New Jersey Nightly News; New Jersey Nightly News Episode from 01/24/1979 7:30 pm

Wow. God. Good evening Rebecca has the night off I'm Clayton Vaughn reporting tonight from Trenton in the news. Hearings began today on whether New Jersey's safest drivers should be guaranteed they're paying the lowest premiums for their insurance. Hudson County corrections officers prison guards staged a sick out today but the county has gotten an injunction against that job action. And the latest Consumer Price Index is out and up. We'll have the statistics. Also today there was a seminar on how nutrition affects athletes performance fall but I will have that in the rest of the day in sports and we'll take a closer look to see if New Jersey really deserves the nickname Cancer Alley. Ever since the early 1950s car insurance here in New Jersey and in most other states has been figured on a rating system that means what you pay depends on how old you are whether or not you're married. And many other factors. Today the state insurance department open public hearings on that system. Mike Power reports.

The way automobile insurance is written now if you live in Plainfield you pay two hundred seventy three dollars for basic coverage but if you live in Newark say six hundred thirty one dollars. And where you live is only one of more than 200 factors that determine your premium. Insurance Commissioner James Sharon wonders whether that's right. Open hearings to answer the question. And today it was the insurance industry's turn. The current system is based on actual experience. It's based on the true spirit experience of classifications of groups of people with similar characteristics. Insurance does not involve you paying for your own accident. If that was the case you wouldn't buy insurance you just self insured. The department of public advocates feels that the present classification system should be abolished because it is essentially unfair to impose higher rates. Persons. On the basis of factors which have no relation to the insureds driving ability or driving record.

If you want to tell a new star and he's got to subsidize it you can't tell him that on the basis of his experience because on the basis of experience he has better experience in the new Dr Who has proven experience. The problem with the with the argument raised by the insurance company is that when you look to group characteristics you would ignore the diversity of experience within that group. The insurance industry defends the classification system as fair and accurate. The state's largest auto insurer Allstate claims that if it's eliminated 80 percent of Jersey drivers pay higher insurance premiums. The insurance industry in New Jersey and the insurance department have never been good friends. But this may be their most serious fight so far. Commissioner Sheeran says the hearings could last a month. In Trenton. I might power several insurance companies are expected to challenge commissioner Sharon's power to change the insurance rate setting structure they claim the changes must be approved by the legislature. The Star Ledger reports today the U.S. attorney's office in the Postal

Service are investigating the sales practices of intercontinental life insurance company. The investigation said to be focusing on charges that senior citizens were misled when they got mailed ads that looked like official Medicare literature. Governor Burnell is one of the founders of the company although its stock was put in a blind trust when he took office. It may not now even own it. There were two bank hold ups in downtown Newark today and two more attempted hold ups although the bandit in both those cases got nothing to do robberies which were pulled off. Different people different banks netted about $3000 total. Police say it was the same man who tried to rob the other two banks handing holdup notes to tellers but each teller refused. The man fled each time so far apparently hasn't tried again. More than 80 guards at the Hudson County jail didn't show up for work today the result of a three year old contract dispute within hours however corrections officials were in court after an injunction against the guards who had called in sick as a Perrier court judge issued the order but no one is sure of that will enter the job action. Sandra King has more.

The city began at midnight and remained 100 percent effective throughout the day. For those participating in the action it meant a dramatic way of emphasizing demands for more money and a new contract for the inmates of the jail. Instead officers and County Sheriff's Department were brought in and to the casual observer nothing seemed amiss. Even visiting hours were too few in number and too inexperienced to serve effectively. Jail officials. The injunction and the threat of individual contempt actions will be enough to force the guards back to work. It's a very serious illness. I don't know what it's going to take to bring the men back in Jersey City. Newark International Airport.

