Washington, D.C. – Late yesterday, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill that furnishes health care benefits to veterans and their families made ill from polluted drinking water at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

The bipartisan Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act provides care and medical services through the Department of Veterans Affairs to those who lived on the base while the water was contaminated with toxic chemicals and who now suffer from exposure-related illnesses. The bill is in large part a product of the tireless advocacy by former Marine Jerry Ensminger, whose daughter Janey passed away from leukemia at age nine. Ensminger’s efforts to uncover the contamination inspired an award-winning film and prompted Congress to take action on behalf of hundreds of thousands across the country.

“If passage of this historic legislation proves anything it’s that one man can truly make a difference no matter how great the odds,” said Alex Rindler, policy associate at the Environmental Working Group. “Jerry’s dogged determination to achieve justice for these families who have sacrificed so much is an inspiration not only to people who have dedicated to serving the public interest, but to all Americans. Simply put: he’s a modern day hero.”

EWG commends the leadership of Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), who, along with Mike Partain and other affected community members, have been fighting for Camp Lejeune veterans and their families since the get-go.

Almost 80 men who lived or were born at Camp Lejeune have been diagnosed with male breast cancer. EWG has urged Congress and the Obama administration to stand up for these men and their dependent children.

Pollution at Camp Lejeune is the largest incident of environmental contamination at any U.S. military facility on record. It is the subject of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Semper Fi: Always Faithful, by Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon.

Michelle Bliss, WHQR 91.3 FM
(Roderick McClain contributed audio for this report) (2011-07-27)

WILMINGTON, NC (WHQR) -The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is mailing out 300,000 surveys between now and December to study the effects of water contamination at Camp Lejeune.

At the same time, an act that would allow Lejeune veterans and family members to receive health care through the VA sits in a U.S. House committee.

Between 1957 and 1987, carcinogens like benzene were leaked into the wells on base. WHQR’s

Michelle Bliss attended a public forum in Wilmington last week where researchers spoke to a group of active Marines and sailors, veterans, civilians, and their families about the study.

“I spent a quarter of a century in the United States Marine Corps. No has been more disillusioned and more disappointed by the conduct of the leadership of our organization than I have been about this situation with this water.”

Jerry Ensminger offered opening remarks to an audience scattered among mostly empty chairs. He’s a veteran who lost his 9-year-old daughter Janey in 1985 to childhood leukemia, one of the many illnesses linked to the contamination caused by underground fuel tanks on base and a small dry cleaning business.

Less than a hundred people attended the event, a disappointing turnout for advocates like Ensminger, who don’t want others to find out like he did, nearly 14 years ago.

“I had fixed a plate of spaghetti and I was walking into the living room to watch the evening news. And the reporter said that ATSDR wanted to take a look at the children who had been born at Camp Lejeune during the years of the contamination, primarily for childhood leukemia. Well, that’s what my daughter died from. I dropped my plate of food right there on the floor.”

Mike Partain, who drove up from Florida for the forum, shares a similar experience from 2007: a month after enduring a mastectomy to remove the 2-and-a-half centimeter tumor from his chest, Partain’s phone rang. It was his father, a Vietnam vet.

“I went home and I flipped on the TV and went to CNN like he told me. And lo and behold, there was a report. It was actually Jerry testifying in front of Congress, and he was talking about the children born on the base between January, 1968 and December of 1985 and how they were exposed to human carcinogens. My birthday is January 30, 1968. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Mary Blakely, who just happened to have her television on in the fall of 2009, now believes the tainted water is to blame for her learning disabilities and her mother’s death from lung cancer.

“I was watching CNN and Mike Partain was on there with some other of the male breast cancer cluster, and I heard them mention Holcomb Boulevard on the base. I recognized that from when my family lived there in Berkely Manor because it’s really close.”

Ensminger, Partain, and Blakely all attended the forum and have lived aboard Camp Lejeune at some point during the thirty-year span of contamination. But figuring out the length and potency of their individual exposures is complicated.

ATSDR Director, Chris Portier, says the government agency is using a method called water modeling to create an historical reconstruction of the wells.

“Once you turn on the pumps, it changes, so you get mixing and all sorts of different things that all have to be taken into account. And then, to get it to the people sometimes this pump’s turned on, sometimes that pump’s turned on, it’s mixed in a tank. You’ve got to figure out all of that to figure out what comes out the tap in the tail end.”

