Tainted Water in the Land of Semper Fi

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North Carolina
WASHINGTON POST
Tainted Water in the Land of Semper Fi
Marines Want to Know Why Base Did Not Close Wells When Toxins Were Found

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Catharine Skipp
Wednesday, January 28, 2004; Page A03

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. --

A military engineer assigned in 1980 to test the drinking water at this
sprawling Marine Corps base punctuated his findings with a handwritten
exclamation point.

"WATER HIGHLY CONTAMINATED WITH . . . CHLORINATED HYDROCARBONS
(SOLVENTS)!" William C. Neal wrote in capital letters on one of his
surveillance reports in early 1981.

A private firm followed up with tests the next year. One of its samples
showed an astonishing result: 1,400 parts per billion -- 280 times the
level now considered safe for drinking water -- of trichloroethylene, a
likely cancer-causing chemical used for degreasing machinery that can
impair the development of fetuses, weaken the immune system, and damage
kidneys and livers. Other samples showed as little as 1 part per billion
to as many as 104 parts per billion -- more than 20 times the level now
considered safe -- of tetrachloroethylene, a toxic dry-cleaning chemical
that can seep into body fat and slowly release cancer-causing compounds.

The number of people who may have drunk the tainted water, bathed in it,
had water fights with it is staggering: The Marine Corps estimates
50,000 Marines and their families lived in base housing areas that may
have been fed by the wells before they were closed in 1985. Victim
advocacy groups place the figure even higher, at 200,000, which would
make Camp Lejeune one of the largest contaminated-water cases in U.S.
history.

Already, more than 270 tort claims have been filed with the Navy's judge
advocate general's office by former residents, who are required by law
to file claims with the military before proceeding with any possible
action in civilian courts.

One of those claims was filed by a Marine air traffic controller named
Jeff Byron. Within months of the 1982 tests, Byron moved his family into
base housing at Lejeune, grateful to leave behind a rickety mobile home
in favor of a modest townhouse with a postage-stamp back yard. Byron and
his wife, Mary, were not told about the water-sampling results, and
nearly two decades would pass before they would find out about them. Now
he wakes up thinking about all the frozen lemonade and apple juice he
mixed with tap water for Andrea, who was born three months before he
moved on base, and for Rachel, who was born two years after.

Both of his girls have been beset with a lifetime of ailments: Rachel,
who is developmentally disabled, was born with a cleft palate and needed
leg braces as a child. She has spina bifida; a gangly, arachnoid cyst on
her spine that cannot be removed; and brittle, rotting teeth. Andrea had
a rare bone marrow syndrome known as aplastic anemia and has been told
by her doctors that the disease could recur if she becomes pregnant.

"I find myself asking, 'What if I hadn't joined the Marine Corps?' "
said Byron, who left the military for the private sector in 1985.

No one knows for sure whether the water at Lejeune made Byron's children
ill or whether it sickened thousands of other former residents -- both
Marines and civilians living on base -- hundreds of whom have organized
into a lobbying group known as Water Survivors. The group's members
blame the contamination for a variety of ills, from chronic headaches to
virulent cancers, from infertility to the incurable leukemia that
claimed their children's lives.

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54143-2004Jan27.html

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