The plane ran into problems at Teterboro Airport with the fire and then when it came down however it ran through the middle of an on ramp connecting routes with any vehicles but it's causing something of a traffic problem. A fourth arrest has been made in a series of burglaries at the Patterson school which was almost destroyed by fire Monday night. The four all in their teens could also become suspects in an arson case. The school fire was deliberately set. State police today were working on a lab report on the causes of tenement fires in Hoboken and Jersey City Saturday and Monday that killed a total of 21 persons. Arson is suspected in both cases. Burial arrangements for the victims have been delayed because relatives are coming from Guyana. The Hoboken and Jersey City tenement fires in another recent fire in New York had taken a total of 40 lives. Fire officials say many of those lives might have been saved if the buildings had been equipped with

simple smoke detectors. There is a growing demand to force building owners to put smoke detectors in their buildings. But as a contributing reporter Ellen Peterson reports tenants may want to act on their own. New Jersey has required smoke detectors in all apartments and for the past two years in both New York and Jersey for the recent fire victims including older tenement buildings do have such devices. Within the next six months. But if you don't have a landlord who is required to install smoke detectors you as a tenant or homeowner ought to consider doing it yourself. There are two basic types of smoke alarms. One detector is especially sensitive to a fast burning fire which produces relatively little smoke. Yes. In a hallway or conceivably the other type of detector employs a photo electric cell to give an early warning by sensing the first traces of smoke

from a fire. Many of the recent victims here in New Jersey suffocated in their sleep from smoke inhalation devices in the apartment. City tragedy ideally to cover all contingencies. It might be best to have one ionisation type device and one photoelectric if you can afford it. The detectors come in models powered by either batteries or by house current. The batteries have to be replaced every year. The types require no such maintenance. But of course it can fail if a fire knocks out the electricity supply. The prices for the smoke detectors I saw range from about 10 to $35. Typical of discount stores like Corvettes and cheap enough it seems to me considering their life saving potential. One other point. Be sure the detector you buy has the underwriters laboratory seal of approval. After you're brought in and tested your smoke detector don't feel safe until you've rehearsed a plan of evacuation. The instructions give tips for devising ways to

safely reach the nearest exit or fire escape. Because in the end your fire alarm is only as good as what you do after it goes. In West Orange. I'm Ellen Peterson. One hundred and fifty New Jersey firefighters and supporters gathered yesterday in orange to hear warnings of increased fatalities because of statewide cutbacks and fire personnel. The demonstration held a protest the layoff of 10 firemen in orange leaving 72 firefighters in an apartment to two years ago had 105. Mayor Carmen Capone said that while they sympathize with the firefighters the layoffs were necessary to balance the city budget because of the loss of 32000 residents which resulted in reduced state and federal aid. A blind New Jersey woman who was seriously burned when her nightgown caught fire as accepted two hundred four thousand dollars to settle a lawsuit against the makers and distributors of the nightgown. Catherine Lupo of Lakewood said she was smoking a cigarette when the gown caught fire. She suffered first second and third degree burns. Kidnapping charges in the circle of friends called

case were dropped today when a Somerset County grand jury refused to take action. A private detective turned the programmer Galen Kelley of Kingston New York had been charged along with the father of the young woman involved the young woman was allegedly taken from the cult's mansion in Morristown in October. The woman later asked that the charge against her father be withdrawn. Assault complaints against Kelly and the father Anthony Joseph stead rack will be sent to a municipal court for disposition. The bill which would raise the state's minimum drinking age from 18 to 19 stalled yesterday in an assembly committee perhaps for good. Today however some parents and public officials offered an alternative. They call themselves the Coalition for 21 named for the drinking age they want. And they unveiled a pile of petitions with 35000 signatures they say back up their case. Allegedly. We believe that neither root nor the legislature can afford to wait for the next set of figures on how many 18 to 21 year olds have to move forward here or indeed caused injury or death to others because of alcohol

