A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  The story was an early signal that the Marine Corps was not going to be able to gloss over Camp Lejeune’s environmental problems as some of its leaders hoped. “I anticipate considerable public attention to this problem and how we deal with it,” a state environmental manager, Chuck Wakild, said in an October 1985 memo to Perry F. Nelson, chief of the groundwater section at the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development. It also was becoming clear to state officials that the land and water, and possibly even the air, at the largest Marine base on the East Coast had become an utter, perilous mess.12

  Rick Shiver, regional hydrogeologist in the state’s Division of Environmental Management, prepared a detailed report for his bosses in October 1985 that said more than seventy sites with hazardous wastes had been identified at the base, and thirty-eight of them were potential sources of groundwater pollution. Already ten wells were permanently shut down, and the contamination posed a threat to at least eighteen others, he said.

  Shiver’s report was the main item of business at a November 1, 1985, meeting at Camp Lejeune between environmental managers from the base, the state, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA had taken a lead role in the cleanup process because it was unclear whether the state had authority over pollution problems on federal land. At the meeting, the EPA’s Wayne Mathis said that data from the contaminated wells in January 1985 showed health risks to people at the base, so Camp Lejeune should be eligible for placement on the National Priorities List for the Superfund program. The base environmental manager, Bob Alexander, pushed back, arguing that there may have been errors in the tests done on the water wells, and therefore a Superfund designation would be overkill. And so began a struggle that would continue for years over who would be in charge of the base cleanup, the EPA or the Navy.13

  The military was determined to follow its own process, the Navy Assessment and Control of Installation Pollutants program known as NACIP, and tried to build a case for it by insisting that the water at the base was now clean and safe. The assistant chief of staff at Camp Lejeune, Colonel Tiebout, sent a memo to the commanding general on November 6, 1985, saying the contamination problem at Tarawa Terrace was under control. “We have not detected any organic compounds in the Tarawa Terrace finished water since we started taking weekly samples in July,” Tiebout said, adding that the state was addressing the source of the housing area’s pollution, ABC One-Hour Cleaners located off the base. Environmental manager Julian Wooten followed up in January 1986 with a report to the state saying that tests now showed “no immediate concern over the quality of water in the two systems at Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point.”14

  Navy headquarters tried to bolster its case for managing Camp Lejeune’s cleanup by arguing that the NACIP process it would follow had the same requirements for public involvement as the Superfund program. The Navy’s chief of information, Rear Admiral J. B. Finkelstein, issued a memorandum on July 1, 1986, stating that it was NACIP policy to keep all interested parties informed about every step of a cleanup project. “To assure the public that the Navy is not hiding information concerning former hazardous waste sites on Navy property, local and state officials, media and interested organizations should be fully apprised of NACIP activity at the commencement and conclusion of each phase of work,” Finkelstein wrote.15

  The EPA was not happy with the NACIP process, though. At a meeting on July 31, 1986, between sixteen officials from the base, the state, and the EPA, it was pointed out that NACIP was not nearly as demanding as the Superfund law known as CERCLA: the cleanup standards were lower, the deadlines for action were looser, and the requirements for studies were weaker. Under the Superfund program, each contaminated site would require a full “remedial investigation/feasibility study” (RI/FS) that would cost between $200,000 and $600,000, and Camp Lejeune was going to need at least twenty such projects. If the EPA had its way, it was going to cost the Navy a minimum of $4 million to do just the required studies at the base, and that was before any real cleanup work began.16

  An overview of the base using environmental studies and reports produced in later years explains why the EPA in 1986 wanted to declare Camp Lejeune one of the worst toxic-waste dumps in America. As the state’s Rick Shiver put it, “these were not the garden variety landfills.” The contaminated sites included:

  •The Hadnot Point fuel farm, which had been built in an industrial area near Ash Street that was only a short distance from a major housing complex. More than a dozen fuel tanks had been installed at this site when the base was built in 1941—a 600,000-gallon tank above ground and fourteen underground tanks, each one capable of holding 12,000 to 15,000 gallons of fuel. A break in one of the aging lines to the tanks in 1979 had caused at least 20,000 gallons of fuel to leak into the soils at the site, and a number of other leaks were documented in the 1980s, including two of more than 1,000 gallons each. The result was that large pools of diesel and gasoline, fifteen feet deep in some places, were floating on the top of the aquifer just below the surface. Groundwater in the area of the tank farm contained “extremely high levels of benzene.”

