WASHINGTON -- North Carolina's members of Congress have grown increasingly impatient with the military over its role in water contamination more than 30years ago at Camp Lejeune.
The Department of theNavy has refused to pay for a $1.6million mortality study that could indicate a trend in deaths among former residents of Camp Lejeune.
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, has blocked two Navy presidential appointees and vowed that he'll stop every nominee until the department ends its "continued intransigence" on funding the study.
Burr and U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, a Greensboro Democrat, have vowed to push legislation on health care for the affected families despite a recent setback in the Senate.
And over in the House, U.S. Rep. Brad Miller, a Raleigh Democrat, has gathered nearly 20 co-sponsors for identical legislation that he hopes will have better success.
Some estimates are thatover a 30-year period, as many as 1million people were exposed to well water that contained trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, benzene and vinyl chloride. The chemicals were dumped into storm drains, leaked from fuel tanks or buried in pits across the base. They seeped through the groundwater and into wells that fed the base areas of Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace.
When news of the contamination in water wells on the base was first reported in a base newspaper and then The News & Observer in 1985, officials said the main contaminants were volatile organic solvents, and they blamed, in part, a nearby dry cleaning establishment for the problem.
But a year ago, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry learned that the water had been contaminated in part with benzene, a fuel component and a known carcinogen.
The finding was so significant that the agency, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control created to assess health hazards from environmental Superfund sites, retracted decade-old research because it didn't include the new poison.
Now, newly revealed documents reviewed by McClatchy Newspapers indicate a fuel storage farm on base might have had far greater significance than previously known.
In fact, 800,000 gallons of fuel were thought to have been spilled over the years from the fuel farm, close to the main well serving Hadnot Point, where the base's enlisted barracks, some officers' quarters and the hospital were..
In a November 1996 meeting among federal, state and base environmental officials, a contractor estimated that 500,000 gallons of the fuel had been recovered, according to a memo documenting the meeting.
"The other 300,000 gallons? I know what happened to it," said Mike Partain of Tallahassee, Fla., who was conceived at Camp Lejeune and lived there the first three months of his life. "We drank it."
A rare cancer
Three years ago, when he was 39, Partain was diagnosed with male breast cancer.
Since then, he has found dozens of other male breast cancer patients across the country - 55 in all - with connections to Camp Lejeune. Some of the men have died.
Male breast cancer is so rare - fewer than 2,000 cases are diagnosed each year - that Partain's findings have raised questions among epidemiologists.
Among those exposed was Paul Akers of Columbia, S.C., who realized the potential source of his illness while sitting in his oncologist's office last summer.
Akers, whose mother volunteered at the Camp Lejeune hospital for years, saw a half-page ad from the Marine Corps, alerting former residents of Camp Lejeune to the contaminated water.
Akers, 64, lived on base for years as a young child, building forts among the pine trees and splashing in a plastic kiddie pool with his little sister.
Reading the magazine ad,Akers, a primary care doctor, thought of his mother, a Marine wife who died of cancer in 1960.
And his little sister, whom he called Penny, dead just last June of cancer at the age of 61, a month after her diagnosis.
And he thought of his own struggle, undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
"You can see why I'm angry at the military," Akers said.
The mortality study that the Navy is resisting is to be done by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
The study is required by law under Title 42, which governs the Environmental Protection Agency's national priority list of hazardous sites.
But Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told Burr last month that because previous research released last summer showed no link to the toxic water, the mortality study is unnecessary.
Burr also is pushing legislation that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide health care to family members with illnesses that could be linked to poisons in the Lejeune water.
That bill failed last month in committee in favor of a Democratic bill putting the Department of Defense in charge of potential victims' health care. U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, who authored the Democratic bill, said the defense agency ought to take responsibility for its failings instead of pushing costs onto the VA.
VA Secretary Eric Shinseki had warned the committee about the cost of Burr's bill. Various veterans service organizations also opposed the bill.
Burr said he'll continue his fight. And this month Miller introduced an identical bill in the House.
Thousands register
The bill has co-sponsors from veteran-heavy states such as Florida, Michigan and Texas, and is named afterJaneyEnsminger, who died at age 9 of childhood leukemia. Her father, Jerry Ensminger of White Lake, a small town in Eastern North Carolina, was stationed at Camp Lejeune during Janey's gestation.
Ensminger has spent more than a decade fighting the Marine Corps for documents and information about the water contamination.
It's unclear exactly howmany people might have been sickened by the toxic water.
Still, 133,000 former Marines, family members and civilian employees have registered with the Marines Corps as potential victims of the contamination. After North Carolina, with 16,575 registrants Florida and California have the most registrants.
Marines spokesman Capt. Brian Block said the military is trying to reach as many people as it can, sending letters through the Internal Revenue Service and putting ads in magazines.
"You have to remember this was almost 30 years ago," Block said.
The Marine Corps says that science has not yet shown a link between Camp Lejeune and families' illnesses. A report by the National Research Council released last summer showed no definitive cause.
Burr and Hagan along with other scientists, questioned those results.
Warnings about water
Documents reviewed by McClatchy Newspapers indicate there were repeated warnings about the poisonous water before the wells were shut down in late 1984.
Handwritten notes from an Army laboratory service chief in 1980 warned repeatedly of contamination at the base.
"Water is highly contaminated," read the note in October 1980. He issued further warnings in December 1980 and in February and March of 1981. .
A Raleigh-based laboratory in 1983 found high levels of TCE in the water.
Then in July 1984, tests showed benzene in well water serving the base's Hadnot Point area to be at 380 parts per billion, according to documents. That was astronomically higher than the EPA's regulatory standard of 5 parts per billion.
The well wasn't turned off until four months later. Block, the Marines spokesman, said Lejeune received the test results in November, and that the well was shut down within a week.
Akers, the doctor, whose sister died in June, said he's still angry at the Marines.
It was too late for his mother, Akers said. But had he and his sister known a decade ago that they drank and bathed in toxic water and were at risk, they would have paid attention.
"There are things that could be done if you know about it," Akers said.
