminated timbers from New York Harbor off Point Pleasant Beach. You could see the fires and smell the smoke at night. Partially burned timbers washed up on the beaches in Ocean County.

So did garbage and medical waste.

And in 1984 Gorga could not find a single politician to stand with him to fight to end those practices. He did find Frank Livelli, a retired chemical company executive, and Nancy Menke. It was all he needed to get the Save Our Ocean committee organized and motivated.

Across the bay, he found allies in Bill Skowronski, a Jackson school teacher; Stephanie Wauters, a housewife studying to become a lawyer; Ben Epstein, a retired Newark superintendent of schools; and Moe Alpert, a retiree just settled in Holiday City at Berkeley.

They and other mainland troops organized as Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water.

Together they brought Greenpeace into the fray. That group staged demonstrations that brought international attention to the plight of the ocean off New Jersey.

Gorga's group was the bad cop in the campaign for a cleaner ocean. Livelli was relentless in his science-based attacks on Ciba-Geigy.

Across the bay the good cops, Epstein and OCCCW tried to negotiate with Ciba-Geigy for an end to the ocean discharge.

Politicians suddenly knew a good thing when they saw it. It was good politics to be in favor of a cleaner ocean, they suddenly discovered.

Gorga had already been stripped of his mayoral powers in Lavallette, largely by a business community that blamed the downturn in their business from the worsening state of the sea on Gorga and company.

He plowed ahead as citizen Gorga.

When the smoke cleared, the New Jersey Legislature had ordered the ocean discharge line shut down. So, too, all of the offshore dumps. Medical waste tracking became the law of the land. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put boats to work to skim floatables that washed out of New York Harbor to the sea.

Gorga died this week, but his legacy can be seen by anyone who looks east from the beaches along Ocean County, or anyplace else in New Jersey.

If you were there in 1984 with Gorga, the improvement in the look, smell, allure and clarity of the water is striking.

It didn't happen because state and federal regulators and lawmakers got religion. It happened because Gorga and his small cadre gave them religion.

Gorga was a remarkable man, the right man at the right time. When the ocean we all love needed a champion, he reported for duty and served tirelessly and with distinction.

The results of that work are more than most, including Gorga, believed possible.

Few men have made such a positive difference for their neighbors and the children and grandchildren of their neighbors.

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