A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  Devereaux underwent a mastectomy on his left breast and had twenty-two lymph nodes removed. All were cancerous. In the months to follow he endured twenty-nine rounds of chemotherapy and thirty radiation treatments. “Then in August 2008 I got a letter from the Marines about the contaminated water,” he said. “A light went off. It was like one and one is two. It was clear.” His wife, Fiona, went online and found more information about the Lejeune problems, including the website run by Terry Dyer’s group, Water Survivors. She posted a message on the site about her husband’s breast cancer, and within minutes there was a reply from Mike Partain. “You need to call me immediately,” Partain wrote, and provided his phone number. “I think I was number seven,” Devereaux said.

  Partain recommended that Devereaux apply for benefits from the Veterans Affairs Department to pay for treatment of his illness, if only to start a paper trail that he might need to fight for health coverage down the road. Devereaux applied in November 2008 and was denied in April 2009—just as the second stage of his disaster struck. “On April 9, 2009, I was supposed to finish my last treatment, but I could feel in my back and neck a pain that was like a pinched nerve,” Devereaux said. “The doctor said we’ll do a scan, and when he got the results he said the cancer had spread to my bones.” Now Devereaux had metastatic breast cancer, for which there is no cure; the doctors told him the average life expectancy was two to three years.

  Mike Partain was deeply affected by Devereaux’s story, not only because it hit extremely close to home, but also for the support it gave as he built a case that Camp Lejeune had caused a cluster of male breast cancer victims unprecedented in the annals of medicine. Since the publication of the Lakeland Ledger story, he had found eight other cases in addition to his own. “That was still a lot for male breast cancer,” he said, “but after seeing how the Lakeland story got nine, I realized a national story would do more.” After a Community Assistance Panel meeting in April 2009 in Atlanta, Partain headed to the nearby headquarters of cable news giant CNN and asked to talk to a reporter. As he described his rare disease and said it was probably connected to drinking poisoned water at Camp Lejeune, Partain said, he could tell the reaction was as if he had said an alien spaceship had landed in Georgia. “They blew me off,” he said.

  “Then in May 2009 we had a big break,” Partain said. He got a call from Bill Levesque, a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, who had heard about Partain’s quest to find cases of male breast cancer linked to Camp Lejeune. “I talked to him for about two hours and he was really interested in my story,” Partain said. When it was published in the big regional newspaper and went online, suddenly the number of breast cancer cases jumped from nine to twenty men who had spent time at the North Carolina base—many of them now retired in Florida. Levesque followed up with a report about that, too, and within days CNN was calling Partain. “With 20 men they were very interested now,” he said.2

  13

  A STONE WALL CRUMBLES

  Sir, there are a number of actions that I would have changed.

  —MAJOR GENERAL EUGENE G. PAYNE JR., ASSISTANT DEPUTY COMMANDANT, MARINE CORPS HEADQUARTERS

  More than twenty years after the contaminated wells were shut down at Camp Lejeune—twenty-seven since solvents were first discovered in the water—victims of the toxic chemicals had nothing but frustration and anger and grief. By 2007, pain and anguish were deeply embedded in those most affected by the pollution, the Terry Dyers and Jerry Ensmingers who were now going into their second decade of demanding that the military and the government acknowledge the harm done to their families and to potentially thousands of others who had been exposed to the tainted water at the base. And some key people in Washington were beginning to share their concerns.

  Democratic senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had been hearing regularly from Sally and Tom McLaughlin, a couple from the western part of his state whose infant son had been born with part of his brain missing in 1966, two years after the end of Tom’s eighteen-month tour at Camp Lejeune, where they had lived in housing at Tarawa Terrace. The McLaughlins convinced Kerry that the baby’s fatal birth defect was the result of Sally drinking contaminated water from August 1962 to February 1964, when Tom was stationed at Lejeune. And Senator Hillary Clinton, the former first lady who had moved from the White House to the Senate at the beginning of 2001, had become concerned about TCE contamination in the water supplies of several upstate New York communities, where high-tech companies used the powerful solvent to clean computer chips. Kerry and Clinton teamed up in July 2007 to introduce legislation that would give the Environmental Protection Agency a year to draft new health standards for TCE in drinking water. The National Academies of Sciences had given the agency a ringing endorsement for its 2001 assessment showing that regulations for TCE should be strengthened to protect public health, but it still had not acted on the matter. “The EPA has dropped the ball in giving this issue immediate attention,” said Kerry. “In light of the tragedy at Camp Lejeune, where the TCE levels in drinking water caused sickness, birth defects and death, it is urgent that we update the standard today.”1

