A Trust Betrayed Read online

  Although these patterns kept emerging, individual families had no way of knowing their full scope. Joan Lewis had a miscarriage in 1970 after living in base housing at Camp Lejeune for several years, and she remembers friends who lost babies during their pregnancies around the same time. “But we didn’t think anything of it back then,” she told the Star-News in her hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2007. “You know, it was just part of life.”5

  What was more unusual to Lewis was that four of her five children—three conceived at Camp Lejeune and another who lived there from just under the age of one until she was five—had health issues that neither Joan nor her husband, Eddie, had ever experienced before moving to the base. She and Eddie had married when Joan was twenty-one, and they had moved into base housing on Bogenville Drive in the Tarawa Terrace neighborhood in October 1966.

  “We lived there a year, then he went to Vietnam, then we went back after he returned in 13 months,” Lewis said. “He saw a lot of action, but he came back okay.”

  All of Lewis’s children “had respiratory problems” while living on the base, she said. “In the middle of the night my oldest daughter had to be taken to the hospital when she was three years old, having breathing problems.”

  The couple’s first boy, Eddie Jr., was born in 1971. “He was conceived at the base but born in Wilmington,” Lewis said. “His last two vertebrae in the lower back were fused together. He was born like that. He had no shock absorber in the neck either, no curve, and it causes a lot of pain.” After Eddie Jr. was born, Lewis said, she had to have a hysterectomy. The doctors had discovered a number of tumors inside her womb.

  People who lived at Lejeune as children have memories of highly unusual illnesses. Sandra Carbone remembers a raft of health problems starting at Camp Lejeune after her family moved to the base in 1968 when she was twelve years old.6

  “During the time we lived at Camp LeJeune, my siblings and I were always getting sick,” she wrote years later on a website for Camp Lejeune veterans and their families. “We never liked the taste of the water there either. My mom would have to make Kool-Aid all the time to hide the taste of the water.”

  When she was thirteen, Carbone recalled, she ended up with a rash on her chest and arms. “The doctors told my parents the rash was a result of my nerves,” she later said. “My sister and I were plagued with headaches and stomachaches. I remember the doctors asking my parents if me, or two of my sisters who were in school, if we had a test coming up in school. They thought we were faking it to get out of school and schoolwork. There were even times when the doctors told my parents they did not know what was wrong with us or what we had.”

  Carbone said the most serious incident occurred when her baby brother, just three months old and born on the base, started crying while she was changing his diaper. “I looked and his ankles were red,” she said. “My mom thought I had done something. But I was really careful—I was the oldest and he was the youngest so I had to take care of him. We were very close.”

  In that incident, she said, her mother “took him to the hospital and the doctor said if we had waited another day he would have died.” Carbone added, “He had some type of toxemia [the presence of toxins in the blood], and had developed septic arthritis (an infection of a joint) in both of his ankles. They had to put the IV in his temple because they couldn’t get it into his body, it was so swollen.” The baby was in the hospital for three weeks.

  Civilians who lived on the base also experienced health problems. John Fristoe and his wife moved to Lejeune in 1958 when he was hired as principal of one of the base’s two elementary schools. They brought their two daughters, Karen, who was six, and Terry, two.7

  “I can remember egg smells in the water,” daughter Terry Dyer said in an interview years later. “And I remember we were sick all the time as children. We had a lot of eye infections, gunk in our eyes.” Later, a baby sister, Johnsie, arrived, but she soon showed signs of being mentally impaired. She stopped talking in early childhood.

  Their father had plenty of health problems, too. “Dad used to have nosebleeds all the time,” Dyer said. “He would sneeze all the time in the shower.”

  Suddenly, at the age of forty-five, Fristoe died of a heart attack after living at Camp Lejeune for fifteen years. The doctors never could explain it, Dyer said, but she pointed out that the family had “lived in four different apartment complexes in Tarawa Terrace.”

