A Trust Betrayed (14 page)

The paper found a woman who had worked as a computer specialist in a building that had to be evacuated several times in the 1980s because of fuel odors. The woman, Mildred Duncan, was furious that the base apparently never tested the air in her office. “This is a betrayal,” said Duncan, now retired as a civilian employee for the Marine Corps. “It's like they lied to us. They kept us in those buildings, breathing all that. It's not right.”
²⁴

On June 24, 1988, the
EPA
again proposed placing Camp Lejeune on the National Priorities List for the Superfund program, the first step toward a final designation and a full cleanup managed by the federal environmental agency. The extent of a “full cleanup” was a contentious point. Marine Corps engineers had suggested that it would take about five years to clean up the groundwater in the Hadnot Point industrial area, but
EPA
project managers commented that the Navy was being unrealistic—restoration work would take at least thirty years, they said.
²⁵

Nine months after the Superfund listing was proposed, another federal agency encouraged the
EPA
to move forward with a cleanup. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (
NOAA
), a branch of the US Commerce Department that serves as a trustee of the nation's natural resources, said it had determined
that Camp Lejeune represented “a potential threat to natural resources held in trust by federal agencies.”
²⁶

As the official designation of Camp Lejeune as a Superfund site came closer, Marine Corps commanders decided they should notify base residents before they were alarmed by a news announcement from the
EPA
. In September 1989, Corporal Dave Mundy wrote a series of reassuring stories in the base newspaper, including one quoting chemist Elizabeth Betz saying the contamination levels at Camp Lejeune were considered safe by the
EPA
and that much of the pollution came from an off-base source, ABC One-Hour Cleaners. A number of water wells were shut down, but there was no effect on base operations, added B. W. Elston, deputy assistant chief of staff for facilities at the base. “We closed eight wells in the Hadnot Point Industrial Area and two in the Tarawa Terrace area as a precautionary measure and still had an adequate water supply,” Elston said.

“We shut down some wells that were not near the
EPA
limit,” Betz told the base newspaper. “Then we started looking at what caused that contamination.” The fact that one of the chemicals found in the wells was the dry-cleaning solvent known as
PCE
helped determine the source, she said. “We were puzzled when that chemical showed up,” Betz said. “At first we couldn't figure out how it had gotten into the Tarawa Terrace system. Then we looked across Highway 24. There was a dry-cleaning business right across the road from the housing area.”
²⁷

Elston was quoted again in a follow-up story by Mundy touting the high standards at the Marine Corps base. “Very few municipalities, I'd say, are inspected as often or as thoroughly as our public works are,” Elston said. “Violations are reported promptly and corrected immediately. . . . We always take measures to go at least a step beyond what is required by law and to ensure that we don't
provide water that is unsafe for those using it. The commanding general will not accept anything less.”
²⁸

On October 4, 1989, a few weeks after the articles were published at Camp Lejeune, the
EPA
officially designated the base as a Superfund site. Among the reasons listed were fuel contamination and volatile organic compounds in the groundwater beneath the Hadnot Point Industrial Area, potential damage to wetlands from waste disposal areas on the base, and pesticide-contaminated soil outside a building once used as a child-care center.
²⁹

Rick Shiver, the environmental regulator representing North Carolina in negotiations on the cleanup, said that by this point the Marine Corps seemed resigned to the fact that it had a massive job ahead of it. The military lawyers and engineers worked closely with the state and the
EPA
to write a 172-page “federal facilities agreement” spelling out requirements for the cleanup and the responsibilities of all parties involved. “It was all very collaborative,” Shiver said. “There was no animosity between the various groups.”

7

THE STRUGGLE FOR DATA

You and I both know how this would “play in Peoria.”

—
KATHY SKIPPER, AGENCY FOR TOXIC SUBSTANCES AND DISEASE REGISTRY, OFFICE OF POLICY AND EXTERNAL AFFAIRS

I
f the Marine Corps had been cooperative with regulators on cleanup plans at Camp Lejeune, the same could not be said for its efforts to find out who might have been harmed by the pollution.

Once the base was placed on the Superfund list, a required federal health study kicked in to determine if people had been exposed to unsafe levels of contamination. The task of conducting this Public Health Assessment fell to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or
ATSDR
, created by Congress in the
CERCLA
law that established the Superfund program in 1980. Not intended as a regulatory agency, the
ATSDR
had a relatively small budget (less than $16 million for health assessments nationwide in 1990).
¹
It had to rely largely on the polluters themselves for funding and data in order to study whether their pollution affected
public health, hardly the ideal way to conduct scientific research. The science of defining chemical pathways, determining levels of human exposure, and taking into account other environmental influences is anything but exact, yet to have impact on policy it must stand up to rigorous standards and extensive peer review.

In the case of Camp Lejeune, there was an additional conflict. The
ATSDR
is assisted on many studies by a sister agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (
HHS
), the Public Health Service, which has its roots in the US Navy. Many in the so-called “commissioned corps” consider themselves part of the military, and even wear Navy uniforms and have similar ranks, operating under the command of the surgeon general of the United States. Thus, not only were the government scientists who were assigned to find out if the US Marine Corps had inadvertently poisoned people at one of its largest installations dependent on the military for the money and information needed to do the job, but they were at least loosely connected to the military themselves. It was kind of like the nerdy little brother being told to find out if the bullying star athlete in the family had been violating any of Mom and Dad's rules.

