A Trust Betrayed

by Mike Magner

  The committee had also evaluated whether further health studies of former Camp Lejeune residents, as recommended in June 2008 by ATSDR epidemiologist Frank Bove, would be useful in determining the effects of the water contamination at the base. “After reviewing the study plans and feasibility assessments, the committee concluded that most questions about whether exposures at Camp Lejeune resulted in adverse health effects cannot be answered definitively with further scientific study,” the panel reported.

  There are two main reasons for this. First, it is not possible to reliably estimate the historical exposures experienced by people at the base. Second, it will be difficult to detect any increases in the rate of diseases or disorders in the study population. Most of the health effects of concern are relatively rare, which means that very large numbers of people are needed to detect increased cases. Although the total number of people who have lived at Camp Lejeune while the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point water supplies were contaminated is sizeable, the population is still unlikely to be large enough to detect effects, other than common diseases or disorders, of concern.

  The committee also had a message for some of those who had spoken at the three public hearings on Camp Lejeune’s contamination. “Many of the people who addressed the committee have suffered from serious diseases or have family members or friends who have suffered,” the panel’s report said. It went on:

  The committee was moved by the testimonies it heard and understands that some may have been looking for the committee to make a judgment on their particular case. However, science does not allow the committee to determine the cause of a specific case of disease. This may be hard to understand. Why would scientific experts not be able to determine whether a child’s birth defect or a parent’s cancer diagnosis was due to a chemical exposure? Unfortunately, for diseases that have multiple causes and that develop over a long period of time, it is generally impossible to establish definitively the cause in individual cases.

  To sum it all up, the committee’s chairman, David Savitz of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, issued a statement in a press release sent out by the National Research Council when its report was released. “Even with scientific advances, the complex nature of the Camp Lejeune contamination and the limited data on the concentrations in water supplies allow for only crude estimates of exposure,” Savitz said. “Therefore, the committee could not determine reliably whether diseases and disorders experienced by former residents and workers at Camp Lejeune are associated with their exposure to the contaminated water supply.”31

  Almost immediately after the report came out, a political and scientific firestorm erupted.

  “The NAS study released Saturday is simply a review of previous scientific literature on hydrocarbon solvents, reports on Camp Lejeune water contamination, and published epidemiologic and toxicological studies,” said Democratic senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Hagan condemned the study on several grounds:

  It failed to take into account the conclusions of previous epidemiological studies that found an association between volatile organic compounds (VOCs) exposures and childhood leukemia, and presents some direct contradictions to the EPA’s maximum containment levels of VOCs in drinking water. Moreover, the NAS study barely mentioned benzene and vinyl chloride and severely downplays the established links between adverse health effects and exposure to VOCs that were present in the water at Camp Lejeune. For these reasons, I cannot stand behind the validity of the NAS study.32

  “It’s clear that the water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated by a number of hazardous chemicals at unsafe levels,” said her colleague in the Senate from North Carolina, Republican Richard Burr. “I am deeply concerned about the conclusions in the report from the National Academy of Sciences. This latest report still raises more questions than it answers.”33

  “We are disappointed and dismayed at the report,” said five scientists who had worked closely with victims of the contamination: Ann Aschengrau, Richard Clapp, and David Ozonoff of the Boston University School of Public Health; Daniel Wartenberg of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; and Sandra Steingraber of Ithaca College. In a June 17, 2009, statement released to the media, the scientists said the report “reached puzzling and in some cases erroneous conclusions. . . . The NRC doubts that ‘definitive’ answers can come from any study, but this sets the bar too high—no one study can provide definitive answers, and all studies must be considered in the light of other scientific evidence. From our experience in other settings, we believe that useful studies of the Camp Lejeune population are possible and furthermore that the Marines and their families deserve our government’s best efforts to carry them out.”34

  The victims of the contamination were dumbfounded by the report. “We couldn’t figure out why the NRC was so in bed with the Navy,” said Partain. A little digging shed some light on the possible reasons for the committee’s blanket exoneration of the Marine Corps for causing health problems at Camp Lejeune.