  Unexplained illnesses affected other adults as well. In 1976, an eleven-year Marine and staff sergeant at Camp Lejeune, Lupe Alviar Jr., “started tripping, falling, [and] stumbling”—totally out of the blue. He was thirty years old and thought he was in perfect health.

  “My legs just went,” he told The Veteran, a newsletter for Vietnam veterans, in 2004. “I felt fine at the time, had no health problems that I knew of, and I just fell down. I didn’t make much of it. I got up, brushed myself off, and carried on.”

  Then, about a month later, Alviar fell down again. “No warning,” he said. “I just suddenly found myself on the ground. So I got up another time, brushed off, and carried on.” Alviar thought he might have been affected by exposure in Vietnam to Agent Orange, the highly toxic herbicide containing dioxin that was used to clear jungle foliage. But his first child’s birth defects made him think there might be a connection to something that happened at his base in North Carolina.

  “My first child was born at Camp Lejeune in 1969,” Alviar said. “He was born with an ear missing and his legs were twisted up like a pretzel.”

  It would not be until the early 1980s that Alviar’s insight into the possible origins of his own and his son’s health problems would find support.

  4

  SOLVENTS!

  The lab was not a high priority at the base.

  —ELIZABETH BETZ, CHEMIST AT CAMP LEJEUNE

  The first authenticated warnings about a serious environmental problem at Camp Lejeune came three decades ago, in late 1980 and early 1981, from an Army laboratory assigned to check whether military installations were able to meet new federal standards for drinking water taking effect in 1982.

  The looming regulations set new limits on trihalomethanes, or THMs—chemicals such as chloroform that are by-products of the disinfectant process used at water treatment plants and can be harmful to humans; levels deemed safe had been set by health studies. Camp Lejeune officials knew the water tests were coming: in September 1980, the water supply branch chief at the Environmental Protection Agency notified the base commander that the agency now had primary responsibility for enforcing the Safe Drinking Water Act passed by Congress in 1974. All water systems in the state had to meet federal standards for THMs within the next two years.1

  The following month, in October 1980, the Army Environmental Hygiene Team from Fort McPherson in Georgia arrived at Camp Lejeune to begin testing for THMs. By that time there were eight different water systems, each with its own treatment plants, at the base. The Army technicians started sampling water from the two largest systems, Hadnot Point and New River, which each served more than 10,000 people.

  Ten days after the samples were taken, the Army lab’s chief of laboratory services, William C. Neal Jr., printed the following in capital letters at the bottom of the results form: “WATER IS HIGHLY CONTAMINATED WITH LOW MOLECULAR WEIGHT HALOGENATED COMPOUNDS.” As a result, Neal wrote, there was “STRONG INTERFERENCE” [from these and other chemicals] in the tests for THMs.

  Two months later, on January 22, 1981, Neal had a similar assessment of tests done on samples collected a month before. “HEAVY ORGANIC INTERFERENCE,” he noted. “YOU NEED TO ANALYZE FOR CHLORINATED ORGANICS.”

  Neal repeated the same message in February 1981 on a results form for samples taken in January 30 at the Hadnot Point water system. And then on March 9, 1981, came a final, exasperated warning about samples collected at the base on February 26: “WATER HIGHLY CONTAMINATED WITH OTHER CHLORINATED HYDROCARBONS (SOLVENTS!),” he wrote.2

  Nea
l could not recall the testing years later, but after he examined them he did not dispute that he had written the memos, and he told an investigator for a Marine Corps panel that his intent was clear. “I was certainly trying to send them a message with the notes I wrote just below the analysis results,” Neal said. The Army lab results did not go directly to Camp Lejeune, however. Neal was supposed to send them to the Navy office overseeing environmental management at Camp Lejeune and other bases in the region, and this is what he did. This office was the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic Division, or LANTDIV, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia.3

