A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  The general’s notice was misleading and deceptive in several ways. The description of the contamination as “minute” and “trace” did not match the reality of PCE levels above 100 parts per billion found in the two Tarawa Terrace wells, not to mention the fact that levels of TCE above 1,000 ppb had been discovered in other base water systems that were undoubtedly used at times by residents of Tarawa Terrace. The omission of the word “volatile” with “organic chemicals” also made the pollutants seem less hazardous than they were; if they had been accurately defined as “volatile organic compounds,” many more residents probably would have been concerned about what was in their water. And the statement that the wells would be closed “for all but emergency situations when fire protection or domestic supply would be threatened” left open the possibility that contaminated wells would be brought back online if water demands could not be met.

  Ten days after the notice went out, the Jacksonville Daily News reported about the chemicals in the base wells. Gunnery Sergeant John Simmons of the public affairs department at Camp Lejeune was quoted as saying that “no state or federal regulations mandate an unacceptable level of these organic chemicals in drinking water.”13

  The following day, May 11, 1985, the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star also reported on the water problems at Camp Lejeune. The newspaper quoted Chuck Rundgren of the state’s water supply branch as saying he did not think base residents needed to worry about bad water. “I think we kind of caught it right at the beginning,” he said.14

  Just as Camp Lejeune was shutting down its poisonous wells, Jeff and Mary Byron—still living in Tarawa Terrace—had their second child. Rachel was born on April 27, 1985. Her newborn profile at Onslow Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville listed no abnormalities, but when the Byrons took her to the base hospital for her first checkup, there were numerous concerns.

  The Navy physicians reported that Rachel Byron was slow to gain weight and had a heart murmur, a double ear infection, an umbilical hernia, brachial dimples, ears rotated toward the back of her head, a large hemangioma (raised birthmark) on her lower back, and an atrial septal defect in her heart, Jeff Byron recounted in testimony to a congressional committee in 2007. “She was labeled a ‘failure to thrive’ baby,” Byron said.

  But the worst was yet to come for the Byrons. Jeff’s stint in the Marine Corps ended in June 1985, and the family returned to Ohio, where Jeff and Mary had grown up. Six months after they arrived back in the Cincinnati area, their oldest daughter, Andrea, who was three years old, was diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease, aplastic anemia. Initially it was believed that she would require a marrow transplant, but fortunately the disease went into remission before that was required. However, Andrea spent the next nine years of her young life undergoing treatment at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, including painful bone marrow testing and regular blood and platelet transfusions.

  Early in Andrea’s treatment, the head of the hematology department at the Cincinnati hospital asked the Byrons if their daughter had been exposed to any toxic chemicals. “Our answer? None,” Jeff Byron said. “They asked us for all of the names of cleaning and hygiene products that we were using. All of the products were ruled out.” Byron had read the “Notice to Residents of Tarawa Terrace” that the commanding general had distributed in April 1985, but at the time he never connected any illnesses in his family to the “trace amounts” of “organic chemicals” found in the base housing’s drinking water. Looking back, Byron was more disturbed by something else in the general’s notice: his advice that they store water in the refrigerator for drinking. “So they want me to store poisoned water for my children to drink,” he told the congressional panel in 2007. “But they don’t spell out that—No. 1, it says that these are—they found minute trace amounts of several organic chemicals. 1,580 parts per billion is not minute or trace.”15

  Jerry Ensminger’s daughter Janey turned nine years old on July 30, 1985, exactly two months after Major General Buehl sent his notice about the wells being shut down. Janey’s leukemia had gone into remission for more than a year after it was discovered in 1983, but her father received some crippling news when he asked the Marine Corps in 1985 for a transfer to a Reserve unit in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, so that Janey could undergo treatment at the Penn State University Medical Center, closer to his family. One of the doctors who evaluated Ensminger’s request wrote a letter saying that Janey’s white blood count was over 150,000, “which put her in a high-risk category and limited the ability or the chances that she would have long-term survival,” Ensminger said. “I lived that nightmare every day from the time I saw that letter. Every day that entered my mind.”

  Ensminger later transferred his daughter to the Duke Children’s Hospital and Health Center in Durham, North Carolina, which specializes in pediatric cancer treatment. During a visit in September 1985, one of the doctors said that Janey had relapsed. “And that was the beginning of the end,” Ensminger said.

  “Janey was a lot like me,” Ensminger told a writer for the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove, for a story in 2011. “She’s very forward. She asserts herself. Very alert, very aware of her surroundings. She wanted to know everything and she wanted her voice in everything.”

  The doctors suggested another round of chemotherapy for Janey, but they warned that it would be painful, with lots of sores and ulcers. “I said no, I don’t want that,” Ensminger told Grove. “Janey was laying over there in the bed, and she said, ‘Hey, you’re talking about me, and I want a say in this. If there’s a chance I can live, I want to do it.’ I told the doctors, ‘You heard her.’ They did it, and oh my God, I still have her purse and all the stuff she had in her room. She had little examining lights—these flashlights that doctors use—and a little compact in her purse with a mirror. And she was obsessed with these sores, and she would constantly shine that thing in her mouth.”

