ABC Cleaners, across the street from Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C., is responsible for some of the drinking water contamination that occurred on base before 1985. The former dry cleaner is now a Superfund site. (File photo: Lisa Sorg)
A federal study has found that tens of thousands of Marines and Navy personnel, their families, as well as civilians who were stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1975 to 1985 are at an increased risk for eight types of cancer from contaminated drinking water.
In one of the largest studies of its kind, the ATSDR – the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry – compared cancer rates at Camp Lejeune, where the drinking water was contaminated with TCE, PCE, benzene and other cancer-causing chemicals, and Camp Pendleton in San Diego, where the water was not contaminated.
The agency published its initial findings online Feb. 1. They have been submitted for external peer review.
The ATSDR studied medical records of more than 211,000 people who had served or lived at Camp Lejeune and found they had an increased risk for some types of leukemia and lymphoma, as well as for cancers of the lung, breast — including rare male breast cancer — larynx, esophagus, thyroid, and soft tissues. Civilian workers had a higher risk of developing blood and bone marrow cancers and some cancers of the breast and lung. Camp Lejeune is the largest Marine base on the East Coast.
Drinking water supplied by two of the base’s treatment plants was contaminated with industrial solvents from 1953 to 1985, but not initially detected until the early 1980s. Water entering the Tarawa Terrace treatment plant was contaminated with high levels of solvents from an off-base dry cleaning facility, ABC Cleaners. As Newsline previously reported, ABC Cleaners is now an EPA Superfund site and being cleaned up under that program.
The Hadnot Point treatment plant began operating in 1942 and served most of the workplaces, a majority of the bachelor’s quarters (“barracks”), a small number of family housing units, field training areas (via mobile “water buffaloes”) and dining halls. The Hadnot Point distribution system was contaminated by on-base sources – leaking underground storage tanks, industrial area spills, and waste disposal sites.
Besides the toxicity of the chemicals themselves, troops were exposed to higher levels of them because they drank more water. A Marine in training could drinking as much as six liters of water per day, the ATSDR wrote, three times that of the general population. Troops would have also been exposed to some chemicals, like TCE, in the shower, either via their skin or inhaling them in shower steam.
The Defense Department was slow to accept and disclose the full extent of the contamination and its health risks. “The Department of the Navy and the United States Marine Corps did their very best to conceal the truth,” said retired Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger, in his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee. Ensminger was stationed at Camp Lejeune with his family. His daughter, Janey, who was conceived, born and raised on base, died of leukemia at age 9. He now lives in Elizabethtown, N.C.
Initially Navy and Marine officials reported that the contamination had reached only a few of Camp Lejeune’s wells, Ensminger testified. “There was absolutely no mention that the contaminants had reached our taps.”
“When that fact was eventually revealed,” Ensminger went on, Marine and Navy officials “described the levels of contaminants we were exposed to as ‘minute,’ ‘trace,’ ‘small’ or ‘minuscule.'” In fact, the levels were tens to hundreds of times higher than EPA drinking water standards.
In 2012, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs began extending disability benefits to some troops who served at Lejeune, and their families. However, the approval rate for those benefits has been as low as 8%.
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