A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  Shortly after Babson sent his report to Camp Lejeune, his colleague Mike Hargett was asked by Betz to come to the base and explain the problem to top officers. Hargett readily agreed because he considered the presence of solvents in the base water to be a serious concern. Betz took Hargett in to meet with a lieutenant colonel whose name he could not later recall, but he did remember the brush-off he received. Betz introduced Hargett as an expert on water systems in North Carolina and state regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act (which North Carolina began to implement in 1980); Betz said Hargett was there to discuss water-quality issues in residential areas of the base. “The lieutenant colonel responded that this was something he would have to look into and we were dismissed,” Hargett testified years later to a congressional committee. “The total time in the Lt. Col.’s office chair was less than five minutes.”18

  At the time the solvents were discovered, the Environmental Protection Agency did not have regulations setting limits for TCE and PCE in drinking water, but the EPA had issued warnings about both chemicals in 1979 in the form of guidance known as a Suggested No Adverse Reaction Level. A SNARL was not an enforceable standard, but only a scientific guess of the amount of contaminant that could be unsafe for humans to consume.

  For TCE, the SNARL was 2,000 parts per billion (ppb) if water containing that amount of the chemical was consumed for one day in normal amounts; it was 200 ppb if the water was consumed for ten days; and it was 75 ppb for long-term exposure to the water. For PCE, the SNARL was 2,300 ppb for one day of consumption, 175 ppb for ten days of use, and 20 ppb for long-term exposure.

  By the end of the summer of 1982, the highest levels of solvents found in Camp Lejeune’s water were 1,400 ppb of TCE in the Hadnot Point system and 104 ppb of PCE in the Tarawa Terrace system. But base chemist Betz said the average levels in eight different samples taken over the summer by Grainger Labs were 20 ppb of TCE at Hadnot Point, which was within all the SNARL limits for the chemical, and 90 ppb of PCE at Tarawa Terrace, which exceeded only the long-term SNARL.

  Betz advised her bosses in an August 1982 memo that PCE, “in high doses, has been reported to produce liver and kidney damage and central nervous system disturbances in humans.” Still, neither Betz nor any other official at Camp Lejeune recommended shutting down wells that showed measurable levels of contamination. Betz suggested instead that the problem might be in the pipes—that is, that PCE could be coming from coatings inside the pipelines serving Tarawa Terrace. She also believed that since the levels of contamination varied so greatly from month to month, there must have been flaws in the sampling methods. However, Betz later said she was unaware at the time that wells were being rotated in the base water systems—with some turned off for days at a time to spread the pumping around the aquifer. If she had known that the readings were high only when certain wells were being used, it would have been possible to pinpoint the sources of contamination, she said.19

  For years after the water contamination was discovered, the Marine Corps insisted that there was no reason to shut down the water systems in 1981 or 1982 because none of them had violated drinking-water regulations then on the books. “At the time, no environmental standards or regulations in regard to the use and disposal of TCE or PCE were in place,” Camp Lejeune’s commander in 2007, Major General Robert Dickerson Jr., said at a congressional hearing. He noted that the first federal regulation for TCE went into effect in 1987, and the first limits on PCE took effect in 1991, both under the Safe Drinking Water Act.20

  What Dickerson omitted from his testimony, though, was that the Navy had its own standards for drinking water that had been established in the early 1960s. These standards were largely ignored. Under rules written by the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, known as BUMED, all installations were advised that “drinking water shall not contain impurities in concentrations which may be hazardous to the health of the consumers.” More specifically, the regulations stated that “substances which may have deleterious physiological effect, or for which physiological effects are not known, shall not be introduced into the system in a manner which would permit them to reach the consumer.”21

  Navy regulations also required annual testing of water supplies using a method called Carbon Chloroform Extract (CCE), described in a Navy manual as a “technically practical procedure which will afford a large measure of protection against the presence of undetected toxic materials in finished drinking water.” The Marine Corps was asked by the Tampa Bay Times in 2013 to provide evidence that CCE testing was conducted regularly at Camp Lejeune, and no records were found. “A cursory review of the more than 8,000 documents that have been produced did not yield any CCE analytical results,” Marine Corps spokeswoman Captain Kendra Motz told the newspaper. “However, the absence of records fifty years later is not an indication that an action was or was not taken, only that no records are available.”22

