by Mike Magner
The CAP members made their purpose clear to ATSDR officials at their opening session. “None of us are scientists,” said McCall, who had delivered an emotional statement about her cancer treatment at the expert panel hearing a year earlier. “We don’t care about science, we want services.” Byron said, “If the DOD poisoned my daughter, I want health care for my daughter. That’s what we’re leading up to. We are here because we want answers and we want this kind of stuff to stop.” Ensminger was angry that the Marine Corps didn’t send a representative to the first meeting. “They need to be up here and they need to have input,” he said. “We’re beating around the bush and chasing our tail because we’re depending on them for information.”24
The CAP would also become a source of frustration for some members. Terry Dyer said she quit the panel in 2007 “because we weren’t getting anywhere. We were talking about the same exact things every time.” David Martin, a North Carolina man who was a member of Dyer’s Water Survivors group, left the CAP at the same time as Dyer.
There was a development in 2006, though, that gave Dyer hope. The Senate approved legislation that eventually made its way through the House as well, ordering the National Academy of Sciences to do a study of possible links between the water contamination at Camp Lejeune and health problems in base residents. “I think I literally screamed,” Dyer said at the time. “It’s like something good has finally started coming out of this thing.”25
The legislation was proposed by Senator Elizabeth Dole, with backing from Senator James Jeffords. Dyer described the meeting that she and other victims of the contamination had had with Dole. “She wanted to hear and listen to each one of our stories,” Dyer said. “She was shaking her head in disbelief. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She looked at us and said, ‘What can I do? What do you need?’”26
“I have heard from constituents and other Marine families whose children have suffered birth defects and even fatal illnesses, and these families believe that their tragedies were caused by water contamination at Camp Lejeune,” Dole said in a news release. “We must uncover and evaluate the facts about this incident—and I am hopeful that this provision will help those families who are seeking answers.” In his own release, Jeffords described the legislation as “the minimum that our government should be doing to address the grievous failure on the part of the Marine Corps to adequately protect its service members and their families.”27
Jeff Byron, who also was gratified by the planned study, said simply, “I am very pleased, and I think the creator has smiled upon us.”28
11
OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE?
I personally would have been using different water.
—THOMAS SINKS, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, AGENCY FOR TOXIC SUBSTANCES AND DISEASE REGISTRY
In 2006, twelve years after the “Republican revolution” under Newt Gingrich had given the GOP a majority in Congress, Democrats regained control of both the House and the Senate. Democrat John Dingell of Michigan resumed chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a position he had held from 1981 to 1994. One of Dingell’s first priorities was to hold the military accountable for its environmental problems, and Camp Lejeune’s escalating health crisis topped the list. Another Michigan Democrat, Congressman Bart Stupak, took over the panel’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. Stupak scheduled a hearing for June 12, 2007, entitled “Poisoned Patriots: Contaminated Drinking Water at Camp Lejeune.” It would mark the first time since the contaminated water issues had surfaced more than two decades earlier that all the major players in the unfolding drama were together on the same stage.1
Stupak opened the hearing by noting that one of the principal pollutants at Lejeune, TCE, was the same volatile organic compound that had poisoned people in Woburn, Massachusetts, in a case made famous by the book and movie A Civil Action. “As bad as the contamination was at Woburn, the concentrations of TCE at Camp Lejeune were as much as ten to fifteen times higher,” he said. “We have a chart. . . . There is a current standard, five parts per billion; Woburn is 267; Hadnot, which is one of the wells [at Lejeune], was 3,400. In Hadnot on February 7, 1985, over 18,000 parts per billion [were found] in the water.”
The lead witnesses at the hearing were Jeff Byron, Mike Gros, and Jerry Ensminger, who by this time had assembled their own website—“The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten”—which was filled with stories and documents related to Lejeune’s water. Testimony by these three relentless advocates for victims of the contamination was a fitting start for an event intended to expose to the public—and more importantly to members of Congress—what was probably the biggest water-contamination case in history, both in terms of the levels of pollution and the number of people exposed to it. Their heartrending personal stories captured the wide range of health problems apparently linked to the tainted water. Driven by anger and grief, Byron, Gros, and Ensminger—along with Tom Townsend in Idaho and others who believed they had been harmed by the pollution—had managed to uncover more information about Lejeune’s water issues than two federal agencies and the Navy itself had compiled during twenty-two years of investigation.
“From documents that we obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests,” Byron testified, “we were able to determine that the Marine Corps/DOD environmental personnel on base were well aware of the VOC contamination before our family moved into base housing, and therefore could have intervened and prevented the adverse health effects suffered by my family as well as other families, whose medical history is very similar to my own.”
After providing more background information, he said, “I was raised to believe that to get something done you had to do it yourself. That is what I and others are doing.”
Gros described how the group of former Marines had found the lab reports that first indicated the presence of solvents in Lejeune’s water in 1980, along with other test results given to the base’s water system managers in the years that followed. “In spite of multiple handwritten warning notes on repeated test reports over several years’ period of time, the advice of the base’s outside water consultants to further identify and quantitate the poisoning chemicals was repeatedly ignored,” he said. “Amazingly, no tests were ever done in follow-up to identify the nature of these compounds or their sources. Even more incredible was the Marine Corps’ attempt to later justify this gross neglect with the tack that no law existed requiring them to exercise the normal good judgment and caring that any other contemporary water supplier would have had for its customers.”