related driving accidents. The group says the number of accidents is increased three times since the drinking age was lowered from 21 back in 1973. Correlations as of legislators do not heed that it's because they're being pressured by liquor interests. Lettuce cost of living report for December shows prices up again. The increase for the month was a third of a percent in the New York northeastern New Jersey metropolitan area leading the way or rises in costs for housing transportation and food and for the year the cost of living rise was six point seven percent. Governor Byrne once the Hackensack meadow lands Development Commission to go ahead with plans to build a giant food distribution center on the Jersey City Secaucus border after a meeting with his cabinet the governor said it was agreed the plan was feasible. It would mean about 4000 new jobs for the area and food wholesalers could also sell their products in the Meadowlands rather than ship everything to food distribution centers in New York or Philadelphia. There is a flash flood watch in effect tonight for all of New Jersey

heavy rains and the already saturated ground may cause river and stream flooding and local flooding in poor drainage areas. Strong winds are also expected to raise tides two to three feet above normal and flooding is possible in the low lying shore areas around high tide. So the forecast for tonight calls for the rain to be heavy at times. There will also be windy and turning colder. Winds will be out of the north a 20 to 30 miles an hour gusts even higher. The low temperatures tonight will be from the upper 20s to the lower 30s tomorrow. The rain should taper off toward morning possibly turning into snow and we could get accumulations of from one to three inches before the precipitation ends by mid morning. It will remain windy and cold with temperatures remaining in the upper 20s to the lower 30s. And the outlook for Friday as fair and cold. We use the common man. The big band being.

The tough cop whose devotion to certain civil liberties sometimes gets carried too far. For the Life of Pi. From a great personal risk from the comfort of the marrow. Little do you watch Thursday at 9:00. New Jersey Public Television. Now as Paul Butler on a nice fourth light in the New Jersey Nets are back in action tonight after a week off. The Nets take on the Cleveland Cavaliers in Piscataway game time 08:00 in Piscataway last night the Rutgers women made it seven wins in a row beating the University of Massachusetts by 13. Denise Kenney scored eight points for Rutgers. Number 45 you know as the lady knights ran their season record to a very impressive 13 and one the only loss came a few weeks ago to Cheney state. Since then Rutgers has been nearly invincible. In fact yesterday the team was ranked 11th in the entire nation. The lady knights are home tomorrow night against Trenton State. Then

again on Saturday against Long Island. If they pick up a couple of more wins next week coached team could find itself in the top 10 again the lady knights are right now 13 and won the final last night. Rucker 74 Massachusetts 61. And high school ball today undefeated Orange was at home against Berenger of Newark. Many consider orange to be the very best team in the state. Watch these highlights you'll understand why orange in the white uniforms is incredibly quick especially five foot nine inch Robert Coles he had 23 points today. Orange wanted 80 to 71. Curtis coats added 14 final again orange Berenger 71 orange now 13 and 0. Terrific team. Also today there was a day long seminar sponsored by the College of Medicine and Dentistry. The topic athletics and nutrition. Christa Gaspar's reports. Two hundred of New Jersey's high school coaches and trainers met at the Sheraton in Prescott away today

to hear prominent nutrition experts talk about diet and a lot of performance. The title of the seminar was to compete and one of the RDA of records nutritionist Marilyn Schorr and I wanted to have some kind of dialogue between nutritionists who know a lot about food and athletic trainers and coaches who are dealing with the athletes and telling them what to eat. So far there hasn't been much communications between the two groups and so I wanted to get it together. One of the speakers today was a Denver Bronco nutritionist Kathy King. She finds the biggest problem with professional and high school athletes is that they start the season out of shape. Basically the major things are that they are the guys coming into the season at the wrong weight and no matter what sport you're going out for people try to lose weight too quickly and so they use some of the methods that we've heard today where you have massive dehydration and or they go on starvation diets and by the time the person is ready to start the season they're in no condition to really exercise.

