by Mike Magner
The tag team of Townsend and Ensminger was just getting started. One day in 2003, Townsend was surfing through the Camp Lejeune website from his Idaho home when he came upon a treasure trove of documents that had been posted on one of the public web pages. There were nearly two dozen folders filled with reports, memos, e-mails, and other information, all focused on the water contamination issues. Townsend called Ensminger in North Carolina and told him to take a look. But when Ensminger tried to copy one of the folders using the slow dial-up connection he had at the time, it took hours just to download one set of documents. He called Townsend back and told him to tell his grandson to use his high-speed connection and put the data on disks as soon as possible. The boy did exactly that, and just in time. Within a few days the documents disappeared from the Marine Corps website. “I think the [National Science Foundation] or the EPA made them put these documents up so they could have access,” Ensminger said. “And Tom got there at the right time.”
Another big break for victims of the Lejeune pollution came in January 2004, when the Washington Post published a long story on page 3 under the headline, “Tainted Water in the Land of Semper Fi; Marines Want to Know Why Base Did Not Close Wells When Toxins Were Found.” After describing the tests done in 1980 and 1981 showing the presence of solvents in the base water supply, the story, by Manuel Roig-Franzia and Catharine Skipp, reported that it wasn’t until 1985 that contaminated wells were shut down.
“The battle over the water contamination at Lejeune has strained age-old loyalties, matching Marine veterans against the power structure of an organization that prides itself in the motto Semper Fidelis, or ‘always faithful.’ The Marine Corps has not denied that contamination took place at Lejeune,” the story said. It went on to describe the problem in more detail:
In a written response to questions from the Washington Post, the Corps said the wells were not shut down for five years because there were no federal drinking-water regulations then for the chemicals found in Lejeune’s water: trichloroethylene, or TCE, the metal degreaser that federal researchers say was kept in leaky underground storage tanks, and tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, which researchers believe leaked into the wells from a dry cleaner that still operates across the street from Lejeune’s main gate. The Environmental Protection Agency had recommended levels—not enforceable standards—at the time, and the Corps said the average contamination readings for TCE were below those levels and that the PCE readings were “only slightly above” those levels.
The Post reported that criminal investigators at the Environmental Protection Agency were looking into what happened. Meanwhile, Senator Jeffords was calling for hearings. “I have very serious questions about why the Marine Corps, who knew the drinking-water wells were highly contaminated in 1980, didn’t close them until 1985,” Jeffords told the newspaper. “Sunshine is always the best disinfectant. . . . We have a strong obligation to provide all the information we already have to the Marines and their families.”6
Jeffords kept the pressure on the Marine Corps and the federal health agency by demanding that everyone who lived in base housing at the time of the contamination be notified about it, and by requesting that the ATSDR’s studies be expanded to include adults as well as children who may have been harmed. The Pentagon responded in February 2004 by saying it wanted to wait until the water-modeling studies (several years off) were completed so they could give people accurate information about their exposure. “Based on the ATSDR results, we will expeditiously consider the need for additional notification,” the Marine Corps said in a statement. (At the same time, the Royal Netherlands Navy, which had an exchange program with Camp Lejeune to train members of its Marine corps, was trying to locate and notify any of its troops who had been at the base in North Carolina before 1985. “The least you can do is this: make up a list of people who had been there in those years and try to track them down,” said Colonel Herman Dukers of the Dutch Marines.)7
The ATSDR insisted that there was a sound reason for its initial studies to look only at babies exposed to the contaminants in the womb. “They were the place where we were most likely to get results,” said the agency’s Scott Mull. “They are much more vulnerable than you or I as adults.” If the studies clearly showed that the water could be linked to birth defects or cancer, they could be expanded, he said. “It was never meant that this would be the end of it. It is really just the first step in what could be [a larger study],” Mull said.8
Despite the ATSDR’s insistence, the US Marine Corps, under pressure from Congress, federal agencies, and victims of the contamination, knew it had to do something to show it was being responsive. In February 2004, the commandant named a three-member panel to look into how the situation had been handled and report back to him. General Mike Hagee described the handpicked trio as an independent group of “private sector professionals” who would objectively consider all the evidence and assess what had occurred at the base.9
Almost immediately, there was an outcry that the blue-ribbon panel was anything but independent. The chairman of the panel was a former Republican congressman, Ron Packard of California, who had represented the district that included the largest Marine base in the West, Camp Pendleton, at the same time that Hagee was a general officer there. One of the members was former Navy administrator Robert B. Pirie Jr., who as assistant secretary for installations and environment in the Pentagon had denied that the Marines were responsible for the contamination at Camp Lejeune. The other was Richard Hearney, a retired four-star general who still served as a part-time consultant to the Marine Corps.