Ensminger told the subcommittee members how he had had to notify the health agency conducting studies at Lejeune, the ATSDR, that the Marine Corps had provided the agency with incorrect information about the base water systems, a mistake that had caused the ATSDR to overlook thousands of people who had been exposed to the contamination. “The credit for the discovery of the incorrect water system data belongs to Major Tom Townsend, United States Marine Corps, retired,” Ensminger said. “It was through Major Townsend’s diligent and aggressive letter-writing and Freedom of Information Act request campaign that much of the factual information about Camp Lejeune was uncovered. Major Townsend lost an infant son and, more recently, his wife of more than 50 years to this contamination.”
Their testimony, rich in details about the military’s attempts to downplay its pollution problems, was in sharp contrast to that of Major General Robert Dickerson Jr., the commander at Camp Lejeune in 2007. “This unfortunate situation happened over 20 years ago,” Dickerson said. “And while there are still large gaps of knowledge on potential health implications due to exposure to TCE or PCE today, these gaps were even greater back in the 1980s.” Dickerson said that two federal investigations, and one by an independent panel appointed by the Marine Corps commandant, had all exonerated Lejeune officials of any wrongdoing. “Ultimately, everyone is here today for the same reason, to determine whether or not our Marines and their families were harmed in any way by contaminated water,” he sai
d. “We fully complied with environmental laws and regulations, and we remain committed to working with ATSDR and other Federal agencies involved with the study.”
Using information discovered by Ensminger, Stupak pointed out that the Navy had issued its own regulations for drinking water in 1972, and that compliance with these regulations had required regular testing. The regulations had specifically set a limit of 3 parts per billion for chlorinated hydrocarbons such as TCE. “Is it a violation of your military code if you ignore the regulations?” he asked Dickerson.
“No, sir. We do not ignore any regulations,” the general responded. “We hold ourselves to the highest standard.”
Sitting beside Dickerson, the environmental restoration manager at Marine Corps headquarters, Kelly Dreyer, interjected that wells were shut down at Camp Lejeune as soon as they were found to be a source of contaminants, but it took some time to track down which wells were tainted.
“Are you telling me the military’s response is—even though we know we are extremely higher than 3 parts per billion, way over our Navy regulations, we would continue to expose people because we can’t find the source?” Stupak said. “That’s ludicrous. If you are concerned about the health and safety of the people you are dealing with, if they’re being exposed to it, you would bring in potable water, you would take other action. . . . Your people were exposed to it, and you didn’t do anything.”
“I wouldn’t say that the Marine Corps, that Camp Lejeune didn’t do anything at that time,” Dickerson said. “I will say that they did work closely with the state of North Carolina environmental [regulators] to detect and find out what was contaminating the water, see what the level of contaminants were and what the impact was. They didn’t know. There were no standards for these contaminants at that point in time.”
Asked about the levels of contamination in the drinking water, Dreyer said the results varied. “That was part of the problem,” she said. “In many instances they would have non-detect [of any measurable levels of contaminants]. We have seen as high as 1,400 in tap water. I will point out that 18,000 figure is from a well sample. And that well would not have been provided directly to anybody to drink. It would have been transported to the water treatment plant and mixed with other wells that were pumping at that time.”
“Everybody did the best with the information they had at the time,” Dickerson insisted. “Unfortunately, some of the levels on a day-to-day basis were above the acceptable levels for drinking water.”
Stupak and other members of the subcommittee also were flabbergasted that the Marine Corps had not made aggressive efforts to contact everyone who had lived on the base when the water was contaminated to inform them that they had been exposed to toxic chemicals. Dickerson said there had been outreach through the media, and that information had been provided on the Camp Lejeune website. “Not the media,” Stupak said. “I’m talking about notice to those individuals who lived there. Why not contact them?”
Dickerson: “Some people, we haven’t got an address to get to. Some of the records are not complete on everybody that was stationed there.”
Stupak: “Have you made an effort?”
Dickerson: “We have made every effort to get the word out. That is why the website was set up.”
Stupak: “No, no, not the word out. Notice directly these people.”
Dickerson: “We have a media campaign to go out, based on the study.”
Stupak grew increasingly frustrated. “My chief of staff here sits here and says, ‘Man, I moved three times in the last few years, but still I get a recall notice on a car that I owned three moves ago.’ And if a private company can still notify you about your clunker, which is probably already no longer on the road, but can give you recall notices, I would think the military could contact people who were exposed. And I would go from 1957 until 1987, that 30-year period. I just can’t believe you can’t do that. That’s inconceivable to me.”
