A Trust Betrayed (12 page)

6

A PERILOUS MESS

You wouldn't want kids out there digging in the soil.

—
WAYNE MATHIS, ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER, U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

T
oxic waste entered the American consciousness in a big way in 1978. That's when news reports appeared saying that about a hundred homes in Niagara Falls, New York, along with the neighborhood school, were sitting on top of barrels and barrels of poisons that had been buried in the early 1950s by the Hooker Chemical Company. Love Canal and its leaky drums of industrial waste became a symbol of the nation's worst environmental problems. A state study found five documented cases of physical and mental deformities among children born there after 1958 and determined that one in five pregnancies at Love Canal had resulted in miscarriages. More than three hundred homes were eventually abandoned, and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to clean up and rebuild the neighborhood.
¹

Within two years of the disaster, a frightened Congress established a program for cleaning up dangerous waste sites around the country. Known as Superfund, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (
CERCLA
) of 1980 for the first time required polluters to pay for removal of hazardous wastes, and if responsible parties could not be found, special taxes collected from oil and chemical companies would be used for cleanups. Over the next several decades, more than 1,600 toxic sites were placed on the national Superfund list, including 141 sites operated by the US Department of Defense.
²

Public sensibilities about deadly chemicals were further heightened in 1983 when it was discovered that a contractor for the city of Times Beach, Missouri, had used liquids containing dioxin to oil roads in the early 1970s. The entire community had to be abandoned after the dioxin levels in the water and soils were found to be hundreds of times above the safe level set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Today, Times Beach is only a memory for the 1,240 people who once lived there. All the buildings—and the poisons—have been removed, and the land has been converted into a state park.
³

So when word went out from Camp Lejeune in 1985 that drinking-water wells had to be shut down because of chemical contaminants, alarm bells went off at a number of government agencies. The city of Jacksonville adjacent to the base was especially concerned, because it and other communities in Onslow County were drawing water for more than 100,000 people from an aquifer just below the one used by the military. Colonel R. A. Tiebout, the facilities supervisor at the base, assured the city in a letter on June 5, 1985, that there was a natural barrier between the aquifer used by Camp Lejeune and the one used by the city. The Marines were tapping the aquifer at depths of between 200 and 250 feet, whereas the city's water was coming from around 500
feet below the surface, he explained. Tiebout said he had checked with environmental officials at both the base and the state water agency, and it was their opinion “that we are in no way affecting the aquifer that is presently used by the city of Jacksonville. As noted on the enclosure, there are several layers of clay which act as a membrane to prevent the groundwater from seeping into the middle sand aquifer.”
⁴

Despite the publicity surrounding Love Canal and Times Beach, however, Marine Corps officials were almost nonchalant about the fact that toxic contamination had forced the shutdowns of ten wells in two of the base drinking-water systems. It wasn't until June 21, 1985, that the results of tests for trihalomethanes, such as chloroform, a by-product of water treatment processes, were given to the Camp Lejeune utilities director, Gold Johnson, by Danny Sharpe of the environmental division. “Until this date, I was not informed that we had any problems with this,” Johnson wrote in a memo that day—nearly five years after the first tests for the chemicals in the base water done by the Army lab. He noted that the data had not been submitted to the state either “and will probably result in a violation letter from the state.”
⁵

More appalling than the failure to communicate about the water problems was the fact that Camp Lejeune officials continued to allow the contaminated wells to be used after they were first turned off in early 1985. In late spring that year, base environmental engineer Bob Alexander reported to Marine Corps headquarters that all ten contaminated wells at Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace remained closed, though his report indicated that one of the tainted wells at Tarawa Terrace had been used three times in April to maintain the water supply to the nearly 6,000 residents of the housing complex.
⁶

Federal health officials would report at a congressional hearing in 2007 that contaminated wells were used off and on for two years
at Camp Lejeune after the presence of solvents was confirmed in 1985. Research by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (
ATSDR
), a part of the federal Centers for Disease Control (
CDC
) that was investigating whether people were affected by Camp Lejeune's pollution, showed “there may have been some much lower contamination in the finished water from 1985 through 1987,” the agency's Tom Sinks said at the hearing. Asked if the levels of dry-cleaning solvents in the water at Tarawa Terrace after 1985 were above 5 parts per billion, which by that time had been set as a federal health standard for the solvents, Sinks said the levels were “probably between five and ten, but certainly nowhere approaching the levels of 180 which we saw prior to 1985.”
⁷