  •A site known as Lot 203, located near Holcomb Boulevard and Piney Green Road south of Wallace Creek, that was used for forty years to dispose of just about every type of hazardous waste imaginable. “There is everything from some above-ground storage tanks labeled ‘diesel fuel’ to minefield-clearing training kits to M-16 shells to . . . the DDT and PCB disposal area, and so on and so forth,” environmental engineer Ray Wattras told a meeting of cleanup officials at Camp Lejeune in 1992.

  •The Rifle Range Chemical Dump, on the south side of Camp Lejeune next to the New River, which was used from the early 1950s until 1976 to bury containers of pesticides such as DDT, wastes containing PCBs from transformers and other equipment, cleaning solvents such as TCE, chemical weapons, and gas cylinders. Investigators documented at least a dozen different “disposal events” at the dump. “Waste materials that were allegedly disposed of here include PCBs, pentachlorophenol, pesticides, gas possibly containing cyanide, chemical agent test kits, and fired and unfired cartridges,” Wattras said at the 1992 meeting, continuing, without irony, “We believe that there is a high probability that chemical agents may be present.”

  •Two lots on Holcomb Boulevard between Wallace and Bear Head creeks—about midway between the Watkins Village and Hadnot Point residential areas—that were used to dump the now-banned pesticide DDT during the 1940s. Transformers containing cancer-causing PCBs were also stored at the same site.

  •A pit off Center Road at the heart of the base that was used in the early 1950s to dump waste oil and liquids from transformers and other electrical equipment. From 1958 to 1977 the area was then used for mixing pesticides and cleaning pesticide equipment. Every week during those two decades, an estimated 350 gallons of pesticide-laced water from the cleaning operations flowed onto the ground.

  •A burn dump for garbage, industrial waste, and construction debris at the center of Camp Lejeune, at Hadnot Point on the east bank of the New River. The twenty-three-acre site, in operation from 1946 to 1971, was graded and seeded with grass after it was closed and is now a recreational area with a fishing pond.

  •A parcel of land adjacent to the New River, where about a gallon of mercury was poured on the ground each year between 1956 and 1966. The toxic metal that had been drained from radar units “was reportedly hand carried and dumped or buried in small quantities at random areas” around the four-acre site, according to one EPA report.

  •A dump at Camp Geiger on the north end of the base that was used from 1946 to 1970 as both a landfill for hazardous wastes—including mortar shells and grenades—and as an open burn area for garbage, used oil, batteries, cleaning solvents, and ordnance. Tons of the insecticide Mirex, banned by the EPA in 1976, were buried at the site in 1964. It was also reported that two truckloads of drums containing pesticides, PCBs, solvents, and “chemical agent training kits” were unloaded at the
site in the mid-1960s.

  •The Mess Hall Grease Disposal Area, located in a wooded area east of Holcomb Boulevard in the northeastern quadrant of the base, which served as a dump for grease and food wastes from the mess hall in the 1950s. Dozens of drums were also found buried at the site, probably containing PCBs or pesticides.

  •A disposal area at Courthouse Bay, a few miles inland from the ocean shore, where at least 400,000 gallons of waste oil and 20,000 gallons of battery acid were dumped.

  •The French Creek Liquids Disposal Area on the southern end of the base, near a creek flowing into the New River, the dumping ground for as many as 20,000 gallons of waste fluids and oil from vehicle maintenance and up to 10,000 gallons of acid from used batteries.