  When NBC News asked Motz about past CCE testing in 2013, she said the method would not have been effective in finding solvents such as TCE and PCE, because those chemicals would have evaporated before the test was completed. CCE testing was mainly good for detecting pesticides or other contaminants that were not as volatile, she said.23

  While the leadership at Camp Lejeune continued to ignore the warnings about solvents in the water through the rest of 1982, base chemist Elizabeth Betz and the consultants from Grainger Laboratories continued to be concerned. Betz wrote a “memorandum for the record” on September 8, 1982, recounting the results of sampling at the Rifle Range the previous spring. A dozen different contaminants—none of which were regulated yet under the Safe Drinking Water Act—had been detected over a three-month period, she noted, including TCE, PCE, methylene chloride, toluene, and benzene; the highest reading was 182 parts per billion of 1,1-Dichloroethylene (1,1-DCE), a toxic compound that forms as TCE breaks down.24

  In December 1982, Grainger’s Bruce Babson reminded the base commander that the ongoing testing for THMs continued to be disrupted by the presence of solvents. Out of forty water samples tested at Camp Lejeune, five contained PCE and five others contained both PCE and TCE, Babson’s memo said.25

  If those warnings weren’t enough, there were many other signs of environmental problems at Camp Lejeune that, had they been noticed, might have kept the base commanders up at night:

  •In March 1977, SCS Engineers of Reston, Virginia, completed a study of oil pollution at the base that the Marine Corps had requested the year before. The survey found “problems associated with petroleum storage areas, maintenance facilities, grease racks, motor pool operations, parking lots, and other activities utilizing petroleum products,” according to a brief description in a memo to base headquarters, but the Marine Corps has refused to release the full study.26

  •On September 22, 1977, the Environmental Protection Agency cited Camp Lejeune as “a major polluter” for violating permit standards at its seven sewage treatment plants and for making illegal discharges to storm drains. The commander of LANTDIV responded to the EPA by ordering the commanding general at the base to take several hundred corrective actions, with a goal of getting into compliance by July 1, 1981.27

  •A year later, in September 1978, the commander of LANTDIV sent a memo to Camp Lejeune’s commanding general reminding him of the need to protect groundwater from contaminants that could leach from the installation’s solid-waste and chemical landfills. “Thus, current land disposal facilities should be monitored to indicate, as early as possible, any movement of contaminants from either disposal facility into the groundwater,” the memo said. “Monitoring is necessary to evaluate either the potential danger to or the impact on groundwater quality.”28

  •A leak of between 20,000 and 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline was reported at Camp Lejeune in 1979, the first and largest of eight different fuel leaks that would be recorded at the base over the next decade.29

  •In June 1980, in a report on Camp Lejeune’s Hadnot Point fuel farm, Cal J.
Ingram of LANTDIV told his bosses at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command that there were problems with the fuel depot. The depot was about thirty-five years old, he said, and many of the tanks and pipes exhibited general corrosion and deterioration. A number of leaks had been found.30

  •In March 1982, chemist Wallace Eakes of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command wrote a “trip report” to his supervisors at LANTDIV describing a weeklong tour he had made of seventy different contaminated sites at Camp Lejeune. He had visited the sites with a team that was conducting an environmental study at the base. One of the sites, which he called “Bldg 712,” had been the base’s “Malaria Control Headquarters” in the 1950s and had later been used to store and mix pesticides such as DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane), which had been banned by the EPA in 1972. The building was now being used as a day-care center for babies and young children. “The findings concerning Bldg 712, the present day care center, was a shock to all concerned,” Eakes wrote in his March 31, 1982, memo. “I recommend that, since this may pose a health threat to the children at the day care center, preventive medicine should be involved.” It was agreed that the Navy medical officer, Norman Lachapelle, would take air and soil samples in the area “under the guise of a normal health survey” so that children and parents wouldn’t be alarmed. The Navy’s tests did not find pesticide residues inside the building, but in May 1982 tests by a private laboratory found that soils outside the center contained high levels not only of DDT but also of the pesticides DDE (dichloro-diphenyl-dichloro-ethylene), DDD (dichloro-diphenyl-dichloro-ethane), and chlordane. The day-care center was immediately shut down.31