  At LANTDIV, Neal’s reports should not have been a complete surprise. In October 1980, a contractor to the Navy engineers, Jennings Laboratories, had collected samples from each of the eight water systems at Camp Lejeune, combined them into one composite sample, and tested it for a variety of chemical contaminants. The results, which were sent to LANTDIV on October 31, 1980, showed trace levels of nearly a dozen potentially toxic compounds, including trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (or perchloroethylene, PCE), and dichloroethylene (DCE). Since the water from each system at Camp Lejeune had been diluted in the composite sample, the results should have raised red flags about the possibility that one or more systems at the base could have significant levels of contamination. Instead, the results were never even sent to Camp Lejeune.4

  Steve Azar, who was head of water quality at LANTDIV in the 1970s and 1980s, could not recall years later exactly when he received test results showing solvents in the water at Camp Lejeune, but he was adamant about what his response would have been. “I would have certainly advised them to sample each well and determine which wells were contaminated and to shut those individual wells down,” he said in an interview in 2004. At the same time, Azar insisted that LANTDIV was not responsible for enforcing environmental standards at Navy bases but only offered guidance to officials at the installations. “Each base decided on its own whether to follow our advice or not,” he said. Other LANTDIV officials also told congressional investigators in 2007 that their agency had “played a limited role” in environmental issues at Camp Lejeune.5

  To date, no evidence has been found that anyone from LANTDIV ever clearly warned Camp Lejeune officials that five different tests from October 1980 to February 1981 showed the possible presence of harmful contaminants in the base drinking water. In an interview in 2004 with an investigator for an independent panel appointed by the Marine Corps, Elizabeth Betz, the chemist at Camp Lejeune, recalled receiving the test results from the Navy office but said LANTDIV had provided no explanation to help her decide what to do. She said she had no background or training about solvents. She was primarily concerned about THMs, and her lab was focused on meeting the coming regulations.6

  The written record and later interviews show that the three staffers in the small environmental office at Camp Lejeune were pretty much on their own in the critical task of ensuring that drinking water at the base was safe, and they were ill-equipped for the task.

  Elizabeth Betz had started working at Camp Lejeune in November 1979. One of her main duties was making sure the wastewater going into the seventy-one storm-drain outlets on the base was sampled regularly and did not violate permit limits for grease, oil, and suspended solids. If any limits were exceeded, Betz would report the violations to the Environmental Protection Agency, which could issue fines or order corrective actions. Betz knew there were a lot of chemical wastes on the base, including pesticides and transformer fluids containing toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), compounds long used as insulators that were banned by the EPA in 1979 due to their carcinogenic effects. But Betz was not in charge of disposal practices or policies. The lab was not a high priority on the base, Betz said. “You have to understand that our lab was small and undermanned,” she said. “We didn’t have the proper equipment, and we had other problems at that time that we were trying to deal with.”7

  Both of her supervisors at the time, Julian Wooten and Danny Sharpe, concurred with that assessment in later interviews. Wooten, who was Camp Lejeune’s environmental manager in the 1960s and 1970s, said the base was not equipped to test water for solvents; if it had been, he said, the contamination probably would have been detected much earlier.

  Though he was by no means an expert, with only a college degree in ecology, Wooten was very concerned about the water at Camp Lejeune. He said that coffee made with the base’s tap water had a bad taste and sometimes even made him ill. By the 1970s, it seemed pretty clear to him that both surface waters and the groundwater at Camp Lejeune were contaminated, but whenever he tried to raise his concerns with base officials, he was ignored.8

  Danny Sharpe, Wooten’s assistant, felt the same way. The lab was part of the base maintenance department, he said. “That is as low as you can go.” Sharpe, who was trained in forestry and had previously worked in a soil conservation program at the US Department of Agriculture, recalled receiving the test results from LANTDIV in late 1980 and early 1981, but he had no idea how to interpret them. “Wooten was an ecologist, Betz was a chemist, and I was a forester. We were a natural resource organization that had been put in charge of environmental affairs. . . . We didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to understand the problem and we didn’t know what action to take,” he said. “I received the reports and sent them up the chain of command,” he added.9