Researchers are also sending comparison surveys to people who lived and worked at Camp Pendleton. The data will determine if a presumptive link can be made between 26 different cancers and diseases that researchers say are related to heavy benzene, tetrachloroethylene, and trichloroethylene exposure.

Even though their ailments vary, many forum attendees echo the same sense of fear and loss regarding their failing health or that of a loved one:

“I always ended up on sick call. I always managed to throw up and cough up and spew up blood and be sickly and have stomach problems and esophagus problems. In 1973, they diagnosed me with osteochondroma.”

“In 1985 she had a stroke, after that, congestive heart failure, liver, and different things set in. I ended up basically with bowel disorders and nerve conditions. In 1986, my wife died.”

“One day my wife gives me a hug; she finds a bump in my chest. Two weeks later, I go to the doctor and I’m sitting on my wedding anniversary being told that I have male breast cancer. Three weeks later, they cut half my chest off. I had no idea what happened to me.”

That was Anthony Taylor, Ronald McKoy, and Mike Partain, once again. Along with the forum, they also attended a community assistance panel or CAP meeting.

Marine Corps spokesperson Captain Kendra Hardesty says that despite active participation in the past, the Corps only sent an observer this time.

“For many years, we actually did send a representative to the CAP meetings; however, in the recent past, it’s become clear that our presence at the CAP meetings was distracting for their intended purpose.”

Mary Blakely remembers one of those meetings. She jumped at the opportunity to speak up.

“I just couldn’t accept that they didn’t try to tell us about it, that they would actually lie about it being there. And the more that I talked, the angrier I got, and I started saying things like, You don’t deserve to wear the uniform of a Marine. You’re not a Marine. A real Marine is a person of honor, and what is being done is not honorable.’”

During Q/A, people asked if they had been exposed, some learning the truth for the first time. People asked how many generations could be affected researchers don’t know. But most people asked if the Marine Corps would be held accountable and step up compensation if the presumptive link is proven.

Right now, the V-A doesn’t have the authority to fund dependents, but it has recently consolidated the review process for all Lejeune claims to a single office. That means one staff can be trained to handle those cases properly.

ATSDR Senior Epidemiologist Frank Bove:

“Our goal right now is to do the best science we can so that these studies have credibility, so the science community takes it seriously and regulators take it seriously, for which to judge whatever actions they’re going to take in terms of maybe additional regulations or whatever they plan to do.”

Bove’s team is also studying mortality rates, birth defects, and childhood cancers. He says that some ATSDR studies in the late 90s are inaccurate and he hopes the new research will provide a definitive say on the risks posed by the tainted water.

Marine Corps spokesperson Hardesty maintains that until researchers prove that connection, the Marine Corps has no comment.

“We’re waiting for the studies to be completed before we can comment on that.”

When the ATSDR releases its results, some next summer and the remainder in early 2014, participants will receive a summary and the findings will be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. After that, the issue moves to regulators, legislators, and the Marine Corps to decide what happens next.

Learn more about the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Camp Lejeune study.

Register to receive Marine Corps updates on Camp Lejeune water contamination.

online and audio report

by STUART WATSON / NewsChannel 36

MOUNT HERMON, N.C. — “An entire community is being wiped out by cancer.”

That’s the way the e-mail to the Newschannel 36 I-Team began.

Needless to say, it got our attention.

To understand what’s behind the letter, you have to go back decades to a toxic waste incinerator in the North Carolina foothills labeled a “public health hazard” by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a part of the Centers for Disease Control.

But demonstrating a link between a long-dead incinerator and neighbors suffering cancer today is all but impossible, particularly since no one has conducted any follow-up studies.

The community is called Mount Hermon. It lies east of Hudson, North Carolina off of US 321 in the pastures and foothills between the furniture-producing region of Hickory and the county seat of Caldwell County, Lenoir. Mount Hermon gets its name from the community’s Methodist Church. In the Bible, Mount Hermon was a holy place. In North Carolina, this place seems cursed.

“There is no brew out of hell that would come up with what they did,” says L.C. Coonce, a retired high school chemistry teacher who fought the incinerator until it closed.