Jeffords was appalled by the lack of a water-quality specialist on the panel, and Republican senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina was angry about the members’ close ties to the military. “The panel the Marines have chosen is outrageous,” Dole said. She had written to the top brass at the Marine Corps before the panel was formed, insisting that it must be independent and impartial. “The Marines have failed on both accounts,” she said.10
In response to the criticism, Hagee added two scientists to the panel, Robert Tardiff and William Glaze. Tardiff was president and CEO of the Sapphire Group, a consulting firm on pollution issues. “This company was nothing more than environmental hired guns,” scoffed Jerry Ensminger. “They perform risk assessments on chemicals and products for the highest bidder.” In contrast, Glaze, a researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University, was cochairman of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board and had a sterling reputation in the research world. After just one meeting of the panel, however, Glaze quietly resigned without publicly stating his reasons. It was left to the panel chairman, Packard, to announce that Glaze had quit because he was concerned there could be a conflict of interest serving on both an EPA board and a Marine Corps panel. Ensminger, for one, wasn’t buying it. “No, Dr. Glaze who cherished his position in the world of academia saw the handwriting on the wall after he attended the first meeting at Camp Lejeune,” Ensminger told a congressional committee a few years later. “If he wanted to retain his high standing that he had attained in academia and the scientific community, he needed to distance himself from this fiasco.”11
Ensminger was also skeptical about the limited assignment given to the Marine panel—to review only what happened from the time solvents were first discovered in the base drinking water in 1980 until the tainted wells were shut down in 1985. “I knew right then that this entire panel was nothing more than a farce,” Ensminger said. “It was akin to placing a Band-aid over a sucking chest wound: too little, too late.”12
The Marines were put further on the defensive in early 2004, when aides to Congressman John Dingell of Michigan spotted the Washington Post’s coverage of Jerry Ensminger and Camp Lejeune just as Dingell, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was preparing for a hearing on the military’s requests for exemptions from environmental laws. “I saw the Post article and tracked Jerry down and took him in to see Mr. Dingell,” said attorney Richard
Frandsen, an investigator on Dingell’s staff for more than thirty years. “He turned to me and said, ‘Help ’em.’” Ensminger recalled that Dingell had started the meeting in his office by saying, “This is why we’re here,” and explaining the military’s exemption requests. Ensminger said he reached into his pocket and pulled out photos of his daughter Janey and her gravesite, and said, “This is why I’m here.” A few days later, Ensminger got a call from Dingell’s office asking if he would appear as a witness at an upcoming congressional hearing. “It turned out the meeting was a job interview,” Ensminger later said.13
The hearing, held on April 21, 2004, had been called by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) to consider the requests from the military for exemptions from environmental laws. Unless Barton’s committee approved the requests, the House Armed Services Committee would not be able to include language in legislation to authorize the exemptions. But with Republicans in control of both panels, it seemed almost a sure bet that the Defense Department would get what it wanted.
Dingell was determined to block the deal. “This is clearly not in the public interest,” he said in his opening statement at the hearing. “The administration’s proposal to exempt the Defense Department from important environmental laws will imperil drinking water supplies and eliminate vital state and federal authorities necessary to protect the public health and the environment. Nowhere has a single set of legislative proposals had so much audacity and so little merit. I would note that the Defense Department is supposed to defend the Nation, not to defile it.”14
Dingell, an Army veteran of World War II with a strong environmental voting record, said regulations on pollution had never affected military readiness, “but the Defense Department like an old maid rushes around looking under the bed to find about what they may complain or what might threaten them. I could understand this from somebody else but I expect our Defense Department to be made of sterner stuff.” He noted that the Marine Corps had argued that virtually all of Camp Lejeune was an “operational range” that needed to be exempt from hazardous-waste laws, even though the base was filled with housing areas, recreation sites, and other areas that needed to be protected from toxic contamination. Not to mention the fact that Camp Lejeune was already on the federal Superfund list requiring extensive and costly remediation.
Later in the hearing, Dingell introduced his ace in the hole, Jerry Ensminger. “From my own past experiences it makes me shudder to think that the military would be granted immunities from any environmental regulations or the oversight by the federal and state agencies that were created for these purposes,” Ensminger said after describing Lejeune’s history of pollution problems and the Navy’s reluctance to address them. “To grant immunities we would be affording the Department of Defense a license to kill their own personnel and their families in a far more terrible way than any foreign enemy could ever kill them with bombs or bullets.”
Ensminger pointed out that 141 military installations around the country were on the Superfund list. “This alone should be testimony enough for the disregard that the Department of Defense has for the environment and the welfare of their own people,” he said. “However, if this fact is not enough of a deterrent, perhaps this next fact will convince you. My daughter, Jane, fought a courageous battle against her malignancy for nearly two and a half years. She literally went through hell and all of us that loved her went through hell with her. The leukemia eventually won that war. On 24 September 1985, Jane succumbed to her disease. She was only nine years old.”