Though it was only twelve years old when it began studying Camp Lejeune's contamination issues in 1992, the
ATSDR
already had a questionable reputation. A joint study released by two environmental groups that year maintained that both the
CDC
and the
ATSDR
—two federal agencies most responsible for protecting Americans from harmful pollution—routinely produced health studies that were “inconclusive by design” because they used weak testing methods, inappropriate statistical analyses, biased contractors, and misguided assumptions about the kinds of health problems that might have occurred. The result was that very few of the
ATSDR
's assessments showed harmful exposures to toxic pollution.

ATSDR
investigators also were known to avoid direct contact
with people in affected communities, the study found. “According to both local citizens and their physicians,
ATSDR
has lacked even the simple etiquette of returning their phone calls,” the report said. “Agency officials have themselves acknowledged that ‘Unless you are a senator or a senator's staff we won't respond.'” Environmentalists reached a damning conclusion about the
CDC
and the
ATSDR
. The Environmental Health Network and National Toxics Campaign Fund concluded: “They have become virtual propaganda tools of polluting industries—making public reassurance instead of public protection their foremost focus. One result has been an increase in public complacency and government inaction at many sites where further precautions to reduce toxic exposures are merited.”
²

To its credit, the
ATSDR
quickly determined there was reason to be concerned about people in Tarawa Terrace who had used water from wells contaminated with perchloroethylene, or
PCE
, that had been dumped by ABC One-Hour Cleaners across the highway from the base housing. A Public Health Assessment completed in 1990 on the dry-cleaners' pollution prompted the agency to start looking for health effects, especially on babies, in the Tarawa Terrace population. They began by compiling birth records from the base hospital going back more than twenty years.
³

The
ATSDR
took much longer to zero in on potential exposures from the many sites on the base where land or groundwater was tainted by hazardous materials used in operations. A major reason for that delay was a lack of cooperation from the Marine Corps in providing information about base contamination. Nearly two years into the study, on February 23, 1993, the epidemiologist in charge of the Public Health Assessment at Camp Lejeune, Nancy Sonnenfeld, wrote the base's communications director, Neal Paul, saying she had received only one set of pre-1985 data on drinking water at the base. Even that data was
flawed, showing some contaminants at levels so low it would not have been possible to detect them using available technology. Sonnenfeld tried to be reassuring about what the health agency might find if it had more information: “As the Navy has noted, the discovery of contamination in potable wells at these sites does not in itself imply that anyone actually drank or washed with contaminated water; the water was treated and diluted before distribution,” she wrote. “Therefore, I would like to examine the data from samples of the tap water which was actually distributed to individual residences and housing areas on the base.”

Sonnenfeld asked for information about Camp Lejeune's water treatment processes, about when tap water was analyzed, about the dates when contamination was first discovered in potable wells and in tap water, and about the frequency of sampling before and after the closures of contaminated wells. She added that she was also still in need of information about all the base housing areas, how many people lived in each, and which water systems they used. And she asked for rough estimates of the numbers of people who had been living at the base for longer than five years and those who had been there for more than ten years at the time the contamination was discovered.
⁴

A couple of weeks later, on March 5, 1993,
ATSDR
environmental engineer Stephen Aoyama followed up with a letter to Paul asking for information about cleanup work that had been done so far at the base, along with documents from the Superfund program, such as site studies and work plans, and a full index of the administrative record for the cleanup effort. But the Marine Corps continued to stonewall for another year and a half, prompting the
ATSDR
's Carol Aloisio, in the office of the assistant administrator, to send a letter higher up in the Navy command. “As you are aware, we have had much difficulty getting the needed documents from
MCB
Camp Lejeune,” Aloisio wrote on September 2, 1994,
to Yvonne P. Walker at the Navy Environmental Health Center in Norfolk, Virginia. “We have sent
MCB
Camp Lejeune several requests for information and, in most cases, the responses were inadequate and no supporting documentation was forwarded. . . . For an
ATSDR
public health assessment to be useful, it is important that all pertinent information be provided for evaluation.”
⁵

The commanding officer of the Navy Environmental Health Center, W. P. Thomas, responded eleven days later by sending a letter to the commander of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command suggesting that Camp Lejeune's environmental managers cooperate with the
ATSDR
—but not ordering them to do so. “In general, we recommend that the Department of the Navy installations routinely provide
ATSDR
with documents distributed to the installation's Restoration Advisory Board,” Thomas wrote. Base officials should keep the
ATSDR
updated with revisions to the administrative index for the Superfund cleanup and “should respond to requests for information promptly with appropriate supporting documents.”
⁶

Despite the limited cooperation, the
ATSDR
managed to complete a first draft of the Public Health Assessment for Camp Lejeune in September 1994. The authors of the assessment concluded that there were “probable health effects” from exposures to volatile organic compounds in the drinking water and recommended further study of babies born to women who drank the contaminated water during their pregnancies. “A study of birth outcomes, in particular of low birth-weight, pre-term births and fetal deaths, should further our understanding of the health effects of low-dose
VOC
exposure,” the draft assessment said.

Navy officials threw a fit. Andrea Lunsford, head of the health risk assessment department at the Navy Environmental Health Center in Virginia, responded to the
ATSDR
's initial public health assessment with a “medical review” dated October 28, 1994.
Lunsford challenged the health agency's assumption that a study of birth outcomes would add to understanding about the effects of low-dose
VOC
exposure, saying it was difficult to determine “causal relationships” between specific contaminants and certain health effects, and even more difficult when the subjects of the proposed study were part of a “a transient, military population” exposed to many other harmful substances as well. Lunsford also said it was “somewhat misleading” to suggest that there were “probable health effects for
VOC
exposures” at the base, “since the risk estimates are based on personnel being exposed to these maximum detected values for a period of one year.” In reality, people were exposed to varying levels of contamination throughout their time on the base, not always to the maximum levels, she said.
⁷