  •In June 1982, an “initial assessment study” conducted at Camp Lejeune under the Navy’s environmental program, NACIP, found seventy-two sites on the base where “some form of waste disposal” had occurred. “Indiscriminate dumping in about every part of the installation” ranged from waste disposal in pits and landfills to the spreading of petroleum compounds on the roads for dust control, said the study by the Navy’s contractor, Water and Air Research, Inc., of Gainesville, Florida. “Some 17 sites had potentially hazardous materials and reasonable potential for material migration, and thus warranted more analysis,” the report said. Among their conclusions, the consultants included this one: “The water table aquifer is highly susceptible to contamination from hazardous waste disposal practices.”32

  •On October 5, 1982, a civilian equipment operator, Jerry “Ike” Rochelle, took Camp Lejeune officials to two areas on the base where he had buried at least fifty drums of mustard gas or nerve gas in 1953. He said that Marine Corps officials who hired him for the job told him to wear “extensive protective gear,” including a gas mask.33

  •On November 22, 1982, the new environmental manager at Camp Lejeune, Bob Alexander, received a telephone briefing from LANTDIV’s J. G. Wallmeyer on information obtained from five people who were “knowledgeable of disposal” at the base. The interviewees reported two sites where drums of chemicals had been buried, two sites where pesticides had been dumped (including one that was now covered by a basketball court), and a hazardous-waste site in the Rifle Range area where a worker was so badly injured in an explosion and fire in 1970 that two years of medical treatment were required.34

  All of this was occurring at Camp Lejeune during a time when water contaminated with TCE was turning up at military bases across the country. In at least a few of those cases, base officials took swift action. Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan detected TCE in its water in October 1977 and within a month began closing wells. The Warminster Naval Air Development Center outside Philadelphia did the same thing in 1979. The Willow Grove Naval Air Station, also near Philadelphia, found both TCE and PCE in a well on the base in 1979. “After contamination was detected, this well was used mainly for fire protection, and not drinking water,” according to a public health assessment done at the now-closed base in May 2002.35

  Despite all of the alarms sounding on the base, Camp Lejeune officials decided in 1982 to reduce the testing for THMs from monthly to quarterly, because that was all that was required by state and federal regulations. And in 1983, the base asked the state for permission to reduce the testing to once a year in the Hadnot Point system because of the “low” contamination levels.36

  One reason that commanders at Camp Lejeune were blithely trying to avoid the issue of well contamination was that they were already struggling to meet the demand for water. In March 1983, an operator of the base water plants wrote to the utilities director expressing concerns about high usage in two of the eight water systems. Based on flows from April to October 1982, wrote general foreman W. R. Price, “the water treatment plants at Tarawa Terrace and Camp Johnson could very well be unable to satisfy the demand during the summer of this year due to steady decrease in well yield.” Because the aquifer was being drained more rapidly than it was being replenished, wells that had once yielded 350 gallons of water per minute were now producing only about 50 gallons per minute, Price said. “If they keep operating pumps at capacity there is a high risk of failure,” he wrote.37

  It was not until 1984 that any wells were first shut down on the base.

  5

  TROUBLE AT TARAWA TERRACE

  I think we kind of caught it right at the beginning.