  Grove told Ensminger that he thought it was incredible that his daughter could face such a terrifying illness and the excruciating treatments with such courage and practicality. “With any kid that has cancer and who’s been in treatment for a long time,” Ensminger responded, “if you weren’t sitting there looking at that child and knowing that they were a child, you would think you were talking to an adult. They’re all that way.”16

  Janey’s final days were horrific, Ensminger said in testimony before Congress in 2007. “Every time she got stuck with a needle, I was there holding her,” he said. “She was screaming in my ear. Every time they stuck a needle through her bone in her hip to pull out bone marrow, I held her and she screamed in my ear, ‘Daddy, Daddy, don’t let them hurt me.’ And the only thing that I could say to her was, ‘Honey, the only reason they’re hurting you is they’re trying to help you.’”

  In a later interview, Ensminger said he marveled at his daughter’s strength in the face of death. “Janey told me she didn’t want to die,” he said. “She wanted to live so she could make a difference in this world.” She even had a sense that her presence would be felt after she was gone. A few days before she died, Janey told her father, “Every time you see a rainbow, Daddy, it’ll be me.”

  Janey died on September 24, 1985. “And then on the day of her death, I started crying,” Ensminger told members of Congress. “I hadn’t cried in front of Janey before that time because she was pulling her strength from me. And I had to be strong for her. If I had to cry, I went somewhere else. But that day I started crying, and she looked up at me, and she had pneumonia that bad she could hardly talk, but she said, ‘Stop it.’ And I said, ‘Stop what?’ She said, ‘Stop crying, Daddy. I love you.’ That was the last words my daughter said to me. She went into a coma. Thirty-five minutes later, she took her last breath.”17

  6

  A PERILOUS MESS

  You wouldn’t want kids out there digging in the soil.

  —WAYNE MATHIS, ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER, U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

  Toxic waste entered the American consc
iousness in a big way in 1978. That’s when news reports appeared saying that about a hundred homes in Niagara Falls, New York, along with the neighborhood school, were sitting on top of barrels and barrels of poisons that had been buried in the early 1950s by the Hooker Chemical Company. Love Canal and its leaky drums of industrial waste became a symbol of the nation’s worst environmental problems. A state study found five documented cases of physical and mental deformities among children born there after 1958 and determined that one in five pregnancies at Love Canal had resulted in miscarriages. More than three hundred homes were eventually abandoned, and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to clean up and rebuild the neighborhood.1

  Within two years of the disaster, a frightened Congress established a program for cleaning up dangerous waste sites around the country. Known as Superfund, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 for the first time required polluters to pay for removal of hazardous wastes, and if responsible parties could not be found, special taxes collected from oil and chemical companies would be used for cleanups. Over the next several decades, more than 1,600 toxic sites were placed on the national Superfund list, including 141 sites operated by the US Department of Defense.2

  Public sensibilities about deadly chemicals were further heightened in 1983 when it was discovered that a contractor for the city of Times Beach, Missouri, had used liquids containing dioxin to oil roads in the early 1970s. The entire community had to be abandoned after the dioxin levels in the water and soils were found to be hundreds of times above the safe level set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Today, Times Beach is only a memory for the 1,240 people who once lived there. All the buildings—and the poisons—have been removed, and the land has been converted into a state park.3

  So when word went out from Camp Lejeune in 1985 that drinking-water wells had to be shut down because of chemical contaminants, alarm bells went off at a number of government agencies. The city of Jacksonville adjacent to the base was especially concerned, because it and other communities in Onslow County were drawing water for more than 100,000 people from an aquifer just below the one used by the military. Colonel R. A. Tiebout, the facilities supervisor at the base, assured the city in a letter on June 5, 1985, that there was a natural barrier between the aquifer used by Camp Lejeune and the one used by the city. The Marines were tapping the aquifer at depths of between 200 and 250 feet, whereas the city’s water was coming from around 500 feet below the surface, he explained. Tiebout said he had checked with environmental officials at both the base and the state water agency, and it was their opinion “that we are in no way affecting the aquifer that is presently used by the city of Jacksonville. As noted on the enclosure, there are several layers of clay which act as a membrane to prevent the groundwater from seeping into the middle sand aquifer.”4

  Despite the publicity surrounding Love Canal and Times Beach, however, Marine Corps officials were almost nonchalant about the fact that toxic contamination had forced the shutdowns of ten wells in two of the base drinking-water systems. It wasn’t until June 21, 1985, that the results of tests for trihalomethanes, such as chloroform, a by-product of water treatment processes, were given to the Camp Lejeune utilities director, Gold Johnson, by Danny Sharpe of the environmental division. “Until this date, I was not informed that we had any problems with this,” Johnson wrote in a memo that day—nearly five years after the first tests for the chemicals in the base water done by the Army lab. He noted that the data had not been submitted to the state either “and will probably result in a violation letter from the state.”5