  In addition to Hadnot Point and New River, a third water system at Camp Lejeune, this one serving the Rifle Range area, also became a focus of concern in the spring of 1981. One part of the Rifle Range had been used as a chemical dump for years, and a groundwater sample taken near the dumpsite on March 30, 1981, showed high levels of “chlorinated organic materials,” according to a memo that LANTDIV sent to the commanding general at Camp Lejeune on May 8, 1981. The memo pointed out, however, that a second round of tests in April had shown “greatly reduced levels of organic contaminants,” and it was unclear why there was such a big discrepancy. The LANTDIV engineering chief, J. R. Bailey, said more tests were planned, but there was no need to stop using the Rifle Range Water Treatment Plant. “Based on the low level of contaminants found relative to the total trihalomethane standard . . . it is not believed that there is an imminent threat to human health presented by consumption of water from the Rifle Range WTP and distribution system,” he wrote.10

  When Betz received the memo about potential contamination at the Rifle Range, she wrote her own memo saying that it appeared to her that the results were flawed, partly because “old acid bottles” had been used to collect the samples in March, and they may not have been properly cleaned. But the fact that LANTDIV sent the results at all was a sign that Navy engineers were beginning to worry about Camp Lejeune’s water supplies, if only because state regulators were getting more involved.11

  A 1982 memo written at LANTDIV and obtained later by congressional investigators said the Navy was aware that North Carolina had assumed responsibility for Safe Drinking Water Act enforcement in March 1980, “and therefore would have the right to sample and test the drinking water at Camp Lejeune for any contaminants regulated under the act.” The memo indicated that LANTDIV officials “were concerned that the state’s testing might discover problems that the Navy had not previously identified.”12

  The threat of enforcement action from the state appeared to serve as an incentive for a full-scale environmental investigation at Camp Lejeune. LANTDIV made the base a part of the Navy Assessment and Control of Installation Pollutants (NACIP) program that had been launched by Navy headquarters in 1982 in the wake of the national scandal over Love Canal, the toxic waste dump uncovered at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1978. The Pentagon thought it wise to check whether there were any ticking time bombs at its many installations around the country.

  The NACIP process in the early 1980s required three steps: an initial assessment study, a confirmation study, and remedial measures. At Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps hired Grainger Laboratories, a state-certified
environmental lab based in Raleigh, North Carolina, to conduct a NACIP study in 1982.13

  The effort was barely under way when Grainger engineer Mike Hargett called base chemist Elizabeth Betz on May 6, 1982, to report that in tests for THMs at both the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point water systems, “peaks” of the cleaning solvents TCE and PCE had been found. It was essentially a repeat of the findings by the Army lab eighteen months earlier.14

  Betz immediately notified her supervisor, Danny Sharpe, who sent the results “up the chain of command” to the base maintenance officer and the utilities director. About a week later, Betz was asked to brief Colonel Kenneth Millice and one of his assistants at base headquarters. But when she met with Millice and a lieutenant colonel on May 14, 1982, neither seemed to have been informed about the test results; Millice simply requested that Betz prepare a report for him to read later on the status of testing for THMs. “No mention was made of extra peaks [of the other contaminants, TCE and PCE] that Grainger found in the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point systems samples,” Betz wrote in a memo summarizing the meeting. Betz also noted that she didn’t bring up the solvents issue because the meeting was focused on the contaminants that were being regulated.15

  On August 10, 1982, Bruce A. Babson of Grainger wrote the base commander that his lab was continuing to have problems with the tests for THMs. “Interferences which were thought to be chlorinated hydrocarbons hindered the quantification of certain trihalomethanes,” Babson said. “These appeared to be at high levels and hence more important from a health standpoint than the total trihalomethane content. For these reasons we called the situation to the attention of Camp Lejeune personnel.”16

  Babson later said he remembered the report because he had been congratulated by his managers for making such an important discovery for a new client. Grainger’s contract with Camp Lejeune had been a “prize,” and they wanted to be sure to obtain the most accurate results possible for the Marine Corps.17