  •A point along a trail used for training exercises, near Sneads Ferry Road and Marines Road, where two 12,000-gallon tanks of sludge from fuel tanks were emptied on the ground while fuel-storage facilities on the base were being upgraded in 1970.17

  Even with all that hazardous waste on the base, the worst contamination for residents of Tarawa Terrace was actually coming from off the base, from the dry-cleaning business at 2127 Lejeune Boulevard directly across the highway from the housing area. ABC One-Hour Cleaners had opened in the mid-1950s and did a booming business serving the base’s active and mobile population. And while the owners, brothers Milton and Victor Melts, were cleaning uniforms and civilian clothes for Marines and their families, their business was dumping the highly toxic solvent PCE into the groundwater on an almost daily basis. The cleaning agent was stored in a leaky 250-gallon tank behind the business. A pipe to the tank also leaked regularly, and buckets of the used solvent were frequently dumped on the ground at the site, according to state and federal inspection reports. PCE-tainted sludge was even used to fill potholes in the establishment’s parking lot. Chemicals that didn’t seep through the soils directly into the shallow aquifer below ended up there anyway after they were washed into the business’s septic tank, which was located 900 feet from one of the wells used for Tarawa Terrace drinking water.18

  The EPA proposed ABC One-Hour Cleaners for the Superfund program in 1988 and formally added it to the list of the nation’s worst hazardous-waste sites in 1989. The Marine Corps paid close attention to the proceedings because, as Colonel A. P. Tokarz of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s office told the North Carolina attorney general in early 1988, “the Department of Defense or the Federal Government may ultimately be required to seek contribution from ABC Cleaners for its on-Base clean-up costs.” (That turned out to be wishful thinking: the business, which became only a drop-off location for dry cleaning in 2005, and was closed in 2011 after being damaged in Hurricane Irene, was unable to afford the extensive cleanup required. Taxpayers ultimately footed the $2.2 million bill through the Superfund program.)19

  Camp Lejeune’s command over its own environmental problems was in chaos, and its maintenance staff was overwhelmed in the late 1980s. The director of utilities, C. H. Baker, acknowledged as much in an “action brief” sent to base headquarters on March 15, 1988, that was tantamount to throwing up a white flag of surrender. Baker’s plea for help said: “(1) Confusion exists regarding which organization or person is responsible for acting on environmental issues, implementing environmental policies and programs, and resolving environmental problems; (2) No single point of contact is available for consultation with State and Federal agencies; (3) Confusion exists among Base activities and State and Federal Agencies regarding who to talk to on various environmental concerns.” There were also more than a dozen “outstanding environmental concerns” that required action, Baker said, including the need to address illegal discharges at four sewage treatment plants and the need to notify people on the base about “lead and other heavy metals in drinking water.”20

  It wasn’t just the water that was causing environmental concerns at Camp Lejeune. Throughout the 1980s, workers in many buildings complained about fuel odors and chemical smells inside the workplace. Tests of indoor air were recommended by consultants at Environmental Science and Engineering in the summer of 1988 as part of a five-part plan “to deal with immediate health risk in the Hadnot Point area of the base.” The firm recommended tests of air quality in areas “with the potential for high levels of harmful volatile compounds,” such as inside buildings near “hot spots” of contaminated groundwater. Dangerous levels of benzene, TCE, and other pollutants in the air could easily be detected using a vapor analyzer or other equipment, the consultants said, adding that if levels were above the limits considered acceptable to humans, “immediate measures, such as forced ventilation, should be taken to reduce health risks until permanent remediation measures can be taken.”21

  This was at a time when Camp Lejeune managers knew that fuel was leaking from the tank farm at Hadnot Point at a rate of 1,500 gallons per month and that it was forming a pool of diesel and gasoline, 15 feet deep in some places, just below the surface in an area filled with offices and maintenance buildings. Base officials were more concerned at the time with the cost of the wasted fuel than with the health effects of the leaks. “The loss of 1,500 gallons per month will be difficult for taxpayers to understand, and the extremely high costs of recovering that lost fuel exacerbate the problem,” Colonel Tokarz wrote in a March 29, 1988, memo to the base’s assistant chief of staff.22

