Camp Lejeune water contamination problem

[waltky]

Water at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune was contaminated four years earlier than previously thought...

Agency: Lejeune water contaminated earlier than previously thought
January 18, 2013 - Many more Marines and their relatives could be eligible for compensation for illnesses now that a federal agency determined that the water at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune was contaminated four years earlier than previously thought.

In a letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said computer modeling shows that drinking water in the residential Hadnot Point area was unsafe for human consumption as far back as 1953. President Barack Obama signed a law last year granting health care and screening to Marines and their dependents on the base between 1957 and 1987. "This is yet another piece of the puzzle that's coming together and slowly exposing the extent of the contamination at Camp Lejeune - and the Marine Corps' culpability and negligence," said Mike Partain, a Marine's son who was born at the southeast North Carolina base and who says he is one of at least 82 men diagnosed with breast cancer. "This is four years overdue."

The Marines were slow to react after groundwater sampling first showed contamination on the base in the early 1980s. Some drinking water wells were closed in 1984 and 1985, after further testing confirmed contamination from leaking fuel tanks and an off-base dry cleaner. Health officials believe as many as 1 million people may have been exposed to tainted water. It's not clear how many Marines and family members will be affected by the expansion of the time line. Partain estimates thousands because the Hadnot Point water system supplied the barracks where the majority of the Marines lived, as well as the Naval Hospital, unmarried officer barracks and some family housing areas. "It is by far the largest exposed population on the base," Partain said.

In a letter to Gen. Allison Hickey, VA undersecretary for benefits, the head of the toxic substance registry noted that a preliminary water modeling report showed that the period covered under the 2012 legislation didn't go back far enough, and that volatile organic compounds exceeded maximum contaminant levels at Hadnot Point as early as August 1953. "I hope this information is useful as the Department of Veterans Affairs evaluates claims from veterans who served at USMC Camp Lejeune prior to the release of our full water modeling report in the spring," agency Director Christopher J. Portier wrote in the letter, dated Wednesday. The letter was first released publicly during a meeting Thursday of the agency's community assistance panel at the disease registry headquarters in Atlanta. Former Marines and family members angrily questioned officials about why these studies have taken so long to complete.

MORE

 

[Mushroom]

Wow, I had better start checking my breasts then.

 

[Mr. H.]

No mention of hydraulic fracturing?

 

[waltky]

Camp Lejeune water contamination scandal...

Victims: Marines failed to safeguard water supply
May 18, 2013 - A simple test could have alerted officials that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, long before authorities determined that as many as a million Marines and their families were exposed to a witch’s brew of cancer-causing chemicals.

But no one responsible for the lab at the base can recall that the procedure — mandated by the Navy — was ever conducted. The U.S. Marine Corps maintains that the carbon chloroform extract (CCE) test would not have uncovered the carcinogens that fouled the southeastern North Carolina base’s water system from at least the mid-1950s until wells were capped in the mid-1980s. But experts say even this “relatively primitive” test — required by Navy health directives as early as 1963 — would have told officials that something was terribly wrong beneath Lejeune’s sandy soil.

A just-released study from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well — nearly 4,000 times today’s maximum allowed limit of 5 ppb. Given those kinds of numbers, environmental engineer Marco Kaltofen said even a testing method as inadequate as CCE should have raised some red flags with a “careful analyst.” “That’s knock-your-socks-off level — even back then,” said Kaltofen, who worked on the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York, where drums of buried chemical waste leaked toxins into a local water system. “You could have smelled it.”

Biochemist Michael Hargett agrees that CCE, while imperfect, would have been enough to prompt more specific testing in what is now recognized as the worst documented case of drinking-water contamination in the nation’s history. “I consider it disingenuous of the Corps to say, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have meant anything,’ said Hargett, co-owner of the private lab that tried to sound the alarm about the contamination in 1982. “The levels of chlorinated solvent that we discovered ... they would have gotten something that said, ‘Whoops. I’ve got a problem.’ They didn’t do that.”

A sign cautions visitors outside a "pump and treat" facility on the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), benzene and other toxic chemicals leeched into ground water from a poorly maintained fuel depot and indiscriminate dumping on the base, as well as from an off-base dry cleaner. Nearly three decades after the first drinking-water wells were closed, victims are still awaiting a final federal health assessment — the original 1997 report having been withdrawn because faulty or incomplete data. Results of a long-delayed study on birth defects and childhood cancers were only submitted for publication in late April. Many former Lejeune Marines and family members who lived there believe the Corps still has not come clean about the situation, and the question of whether these tests were conducted is emblematic of the depth of that mistrust.

MORE

See also:

After nearly 30 years, Camp Lejeune coming clean
May 18, 2013 — Purple wildflowers sprout in abundance around the bright-yellow pipe, one of several jutting from the sandy soil in this unassuming patch of grass and mud. A dirty hose runs from the pipe to an idling truck and into a large tank labeled, “NON-POTABLE WATER.”

This is the former Hadnot Point fuel farm, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune’s main fuel depot until it was ordered closed in the 1980s. At one point, a layer of gasoline 15 feet thick floated atop the groundwater here, and this “fluid vapor recovery” truck is part of the continuing effort to remove it. “He’s skimming that contaminate out of that well, into this tank,” civilian Bob Lowder, head of environmental quality for the base, said during a recent tour. “We’ll take that off for recondition or disposal, as appropriate.” The coastal base is the site of what’s considered the worst case of drinking-water contamination in the nation’s history. But the Marines stress that that’s just what it is — history.

Of the more than 600 polluted sites scattered about the 170-square-mile base, about five dozen remain to be addressed. ABC Cleaners — the offsite business that dumped cancer-causing solvents into the Lejeune water table — stands vacant, the paint flaking from its rotting clapboards. Wells tainted with gasoline, pesticides and toxic degreasers have been isolated, and technicians test the water from the base’s treatment plants monthly. Marine families stationed at Lejeune enjoy what Lowder proudly describes as “the safest and most tested drinking water that they can find.” “We probably have the most aggressive sampling regime for our drinking water than anybody else in the nation,” he says. “Maybe in the world.”

The worst of the contamination occurred during the height of the Cold War. But records suggest that toxic substances began leaking — or were being intentionally dumped — into the ground almost immediately after the Department of War carved a spot for the 1st Marine Division out of the coastal pine forest at the mouth of the New River in late 1941. Workers say there were no guidelines for disposing of chemicals on the base until the mid-1980s. A building once used as storage the toxic insecticide DDT later housed a day care and nursery; PCB-laden transformer oil was routinely spread on roads to keep down the dust.

Researchers believe two of the most serious pollutants — trichlorethylene and percholoroethylene — first exceeded today’s maximum allowable levels in the groundwater in the early 1950s, about the time the U.S. was winding down the Korean War. At least one measurement taken in 1982 found levels of TCE — even then widely banned as toxic to humans — of 1,400 parts per billion in the base’s drinking water supply. That is five times the levels discovered around the same time in Woburn, Mass., scene of a childhood leukemia cluster recounted in the book and movie “A Civil Action.”

MORE

Related:

Marine who dumped toxins felt illness was payback[/quote]

 

[whitehall]

It's old news. I spent a couple of years stationed at Lejeune during the time in question and I get periodic updates from the Marine Corps. I'm fine and it seems the contamination was restricted to family housing areas.

 

[Mr. H.]

There have been more water supplies contaminated by old fuel farms than have been contaminated by hydraulic fracturing. Time to shut down ALL military camps.

 

[Mushroom]

There have been more water supplies contaminated by old fuel farms than have been contaminated by hydraulic fracturing. Time to shut down ALL military camps.

As well as all gas stations.