One member of the committee who was deeply moved by Ensminger’s testimony was Republican Richard Burr, soon to be elected as a senator from North Carolina. “I am curious if there is anybody in the audience from DOD or from the Corps who was assigned to come here and listen to Mr. Ensminger’s testimony as it relates to what I think is a tragedy at Camp Lejeune?” Burr asked the packed crowd at the hearing. No one responded, and the congressman said he was disgusted that military leaders responsible for the problems at Lejeune would not send a representative “to listen to the testimony from somebody who is willing to take their time, and probably pay their way, to come and sit through a very lengthy hearing and to wait to make one very, very important statement. Not just for you and not just for your daughter,” Burr told Ensminger, “but potentially for every man and woman who serves and every family who could potentially live on a base that is faced with this type of problem.”
After the hearing, most members of the committee came down to the witness table to shake Ensminger’s hand, he recalled. Dingell’s aide, Dick Frandsen, stood off to the side watching and waiting, “and when they were all done he came over and hugged me and said, ‘You knocked it out of the park.’” The story of his daughter’s death had a huge impact. Frandsen later told Ensminger that his testimony caused fourteen Republicans to change their minds and oppose the military exemptions. Two weeks after the hearing, Barton’s spokesman said his committee would reserve the right to object if the exemptions were added to any bill authorizing programs for the Department of Defense.
Camp Lejeune was still a mess. More than twenty sewage spills occurred at the base between 1997 and 2004; two occurred within two days in May 2004, including one that sent 47,500 gallons of raw sewage into a creek feeding into the New River. Cleanup crews specializing in treating and removing toxic wastes were also at work around the installation performing studies, installing monitoring equipment, and beginning remediation on dozens of contaminated sites. Most of the projects were expected to take years to complete.15
Into this environment waded the special panel appointed by the Marine Corps commandant to find out how the water contamination problems had been handled in the early 1980s. The committee called a public hearing for June 24, 2004, at the base USO center to allow interested parties to provide information. About fifty former residents of Lejeune showed up to testify, mostly in an angry, emotional manner.
“In the private sector this would be a felony . . . leaving people injured, sick and dying,” said Ellen Harris, who returned to the base where she had lived for five years from her current home in Fort Plain, Georgia. “We all looked like we had the mange.”16
The chairman of the panel, Ron Packard, urged calm and order, saying each person who wanted to speak would have five minutes to do so. “We think that it would be inappropriate to play to the media,” he told the audience. “We have to carefully evaluate the Marine Corps’ concerns and the concerns of the families.”
“As a victim who has suffered the ill effects of this contamination for over 30 years, I resent and am appalled at being allotted all of five minutes to provide you with my questions and concerns,” responded Paula Orellana of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, who was born at Camp Lejeune and had lived there as a child in the 1970s. “This leads one to wonder: how many facts do you really want to find?”
Ensminger used his time to tell the four panel members that the group before them was just “a fraction of those affected by this travesty and tragedy.” He began telling his version of how the Marine Corps failed to protect the base water supply by placing supply wells dangerously close to heavily contaminated waste sites. Packard allowed Ensminger to continue for ten minutes and then tried to cut him off. The audience hollered for Ensminger to continue, so Packard relented. By the end of the hearing, the panel was asking Ensminger for information. “I would ask you to screen your database and provide the names of all those we can interview,” said Richard Hearney, a retired Marine general.
Packard, the Marine Corps panel chairman, met later with a reporter for a Vietnam Veterans of America publication, Richard Currey, and tried to explain that the panel’s assignment did not include examining health problems among former Lejeune residents. “We’re listening very carefully to the concerns of the people who feel they or their families suffered as a result of the solvents in the water,” Packard said. “But it is not, however, the mandate of this panel to address those issues spec
ifically or offer any form of redress. We’re strictly a fact-finding group.”17
Currey pointed out that “the inescapable heart of the matter” was the Marine Corps’ failure to act for five years after learning that solvents were present in the base water supply. “The commandant has asked us to look very hard at that period of time, and determine if appropriate decisions were made in the context of the early 1980s,” Packard replied. “There wasn’t as much known about toxins or their effects back then. This panel has to make a decision about how it looked to the Camp Lejeune leadership at that time.” It was not an easy task to piece together records of decisions made two decades earlier. “And in many cases we’re dealing with people’s memories,” Packard said. “That can get pretty hazy. We’ve had people who said they were not involved, but then we produced documents confirming they were. At which point they say they just don’t recall the details.”
Packard insisted that his panel was operating under no constraints except for its specific mandate. “The commandant has not limited our range in terms of what we can look at or who we can talk to or consult with,” he said. “In fact, after we got under way, the Marine Corps has left us alone to do our work. But definitive conclusions about water contamination and human illness are simply not within this panel’s purview.”