  The head of the Naval Hospital at Camp Lejeune, H. P. Scott, told the base commander that summer that his staff would not be able to conduct indoor-air monitoring. It would take five people to do the job, or half the hospital’s industrial hygiene staff, Scott complained, suggesting that the work be contracted out. Years later, when the Marine Corps was asked to produce results of the air tests, none could be found. A Marine spokesman, Major Nat Fahy, told the St. Petersburg Times in Florida in 2011 that an extensive search of records turned up empty. “The absence of records more than 20 years later does not necessarily mean action was not taken,” Fahy told the newspaper. “We believe that any testing that may have been done was done in a timely manner.”23

  The paper found a woman who had worked as a computer specialist in a building that had to be evacuated several times in the 1980s because of fuel odors. The woman, Mildred Duncan, was furious that the base apparently never tested the air in her office. “This is a betrayal,” said Duncan, now retired as a civilian employee for the Marine Corps. “It’s like they lied to us. They kept us in those buildings, breathing all that. It’s not right.”24

  On June 24, 1988, the EPA again proposed placing Camp Lejeune on the National Priorities List for the Superfund program, the first step toward a final designation and a full cleanup managed by the federal environmental agency. The extent of a “full cleanup” was a contentious point. Marine Corps engineers had suggested that it would take about five years to clean up the groundwater in the Hadnot Point industrial area, but EPA project managers commented that the Navy was being unrealistic—restoration work would take at least thirty years, they said.25

  Nine months after the Superfund listing was proposed, another federal agency encouraged the EPA to move forward with a cleanup. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the US Commerce Department that serves as a trustee of the nation’s natural resources, said it had determined that Camp Lejeune represented “a potential threat to natural resources held in trust by federal agencies.”26

  As the official designation of Camp Lejeune as a Superfund site came closer, Marine Corps commanders decided they should notify base residents before they were alarmed by a news announcement from the EPA. In September 1989, Corporal Dave Mundy wrote a series of reassuring stories in the base newspaper, including one quoting chemist Elizabeth Betz saying the contamination levels at Camp Lejeune were considered safe by the EPA and that much of the pollution came from an off-base source, ABC One-Hour Cleaners. A number of water wells were shut down, but there was no effect on base operations, added B. W. Elston, deputy assistant chief of staff for facilities at
the base. “We closed eight wells in the Hadnot Point Industrial Area and two in the Tarawa Terrace area as a precautionary measure and still had an adequate water supply,” Elston said.

  “We shut down some wells that were not near the EPA limit,” Betz told the base newspaper. “Then we started looking at what caused that contamination.” The fact that one of the chemicals found in the wells was the dry-cleaning solvent known as PCE helped determine the source, she said. “We were puzzled when that chemical showed up,” Betz said. “At first we couldn’t figure out how it had gotten into the Tarawa Terrace system. Then we looked across Highway 24. There was a dry-cleaning business right across the road from the housing area.”27

  Elston was quoted again in a follow-up story by Mundy touting the high standards at the Marine Corps base. “Very few municipalities, I’d say, are inspected as often or as thoroughly as our public works are,” Elston said. “Violations are reported promptly and corrected immediately. . . . We always take measures to go at least a step beyond what is required by law and to ensure that we don’t provide water that is unsafe for those using it. The commanding general will not accept anything less.”28

  On October 4, 1989, a few weeks after the articles were published at Camp Lejeune, the EPA officially designated the base as a Superfund site. Among the reasons listed were fuel contamination and volatile organic compounds in the groundwater beneath the Hadnot Point Industrial Area, potential damage to wetlands from waste disposal areas on the base, and pesticide-contaminated soil outside a building once used as a child-care center.29

  Rick Shiver, the environmental regulator representing North Carolina in negotiations on the cleanup, said that by this point the Marine Corps seemed resigned to the fact that it had a massive job ahead of it. The military lawyers and engineers worked closely with the state and the EPA to write a 172-page “federal facilities agreement” spelling out requirements for the cleanup and the responsibilities of all parties involved. “It was all very collaborative,” Shiver said. “There was no animosity between the various groups.”