  Around the same time, Republican senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina pushed an amendment to a Defense Department bill to require the Marine Corps to contact everyone who had lived or worked at Camp Lejeune over several decades before the mid-1980s and inform them about the water contamination. “We cannot correct a past mistake by pretending that this contamination did not take place,” Dole said in a statement on the Senate floor. “We cannot hope to protect the sterling reputation of the Corps by avoiding the hard and unpleasant facts associated with this tragic situation.” Dole said she understood it would be an enormous task to identify and directly notify each Marine, family member, and civilian employee who had lived or worked on the base since the mid-1950s. But not reaching out to them would be “a profound disservice,” she said. “We count on them to protect us. They count on us to do the right thing. Every member of this body has many, many constituents who served at Camp Lejeune.”2

  The frustration among victims of the contamination was turning to outright anger. At an August 2007 meeting of the Community Assistance Panel set up by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to provide input on its Lejeune studies, scientists from the agency reported that it would be months before they could complete a study of how many people had been exposed to contaminants at the base and at what levels. The ATSDR was now into its fourth year of designing computer models to re-create the flow of contaminants in the base’s water systems over a period of thirty years, with no clear end in sight. “These studies have not been easy,” said the agency’s senior scientist, Frank Bove. “And the future studies will take time, too.”3

  Members of the CAP who had traveled long distances to attend the meeting in Atlanta did not hold back their rage. “Nothing is happening here,” said Terry Dyer, who had been actively following the studies by the ATSDR for nearly a decade, after discovering that her father, a school principal on the base for fifteen years, might have been killed by the tainted water, and that the water could have also accounted for the severe health problems suffered by her and her two sisters. “I’m tired of coming here. I’m tired of time away from my family. I’m tired of not knowing from day to day whether I’m going to die. I don’t want to waste this time here because I want to be with my family.”4

  Jeff Byron also let loose on officials from the ATSDR and the Marine Corps. “When are you going to divulge what you know? Why are you still holding back on Freedom of Information documents that we are requesting, instead of citing national security?” Byron asked. “I’m sick of wasting my time with people who won’t give us the truth.”5

  The fury increased in the fall of 2007 when the National Research Council—a part of the National Academies of Sciences that was tasked by Congress to study whether illnesses could be linked to Lejeune’s contamination—dispatched a committee of researchers to the North Carolina base
to begin an investigation. Members of the panel arrived on Wednesday, November 14, for a tour of the sprawling installation, followed by a reception and dinner at the Officers’ Club. Jerry Ensminger heard that the committee was being “wined and dined” by the Marine Corps as it launched its study of the effects of the base contamination and immediately suspected the results would be as tainted as Camp Lejeune’s water had been in the 1970s. “I fully intend to write an official letter of protest to what we, the victims of this tragedy, view as a direct violation of the ethical standards which should guide the activities of the National Academy’s work,” he wrote to one of the administrators of the study in Washington.6

  The day after their inaugural meeting in the most comfortable accommodations the Marine Corps could provide, the scientists were confronted with the cold, harsh realities of the issues they were assigned to study. At a meeting with victims of the contamination, Mary Freshwater of Greenville, North Carolina, stood before the panel holding a cardboard box carrying a stained piece of clothing and a bottle that had been used by her infant son, who had been born with an open spine at Camp Lejeune in 1977. Fighting back tears, Freshwater said the tiny outfit was all she had to remember her baby boy, who had died on New Year’s Eve only a month after his birth. The doctors had said it was a fluke, she said, and encouraged her to get pregnant again. That she did, and another son was born—this time without a cranium. “I’d appreciate it if you take into account that we are not just numbers in a study,” she told the scientists. “We are people that have had great tragedies, and the pain is no less.”7

  But even if the problems at Lejeune were viewed only through statistics, it seemed no less a tragedy. This is what was so infuriating to Freshwater and others who were certain they had suffered horribly from drinking poisoned water at the base. The ATSDR survey completed in 2003 found that of some 12,000 babies conceived or born at Lejeune between 1968 and 1985, more than 100 had suffered from birth defects or childhood cancer. About half of those cases had been confirmed by medical records. This was an unusually high rate, meaning that 1 in every 240 children who had been exposed to the contamination had experienced a devastating health problem. Furthermore, separate studies in communities where drinking water was contaminated by the toxic solvents TCE and PCE, in both New Jersey and Massachusetts, also showed increased rates of childhood leukemia, birth defects, and other serious illnesses. And evidence was growing that adults were affected, too: a study released in January 2008 by researchers at the University of Kentucky pointed to “a clear-cut link” between TCE exposure and development of Parkinson’s disease.8 Yet in its studies at Lejeune, the ATSDR was still studying only the chemical’s effects on children, insisting that there was insufficient evidence to show that adults also could have been harmed.

  It shouldn’t have been surprising that the effects of Camp Lejeune’s water contamination were being downplayed by the administration of President George W. Bush. Questions involving the effects of toxic chemicals were no longer the sole responsibility of experts at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, the ATSDR’s parent agency. The producers and users of hazardous substances—industries and the military—had a greater role in assessing the risks from their own pollution than ever before.