Dr. Donald Wiggins the keynote speaker from the University of Texas Medical School tried to clarify from myth and fact that many of today's athletes have especially about how food you can make good decisions a health food store you can make poor decisions you can do the same good and poor decisions at the supermarket. You shouldn't waste the money and health foods interest got away. If your trusty gaff worth reporting. Also today owners of the burned down Garden State raceway and Cherry Park reaffirmed today that reconstruction of the burned down track while the allayed will no doubt occur. The track will eventually reopen they say without a doubt. And that's sports. Thank you Paul. Another day of hearings in Atlantic City on whether Resorts International should get a permanent casino license and again the brothers came up for discussion. Edward Giulini once the manager of resorts casino in the Bahamas and by authorities to be a close associate of mafia money man Meyer Lansky. The day it came out that dino collected twenty eight thousand dollars in a so-called commission when he arranged the sale of slot

machines to the Bahamas Casino back in 1968. Resorts president Jack Davis testified today he only learned of that payment to Deano recently. And Davis also says he wouldn't know do you know if he tripped over him. At this time one artificial flavors and preservatives are being regarded as potentially hazardous. Natural flavors are being investigated as food additives important work in flavor research is being done by Dr. Steven Chang and his associates at Rutgers Department of Food Science. Diana London files this report. Dr. Chang's job is to find out what molecules give a particular food its taste and smell so that food companies can produce those molecules in a laboratory without always having to rely on the real thing. But the idea of a test tube flavor isn't always appealing even if the flavor is. I want to emphasize here that what we are going to use here is not very in centers that are chemicals but the chemicals which we call natural identical. That

means they are a region all a president in the fall to capture the flavor of a food. Dr. Chang begins by heating it. The flavor molecules are condensed in these frozen flasks. In the case of bacon for example he'll cook 200 pounds of meat. And this is what is left with about the essence of bacon. It's a concentrated natural substance that can be analyzed and eventually synthetically duplicated into something that tastes and smells like bacon. But it's never been within 10 feet of a pig. After Dr. Chang gets the concentrated bacon flavor he puts it through a sophisticated instrument called a gas chromatograph that breaks the bacon flavor down further into its component molecules. Then he relies on another bit of sophisticated equipment. His nose. He smells each component of the flavor sample as it leaves the chromatograph and decides how important each one is to the typical bacon taste and odor. Those results are recorded and made available to

food companies. They can then construct the necessary molecules to create the flavor and smell of bacon at a much cheaper price than it would cost to buy the actual meat. Soybeans for example can serve as a base for many of Dr. Chang's flavors. This is of particular importance to New Jersey where the soybean crop has been thriving. Work or increase in food. For example we can make hamburgers. We have. People mistakes if we want to go from side being proud to be there for all work or directly benefit the New Jersey awkward cultural product. You've probably tasted Dr Chang's work in bacon crackers taste more bacon peanut butter that tastes more peanut and margarine the tastes more buttery dedicated to the idea that what you taste is not always what you think you taste. In New Brunswick and then the London flavor a surge of rockers is financed mostly

by grants from major food manufacturers. And officials in Dover Township are optimistic that they may soon get the city's status from the federal government that's important because that would make it easier to get federal aid. Now the U.S. Commerce Department officials are telling Dover leaders that as long as the required population is maintained should be a city. The problem in Dover Township is that it is a township designation is from its incorporation back in seventeen hundred sixty seven by King George of England. U.S. government later decided that townships were areas of land not necessarily saw governing populations Honor's Dover's population of 67000. And if they can hang on to its city status it could be a model for other townships in the state. Did you know that 20 percent of the population in the United States never go to the dentist. Only 40 percent

go there know how to be a wife. Well we'll have some helpful suggestions for you this week on your file. Visit a museum whose motto is Please Touch Museum during your museum addling across children of all ages. We'll also talk about our great to be witnesses we're going to. Don't miss it Thursday at 10:30 on New Jersey Public Television. Is New Jersey really a Cancer Alley. Last week the State Environmental Department released a study that disputes that image. The 200 page report is a maze of statistics. So we'll just try to hit the main points. First of all report says the cancer rate in New Jersey is no worse than the rates in four surrounding states The report also says the diet and ethnic background of New Jerseyans may affect the cancer rate as much as the high concentration of polluting industry. For instance there are more cases of lung cancer among talian and poles than in other groups. Breast cancer