  —CHUCK RUNDGREN, DIRECTOR, NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES, DIVISION OF HEALTH SERVICES, WATER SUPPLY BRANCH

  Jeff Byron was on the threshold of his dreams when he moved to Camp Lejeune in early 1982. In the past year he had joined the Marines, survived boot camp, gotten married, and graduated from the Navy’s air-traffic control school in Millington, Tennessee. Best of all, his wife, Mary, was pregnant with their first child.1

  Byron loved the Marine Corps—two of his uncles were Marines during World War II, and a cousin fought in Vietnam—but he wasn’t really thinking about joining when he graduated from Forest Park High School in Cincinnati in 1975. He went to Morehead State University in Kentucky, then left after a breakup with his girlfriend in his third year there. Back in Ohio, he made a living as a bartender (and met Mary when he was on the job in a bowling alley). Meanwhile, the state was going through economic doldrums, just like the rest of the country. “It was the second-largest recession since the Great Depression in 1981 and it was hard to find a job,” he said. “I was overqualified for lower-paying jobs and under-qualified for higher-paying jobs.” So the Marines became a good path toward a better career, and Byron signed up in June 1981. He and Mary were married in Hamilton, Ohio, after Jeff finished boot camp in South Carolina and before he started at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Tennessee.

  When Byron was assigned to Camp Lejeune in early 1982, no housing was available on the base, so he and his wife rented a place in Jacksonville while waiting for a vacancy. Andrea was born in June. She was two months old when the family moved into base housing at Midway Park, directly across from the main gate at Camp Lejeune.

  Andrea seemed perfectly healthy before she lived on the base—her only visits to the doctor were for “well-baby” exams, Byron said. That quickly changed after the move into Midway Park, where the Byrons lived for a year. Things continued to go down-hill when the family lived in quarters at 3114 Bougainville Drive in the Tarawa Terrace housing complex from August 1983 until June 1985. In that period of less than three years, Andrea was at the base hospital a total of fifty-seven times—an average of nearly twice a month—for treatment of a variety of ailments. There were rashes, ear infections, coughs, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, and unexplained fevers. “Most of the time the medical personnel on base did not have an explanation for her symptoms,” Byron said. “We were told to give her tepid baths and children’s Tylenol to reduce the fevers.”

  One of the worst episodes involved three visits to the emergency room on the weekend after Thanksgiving in 1983, when Andrea’s fever soared as high as 105.8 degrees. Again, doctors had no idea what was causing the baby’s temperature
to rise so far above normal.

  Around the same time, another family was struggling with the serious but unexplained illness of their own daughter. Janey Ensminger was the six-year-old child of Jerry and Etsuko Ensminger, a drill instructor and his Japanese wife who lived on and off of Camp Lejeune for eleven of the nearly twenty-five years that Jerry was in the Corps. He was a career Marine, having joined right out of high school in 1970 in hopes of avenging his older brother’s severe wounding at the hands of the Vietcong.2

  Born on the Fourth of July in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1952, Jerry Ensminger was the third of six children in a family that was anything but steeped in the military. His father was an orphan who became a pipefitter and part-time farmer in south central Pennsylvania; he had fought the Germans in Greenland during World War II. His brother Dave had signed up for service only because he wanted to get married and pursue a career as a veterinarian, but couldn’t afford college. The Marine Corps offered to send him to officers’ school after boot camp, but Dave wanted to do only a two-year stint to qualify for the GI Bill, so he was assigned to the infantry with orders for Vietnam.

  There, in an orchard in the Mekong Delta, Sergeant Dave Ensminger was leading a team that was training Vietnamese fighters when he crouched down to look into some brush as his unit was putting down its gear nearby. An explosion ripped into his lower body. A Marine from New Jersey ran to help and was killed by a second powerful blast. Dave Ensminger survived, but he had shrapnel in his skull and was paralyzed on the right side of his body. He came home facing years of therapy to learn how to walk again; eventually he would be able to handle a job as a mechanic at a Navy shipyard. These events on the other side of the world changed the direction of Jerry Ensminger’s life. Ensminger hadn’t even waited for his high-school graduation ceremony to be over before he joined the Marines. Some of his classmates, caught up in the antiwar fury felt by many young Americans in the spring of 1970, derided his decision to sign up. One of them spit on Ensminger. “I knocked his ass out,” Ensminger said.