  The EPA had established a program in 1985 to evaluate the safety of new substances introduced into the marketplace that ultimately ended up in the environment. Assessments of more than five hundred chemicals had been completed in the first fifteen years of this program, called the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, but the numbers dropped below an average of five per year between 2000 and 2007, according to a March 2008 report by the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office. “GAO concluded that the IRIS database was at serious risk of becoming obsolete because EPA had not been able to complete timely, credible assessments or decrease its backlog of seventy ongoing assessments—a total of four were completed in fiscal years 2006 and 2007,” said one of the authors of the report, John B. Stephenson, in testimony to a House committee. A major reason for the slowdown in completing chemical-safety studies, according to the GAO, was that the Bush administration had imposed new requirements: the EPA now had to submit every risk assessment to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review before it could be added to the IRIS database. Many assessments that went to OMB were held there indefinitely, often to give industries an opportunity to comment on the EPA’s conclusions about harmful levels of exposure. Some assessments never again saw the light of day.9

  The delays in assessing chemical threats can have disastrous effects on public health, said Lynn Goldman, who had been head of the EPA Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances under President Bill Clinton, speaking to a Senate committee investigating the IRIS system in April 2008. Take the example of formaldehyde, a long-used wood preservative, Goldman said. In 2006, an international research agency had recommended that it be classified as a known cancer-causing agent rather than just a probable carcinogen. “As evidence has accumulated, many countries and the state of California have proposed strict enforceable standards for formaldehyde in buildings,” she said. Goldman, who later became dean of George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services, and at the time of the hearing was professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, noted that:

  for years, the scientists at the EPA have been trying to update the agency’s assessment of formaldehyde on IRIS. In 2004, this was nearly complete, but the process was postponed. The formaldehyde industry persuaded members of Congress and the EPA’s political leadership that “new” scientific findings would soon be forthcoming, justifying a delay. At the same time, the CIIT (Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology) published its own formaldehyde cancer assessment. In an unprecedented action, in 2004 EPA incorporated the CIIT assessment into its fiberboard hazardous air pollution rule, without the concurrence either of EPA’s scientists or the EPA’s independent Science Advisory Board.10

  While stricter limits on formaldehyde were being held back, Goldman said, the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast, leaving thousands homeless. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stepped in to provide 120,000 travel trailers for temporary housing, without realizing the trailers had been built with materials soaked in formaldehyde. “You know about the rest of the tragedy, and the slow response to the problem by the federal government,” Goldman told the Senate committee. Thousands of hurricane victims now had a new disaster—health problems from breathing the toxic fumes of formaldehyde—and multimillion-dollar lawsuits were soon in the works. (The trailer manufacturers and contractors ultimately settled a class action suit for $42.6 million, but cases seeking damages from the government were still in the appeals process in 2013.)11

  “Like formaldehyde, several other major chemicals under assessment by the EPA, like the dry cleaning solvent perchlorethylene, also have been held hostage,” Goldman said at the 2008 hearing. “Withholding information about chemical hazards does cause harm to the public.”12

  A couple of months later, a House committee looking into the same issues at EPA invited Jerry Ensminger to testify about the military’s role in assessing the risks from chemicals such as TCE that had been found in the water at Camp Lejeune. “It is a known fact that the United States Department of Defense is our nation’s largest polluter,” Ensminger told the committee. “It is beyond my comprehension why an entity with that type of reputation and who has a vested interest in seeing little to no environmental oversight would be included in the scientific process. Not only are they obstructing science, they are also jeopardizing the public health for millions of people all around the world . . . and yet this administration and past Congresses have allowed DOD’s tentacles to infiltrate the realm of science.”13

  Political pressures were also taking a toll on the federal scientists most responsible
for protecting the public against health threats of all kinds, including those in the environment. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its Superfund branch, the ATSDR, more than a dozen top managers and researchers had left between 2004 and 2006, and morale among the remaining staff was in the tank, according to a lengthy story published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on September 10, 2006. “You’re seeing a gradual erosion of the scientific base, and that’s very worrisome,” a former CDC director, David Sencer, told the newspaper. Sencer and four other past directors wrote a joint letter to the director at that time, Julie Gerberding, saying they were alarmed by the depth of problems at the CDC, which had long been considered one of the premier public health agencies in the world. The paper had obtained a copy of the letter and included quotations from it in the story. “We are concerned that so many of the staff have come to us to express their concerns about the low morale in the agency,” the five former directors had written to Gerberding. “We are concerned about the inability of many of the partners to understand the direction in which CDC is headed.” CDC employees told the newspaper in interviews that one of the reasons for the low morale was “a general lack of confidence that CDC’s leadership will ‘do the right thing’ when faced with political pressure from Washington.”14