according to the study strikes more women of Russian Polish German and Italian descent. To help get some useful meaning out of this report we have asked Assistant Commissioner Glenn Paulson to join us. Dr. Paulson does this report actually run as counter as we have tried to summarize to Jersey's reputation as a Cancer Alley. Well yes and no. We did find that the areas around us are very much the same as New Jersey goes around and states in the surrounding states but at the same time that area as a whole is much higher than the national average from 10 to 20 percent higher. And the rest of the country if you will. So the Cancer Alley name doesn't apply just to New Jersey it applies if you will to a little bit larger region. But we all have in common the same sorts of problems that strike at. The entire region. Yes our impression is that if the same study was done for example looking up into Connecticut into New England down toward Baltimore and Washington it probably the same

pattern would be found. The whole east coast is heavily populated heavily industrialized. There's a large number of different ethnic groups a wide variety of industries that are known or suspected to be linked to cancer in other words the picture is the same. And much of the East Coast. There were two things that really struck me in this report. One was the ethnic group breakdown and the fact that people from different ethnic backgrounds have different types of cancer in different rates. Could you explain that. I can't really do justice to the full wealth of the data in just a brief period but there have been suggestions in the literature looking at specific ethnic groups for a number of years. For example polls in Poland versus poles in the US Japanese in Japan or Hawaii or the US and looking at their cancer rates and you find patterns. Of cancers that are high in one group can be low in another and vice versa. The question is why. Well that's not as well understood yet. One of the common suggestions of course is diet different

dietary constituents preserved meats the amount of bulk in diet varies amongst different ethnic groups different cultural patterns. There's other factors that vary too. Socioeconomic status often correlates with ethnic groups. The Irish cop of course being the class went to classical examples. There also can be occupational patterns. That are associated with ethnic groups. Let's consider what you do with industrial boys. That's right for all or. Even such simple factors as how often people go for medical checkups can be different in different ethnic groups either as a function of culture or income or both. The other thing that struck me in the report I mentioned there were two things that did was the fact that this report concentrates. To a great extent on prevention rather than cure. We were talking before we started to roll the tape and you indicated the federal government for instance is only spending 5 percent as much on prevention as on the cure of cancer. Does that strike you as odd.

Yes in fact it's more than not I think it's wrong. If you look at public health over the say the last hundred fifty years we've prevented polio. More recently not through a cure but through prevention through vaccines and the like. We prevented tuberculosis not through a cure for the book per kilo system but by preventing people from being exposed to such simple things as sewage treatment plants. And I think the whole history of Public Health shows that prevention is much more effective. In a dollar and cents way. And it also of course eliminates the human suffering. We think that proportion is all wrong. Well if that's the case in terms of the federal government and this is a state report then what is the state doing now to address the points that were raised in this realm or you're blessed by a couple of members of the congressional delegation who are right on the right committees in Congress notably Congressman McGuire from northern New Jersey who has the same attitude we do. And we have demanded and he has demanded a shift in the funding pattern by the National Cancer Institute For the last three four sessions of Congress. Unfortunately it has

not been successful. I think because the perception by much of the members of Congress by the National Cancer Institute and by most of the research community is oriented oriented toward looking for a cure looking for the magic bullet. Is it sometimes true that will that will solve the problem. We don't think that magic bullet will ever be found. We just haven't been able to convince the people that make the decision. Perhaps the report will go along that route and we certainly hope so Dr. Paulson thank you for being with us. My pleasure. Once again our top stories. The state insurance department began hearings today on whether insurance companies should be forced to give safer drivers lower insurance rates. Jail guards at the Hudson County Jail staged today but a judge has ordered an end to the job action. Another close call involving a light plane over northern New Jersey. It crash landed at Newark International Airport this afternoon with the people on board walked away with only a few scrapes and that's the news. Or we're back on the New Jersey

New Jersey joint presentation of New Jersey Public Television and 13 broadcast at 6:30 on Channel 13. And at 7:30 on New Jersey Public Television an updated edition is broadcast at 10:00 pm on New Jersey public television and at 7:00 the following morning on Channel 13 Fortune's pre recording.