Next, it was the ATSDR’s turn to report on its studies. Thomas Sinks, the agency’s deputy director, said that in the modeling that had been done on the Tarawa Terrace system, which mostly had been contaminated with the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene from a nearby business, the highest PCE reading had been 180 parts per billion—thirty-six times the maximum exposure level set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1992. “There were approximately 83,000 people exposed to this water from 1958 through 1985,” Sinks said. Modeling had not been completed on the Hadnot Point system, but one sample of tap water there had 1,400 parts per billion of TCE, hundreds of times higher than the safety level, he said. Sinks also said the ATSDR had begun a modeling study for the Holcomb Boulevard system, which the agency only recently discovered had been served by the Hadnot Point treatment plant for years before its own plant was built in 1972. Sinks estimated that at least 10,000 people living in the Holcomb Boulevard area from 1968 through 1985 had been exposed to contaminated water from the Hadnot Point system.
Congressman Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, asked Sinks whether, if he had been living at Camp Lejeune during the time of the contamination, he would have felt comfortable drinking the water.
“Well, I think that I personally would have been using different water and I think that I would have been recommending that an alternative water source was used at that time,” Sinks responded.
“I don’t know anybody that would say the opposite of that,” Walden said.
Ensminger and his crew had uncovered another ominous part of the story before the hearing: the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement division had spent a considerable amount of time looking into whether Marine Corps officials had obstructed government investigations of Camp Lejeune pollution, but the Justice Department had determined that there was not a strong enough case to bring criminal charges.
EPA investigator Tyler Amon appeared before the subcommittee with the agency’s top enforcement officer and verified that he had found some evidence of obstruction, mainly in the way Navy engineers appeared to have been coached in how to answer questions about the contamination. “So criminal charges were considered on obstructing justice?” Stupak asked Amon.
“That is correct, sir,” the EPA investigator replied.
“Okay. And then who determined not to bring forth the charges?” Stupak asked.
“The Department of Justice ultimately makes decisions on what is charged,” Amon said.
Peter Murtha, director of the EPA’s Office of Criminal Enforcement, said the agency’s investigation had spanned eighteen months and had included twenty-six interviews with personnel from Camp Lejeune and the Navy Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic Division, or LANTDIV. In addition, thousands of documents had been reviewed, and investigators had consulted “extensively” with an expert in drinking-water regulations. “I think one also has to bear in mind, although clearly there is some derogatory information in the investigation that we put together, that it is really a higher bar to bring criminal charges,” Murtha said.
“Under the principles of federal prosecution, the Department of Justice prosecutors need to make sure that they have a reasonable probability of succeeding on the charges that they bring,” Murtha told the subcommittee. “And I think the feeling must have been here that, even though there was evidence of not being forthcoming, that that evidence didn’t quite reach the level where there could be a reasonable probability that convictions would be obtained.”
Congressman Ed Whitfield, a Republican from Kentucky, was troubled by the fact that the Navy’s environmental engineers had been coached by their superiors on how to handle investigators’ questions. “There may not have been any criminal charges, but I think it is a sad day that the investigation shows quite clearly that people were not forthcoming,” Whitfield said. “And like I said, we are very proud of our military, but I think, in this incident, the military leadership failed the men and women who serve this country and their families.”
Another EPA official, Franklin H
ill of the Superfund office in Atlanta, provided an update on the source of all the problems at Lejeune. “During the eighteen years that EPA has been involved in cleanup at Camp Lejeune, we have made significant progress in cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater,” Hill reported. “To date, we have selected remedies at thirty sites within Camp Lejeune and anticipate selection of the last remedy in the year of 2011.” Sixteen other contaminated sites were still under investigation at the base, he said, and all “remedies” were expected to be in place by 2014.
Stupak was not impressed. “Camp Lejeune was listed [as a Superfund site] in 1989,” he told Hill. “That was when it was final, you said. Here we are eighteen years later, and nothing has been cleaned up, has it?”
Hill responded: “Well, we have a couple of sites that we have removed, or we have decided that they have reached their remedial goals. We have had some soil . . .”
Stupak interrupted: “You are close?”
Hill: “We have had a number of cleanups on the site. So the answer to your question, sir, is yes, there have been some cleanups.”
Stupak: “Of the 46 sites, how many have been cleaned up?”
Hill: “That is a good question. I don’t want to guess at that, but I know that there are several removals that have been completed.”
Cleanup was also continuing at the property owned by ABC One-Hour Cleaners, which had dumped dry-cleaning solvents over a period of several decades, contaminating the water at Tarawa Terrace, Hill said. “It will go on until we achieve the remedial goals for that site,” he said. “And right now, we are looking at North Carolina standards, which is about 2.8 parts per billion for TCE. So that is quite a conservative number. And it will take us some time to achieve that.”
Finally, a representative of the Navy’s Office of the Judge Advocate General (JAG) gave a status report on claims that had been filed to that point seeking damages from the military for health problems—and in some cases, deaths—that were believed to have been caused by the Lejeune pollution. “As of this date, we have received a total of 853 claims that allege either personal injury or death as a result of exposure to contaminated drinking water while living or working on board Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune,” said Pat Leonard, director of the claims, investigations, and tort litigation division at the Navy JAG office. “The majority of the claims are from family members of former service members stationed at Camp Lejeune. Included in that total number are 115 claims from civilian employees who worked on board the base.”