For nearly a dozen years, from 1977-1989, a company called CSI or Caldwell Systems Inc. operated the incinerator on county property on a ridge line known to locals as Mount Lick. From those heights the incinerator spewed smoke and chemicals untreated onto the people living below.

To this day Coonce sums up his version of the mindset that brought the plant bluntly: “Here’s a bunch of hillbillies. We’ll just dump this stuff on them. They’re not really important people anyway.”

Coonce put pencil to paper and calculated that the operators of the incinerator were pumping toxic liquids into the incinerator at a rate faster than it could burn them all. The result, he says, is that the plant did not completely burn the chemicals – instead it vaporized them.

“Instead of pouring it into the river they were pouring it into the air,” he says.
Coonce’s father and others went door to door in the community around the mountain when the incinerator was operating, collecting their own health survey and mapping homes where people were sick by sticking push-pins in a map. The illnesses were color coded. The black pins were cancers.

The CDC’s report concluded the rate of cancer in Caldwell County was no greater than similar communities. But the report documented other illnesses, including respiratory illness. Now neighbors of the old incinerator say someone should come back and take a second look.

“Of course the furniture people supported it,” Coonce says of the CSI incinerator.
He found himself in the minority in Caldwell County fighting the plant. The incinerator gave furniture manufacturers a place to get rid of solvents, paint and lacquer dust. And to many people in the community, furniture-making meant a steady paycheck.

But along the way the waste stream pouring into the CSI incinerator expanded far beyond furniture byproducts to include torpedo fuel from the United States Navy.
According to the CDC’s report, the torpedo fuel amounted to as much as 10 percent of the overall waste stream.

“Imagine carrying naval weapons’ waste from Japan to Caldwell County,” says Coonce.
In 1989, the CSI incinerator caught fire for the second time and exploded, forcing an evacuation of hundreds of people living nearby. Only then did a judge agree to shut it down.

“People knew there was a problem,” says Coonce.

And now – more than 20 years later – there are still problems.

“They found a tumor and it’s malignant,” says 79-year old Franklin Haas, his head wrapped in a bandage from recent surgery. Haas, his son Randy, Randy’s daughter and granddaughter – four generations of the family – run the Mount Hermon grocery store.

It’s hard to recognize Haas from his 50th wedding anniversary photo. His throat and face are swollen and puffy. He says his eyelids became so swollen it took surgery to keep them open. Doctor after doctor found it difficult to diagnose.

“She finally said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’” says Haas.

After about two years and 14 doctors, Haas says he got a name for the tumors on his head: Cutaneous Angio Sarcoma, a rare cancer that spread through along the blood vessels on his scalp.

The Haas family’s Mount Hermon grocery store sits just down the hill from where the incinerator once belched smoke. And just behind the store, Haas built the home he has lived in for decades.

“For a while there was soot that would settle on the grass,” he says. “You’d wake up with the smell – it was a terrible smell.”

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported that neighbors of the incinerator, “…inhaled hazardous substances” and “…had dermal contact” with the same hazardous waste – on their skin.

By the time Franklin Haas’ cancer was diagnosed, it had spread.

He speaks in measured tones, drawing no hasty conclusions about the incinerator and his own cancer. But he can’t help but wonder.

“That’s always been in mind y’know wondering if it would harm you or your family down the road.”

He is not alone. At his family store, now run by his son Randy, neighbors and family members point house by house to people who live and die with cancer.

Lately Randy Haas has noticed a red rash on his ankle, behind his knee and on his back.
“So I’m going to have to probably have this diagnosed to see what it is and it may be the same thing [his father has],” he says.

Randy and others recall health workers telling them that chemical exposure could have health implications years later.

“It’s like a dormant seed,” he says. “And sure enough…it’s blossoming now.”

“It’s clear to me we have a cancer cluster and a neurological cluster,” says Coonce, the retired chemistry teacher.

But even if a health agency could verify and map out clusters of cancer or neurological disorders, it’s hard to prove the incinerator caused them. It’s actually nearly impossible since no agency is counting.

“The government hasn’t done anything,” says Coonce. “It’s a time bomb and it’s a slow explosion but it is happening.”

He says Mount Hermon got dumped on first because neighbors didn’t count. Now when it comes to health agencies collecting numbers to prove or disprove clusters of disease, well, they don’t count.