Hypodermics on the Shore
The first tide of syringes washed ashore on Thursday, August 13, 1987. Hundreds of unmarked hypodermic needles spilled out of the surf that afternoon, accompanied by vials and prescription bottles, along a 50-mile stretch of New Jersey beaches during peak tourist season. By the next morning, New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, an environmentalist Republican with national ambitions, was aloft in a helicopter surveying the floating slick of medical waste and other garbage that now stretched from Manasquan to Atlantic City. Disembarking onto Island Beach State Park for a press conference, Kean vowed in front of a huddle of news cameras that New Jersey would join legal action to “sue in federal court to have the guilty party pay every penny of damage that this tide of garbage has caused.”
New Jersey officials pointed eastward, across the water, toward Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, the 2,200-acre disposal site whose mounds of garbage by then ranked among the largest man-made structures in history. Perhaps an inbound barge filled with trash had spilled. Perhaps a Gotham crime syndicate was luring hospitals into an illicit dumping scheme. Federal officials, including Samuel Alito, then the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, began preparing legal action. But New York City’s mayor, Ed Koch, said there wasn’t any proof that the needles had washed over from his jurisdiction. New York, the Koch administration insisted, was “not missing any garbage.”
The legal battle ended a few months later, with a cash settlement and a technological fix. New York agreed to