  More appalling than the failure to communicate about the water problems was the fact that Camp Lejeune officials continued to allow the contaminated wells to be used after they were first turned off in early 1985. In late spring that year, base environmental engineer Bob Alexander reported to Marine Corps headquarters that all ten contaminated wells at Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace remained closed, though his report indicated that one of the tainted wells at Tarawa Terrace had been used three times in April to maintain the water supply to the nearly 6,000 residents of the housing complex.6

  Federal health officials would report at a congressional hearing in 2007 that contaminated wells were used off and on for two years at Camp Lejeune after the presence of solvents was confirmed in 1985. Research by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a part of the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that was investigating whether people were affected by Camp Lejeune’s pollution, showed “there may have been some much lower contamination in the finished water from 1985 through 1987,” the agency’s Tom Sinks said at the hearing. Asked if the levels of dry-cleaning solvents in the water at Tarawa Terrace after 1985 were above 5 parts per billion, which by that time had been set as a federal health standard for the solvents, Sinks said the levels were “probably between five and ten, but certainly nowhere approaching the levels of 180 which we saw prior to 1985.”7

  At least the Marine Corps was taking steps to solve the problem. An emergency water line to Tarawa Terrace from the Holcomb Boulevard system became active in June 1985. Soon after that, in early summer, the base asked the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for a study to help determine “groundwater use and management practices that will reduce the chances of further contamination and help assure that future water-supply needs are met.” The USGS responded with a study proposal that showed the complexity of the task. Camp Lejeune has one of the largest groundwater withdrawals in North Carolina—8 million gallons per day to support a population of about 100,000, noted USGS hydrologist Orville B. Lloyd Jr. in the proposal. Lloyd added that there had been tremendous growth at the base over the years and a corresponding rise in the wastes generated: “As a result,” he wrote, “significant amounts of several kinds of wastes containing hazardous and toxic organic compounds have been disposed of or spilled at numerous sites on the base.” The sandy soils in the coastal area did little to prevent the wastes from moving into the groundwater. In order to fully understand the movement of contaminants and groundwater conditions below the base, the USGS would need to do a study in three phases over four years at a cost to the Marines of $417,000, the hydrologist said.8

  While the Marines were scrambling to maintain a clean water supply for Lejeune residents, the state of North Carolina was demanding immediate action on the contaminated groundwater. On May 15, 1985, the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Community Development notified the base commanding general, Major General L. H. Buehl, that state standards had been violated in ten wells containing at least nine organic contaminants, including the degreaser trichloroethylene (TCE), the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene (PCE, also called tetrachloroethylene), the TCE by-product vinyl chloride, and a carcinogen found in fuel, benzene. As a result of the violations, the Marine Corps had thirty days to provide the state with the base’s plan of action for identifying the sources of the contamination, determining the extent of the contaminated plume, and completing remedial work.9

  It took more than thirty days for the Marine Corps to respond. When Colonel Tiebout wrote to the state on July 19, 1985, he said the plan of action was simply to continue with the Navy Assessment and Control of Installation Pollutants program that had started in 1982 with an assessment of potentially contaminated sites at the base. The next steps planned in NACIP included retesting groundwater at twenty of the polluted sites, conducting new tests on samples from all water wells on the base, determining the size and movement of the contaminated plume, and developing plans to clean it up, according to an outline of the plan attached to Tiebout’s letter to the state. The goal was to complete the NACIP process by the end of 1986, he said.10

  The state’s attention to Camp Lejeune’s problems soon resulted in a public spotlight on the base contamination. The Raleigh News & Observer published a lengthy report on September 15, 1985, headlined “Civilians, Military Investigating Waste Dumps at Camp Lejeune.” T
he story began by describing the child-care center that had been housed in a former pesticide-storage building for nearly twenty years until it was shut down in 1982, when chemicals such as DDT and chlordane had been found in the soil outside. Wayne Mathis, an environmental engineer for the EPA, told the newspaper that he could not speculate about the risks to children who spent time at the site over the previous two decades, but he added, “You wouldn’t want kids out there digging in the soil.” In fact, there is little doubt that many children did just that, as there was a 6,300-square-foot playground outside the day-care center where the soils were found to be laced with pesticides.

  The News & Observer went on to describe widespread dumping at the base, but noted that Camp Lejeune wasn’t the nation’s worst military site in that regard, or even the most polluted installation in the Southeast. EPA officials told the paper that bases in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia had sites that were even more polluted. They also made a point of saying that it appeared that no laws had been violated at the bases. “The military hasn’t done anything that wasn’t done in the private sector,” said Arthur E. Linton, federal facilities coordinator for the EPA’s southeast region in Atlanta. The Marines and state officials also downplayed the fact that at Camp Lejeune, ten wells serving two major drinking-water systems had to be closed because of the toxic pollution. Charles E. Rundgren, head of the state’s water supply branch, was quoted in the story as saying that the base water would not cause someone to immediately become sick from drinking it, but he did warn that ill effects could result from long-term exposure.11