At least the Marine Corps was taking steps to solve the problem. An emergency water line to Tarawa Terrace from the Holcomb Boulevard system became active in June 1985. Soon after that, in early summer, the base asked the United States Geological Survey (
USGS
) for a study to help determine “groundwater use and management practices that will reduce the chances of further contamination and help assure that future water-supply needs are met.” The
USGS
responded with a study proposal that showed the complexity of the task. Camp Lejeune has one of the largest groundwater withdrawals in North Carolina—8 million gallons per day to support a population of about 100,000, noted
USGS
hydrologist Orville B. Lloyd Jr. in the proposal. Lloyd added that there had been tremendous growth at the base over the years and a corresponding rise in the wastes generated: “As a result,” he wrote, “significant amounts of several kinds of wastes containing hazardous and toxic organic compounds have been disposed of or spilled at numerous sites on the base.” The sandy soils in the coastal area did little to prevent the wastes from moving into the groundwater. In order to fully understand the movement of contaminants and groundwater conditions below the base, the
USGS
would need to do a study in three phases over four years at a cost to the Marines of $417,000, the hydrologist said.
⁸

While the Marines were scrambling to maintain a clean water supply for Lejeune residents, the state of North Carolina was demanding immediate action on the contaminated groundwater. On May 15, 1985, the state's Department of Natural Resources and Community Development notified the base commanding general, Major General L. H. Buehl, that state standards had been violated in ten wells containing at least nine organic contaminants, including the degreaser trichloroethylene (
TCE
), the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene (
PCE
, also called tetrachloroethylene), the
TCE
by-product vinyl chloride, and a carcinogen found in fuel, benzene. As a result of the violations, the Marine Corps had thirty days to provide the state with the base's plan of action for identifying the sources of the contamination, determining the extent of the contaminated plume, and completing remedial work.
⁹

It took more than thirty days for the Marine Corps to respond. When Colonel Tiebout wrote to the state on July 19, 1985, he said the plan of action was simply to continue with the Navy Assessment and Control of Installation Pollutants program that had started in 1982 with an assessment of potentially contaminated sites at the base. The next steps planned in
NACIP
included retesting groundwater at twenty of the polluted sites, conducting new tests on samples from all water wells on the base, determining the size and movement of the contaminated plume, and developing plans to clean it up, according to an outline of the plan attached to Tiebout's letter to the state. The goal was to complete the
NACIP
process by the end of 1986, he said.
¹⁰

The state's attention to Camp Lejeune's problems soon resulted in a public spotlight on the base contamination. The
Raleigh News
& Observer
published a lengthy report on September 15, 1985, headlined “Civilians, Military Investigating Waste Dumps at Camp Lejeune.” The story began by describing the child-care center that had been housed in a former pesticide-storage building for nearly twenty years until it was shut down in 1982, when chemicals such as
DDT
and chlordane had been found in the soil outside. Wayne Mathis, an environmental engineer for the
EPA
, told the newspaper that he could not speculate about the risks to children who spent time at the site over the previous two decades, but he added, “You wouldn't want kids out there digging in the soil.” In fact, there is little doubt that many children did just that, as there was a 6,300-square-foot playground outside the day-care center where the soils were found to be laced with pesticides.

The
News & Observer
went on to describe widespread dumping at the base, but noted that Camp Lejeune wasn't the nation's worst military site in that regard, or even the most polluted installation in the Southeast.
EPA
officials told the paper that bases in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia had sites that were even more polluted. They also made a point of saying that it appeared that no laws had been violated at the bases. “The military hasn't done anything that wasn't done in the private sector,” said Arthur E. Linton, federal facilities coordinator for the
EPA
's southeast region in Atlanta. The Marines and state officials also downplayed the fact that at Camp Lejeune, ten wells serving two major drinking-water systems had to be closed because of the toxic pollution. Charles E. Rundgren, head of the state's water supply branch, was quoted in the story as saying that the base water would not cause someone to immediately become sick from drinking it, but he did warn that ill effects could result from long-term exposure.
¹¹

The story was an early signal that the Marine Corps was not going to be able to gloss over Camp Lejeune's environmental problems as some of its leaders hoped. “I anticipate considerable
public attention to this problem and how we deal with it,” a state environmental manager, Chuck Wakild, said in an October 1985 memo to Perry F. Nelson, chief of the groundwater section at the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development. It also was becoming clear to state officials that the land and water, and possibly even the air, at the largest Marine base on the East Coast had become an utter, perilous mess.
¹²

Rick Shiver, regional hydrogeologist in the state's Division of Environmental Management, prepared a detailed report for his bosses in October 1985 that said more than seventy sites with hazardous wastes had been identified at the base, and thirty-eight of them were potential sources of groundwater pollution. Already ten wells were permanently shut down, and the contamination posed a threat to at least eighteen others, he said.

Shiver's report was the main item of business at a November 1, 1985, meeting at Camp Lejeune between environmental managers from the base, the state, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The
EPA
had taken a lead role in the cleanup process because it was unclear whether the state had authority over pollution problems on federal land. At the meeting, the
EPA
's Wayne Mathis said that data from the contaminated wells in January 1985 showed health risks to people at the base, so Camp Lejeune should be eligible for placement on the National Priorities List for the Superfund program. The base environmental manager, Bob Alexander, pushed back, arguing that there may have been errors in the tests done on the water wells, and therefore a Superfund designation would be overkill. And so began a struggle that would continue for years over who would be in charge of the base cleanup, the
EPA
or the Navy.
¹³