  Ensminger discovered, in talking with Clapp, a highly regarded epidemiologist who had been asked to review the NRC report before it was released, that Clapp’s dissenting comments had been left out of the document. He also learned that as the NAS report was being prepared for publication, the scientific panel had assigned a scientist at the Honeywell Corporation—a company second only to the US military in the number of Superfund sites for which it is a responsible party—to manage peer-review comments by independent scientists. The potential conflict raised concerns that any conclusions saying that health problems could not be linked to contaminants would benefit Honeywell’s defense in Superfund cases. Not only was there no mention of Clapp’s disagreement with the committee’s conclusions in the report, but the National Academies told Ensminger that the peer-review comments would never be released to the public.

  Ensminger and Partain uncovered an even more damning document as well, one implying that the National Research Council report had been soft on the Marine Corps for a reason. In May 2009—a month before the report was released—the National Academies of Sciences had signed a $600,000 contract with the Navy agreeing to serve as consultants in helping the military to explain the effects of the water contamination, or lack of them, on people who had lived at Lejeune. Bill Levesque, the reporter who had written about Mike Partain at the St. Petersburg Times, obtained a copy of the contract and wrote a story about it in November 2009, five months after the release of the report. “Federal scientists and critics of the Marine Corps say the contract . . . is a blatant conflict of interest, and some critics say it calls into question the accuracy of an NRC report that already has been criticized by some scientists,” Levesque wrote. “They’ve beaten us to death with the NRC report and pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes,” Partain was quoted as saying in the story. “The NRC report smelled rotten,” he said, “and now we have a deal that smells even worse.”35

  The article quoted the response of a spokesman for the Marines, Captain Brian Block, who said the contract was part of its continuing relationship with the NRC and would aid the Corps’ efforts to better understand the potential health effects of polluted water. “The Marine Corps initially declined to confirm the existence of the contract when the Times asked about it earlier in the week,” wrote Levesque. “Block, the Corps spokesman, said in an e-mail, ‘We will not discuss future contracts until they are finalized.’ In fact, the contract was finalized on May 1. The Marine Corps also provided, at the Times request, a financial breakdown of the $14 million the Corps has publicly maintained it spent on Camp Lejeune research. The list did not contain the $600,000 NRC contract. When asked about it, the Corps did not respond.”36

  Officials at the ATSDR, whose plans for further studies of health problems at Lejeune had been discouraged by the National Research Council committee, were furious about the consulting contract between the NRC and the Navy. “The direct funding of peer review by the agency responsible for contaminating the Camp Lejeune drinking water creates a perceived c
onflict of interest unacceptable to the community of veterans and their families exposed,” wrote Thomas Sinks, deputy director at the health agency, in a letter to the Marine Corps and Navy.37

  Regardless of the seemingly tainted process for evaluating the effects of Camp Lejeune’s water pollution, the committee’s report was a severe setback to the slow but steady progress that the ATSDR had been making in its studies. It also dampened the ability of the affected victims to get their story out. “When the NRC report came out it sucked the air out of the Camp Lejeune story,” Partain said. CNN canceled its plans for a story about the male breast cancer victims. “It was probably the darkest time I remember because we were pretty much on the brink of being wiped out,” Partain added.

  But Levesque wasn’t giving up. On July 3, 2009, another story on the male breast cancer cases was published under his byline in the St. Petersburg Times. Six more cases had been found in just the past week in Florida, all with time spent at Camp Lejeune, Levesque reported. “Male breast cancer is exceedingly rare,” his story said. “Just 1,900 men are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year compared with nearly 200,000 women, the American Cancer Society says. A man has a 1-in-1,000 lifetime chance of getting the disease. Men who get it are often over 70, though it is rare even in older males.”38

  Boston University scientist Richard Clapp told Levesque that he was very concerned. “My gut tells me this is unusual and needs to be looked into,” he said. “I’m sure there are still more out there in other states.”39

  CNN came back again, and this time the national cable network did the story in a big way—in two segments that ran on September 24 and 25, 2010. The stories featured Partain and other men who had spent time at Lejeune and now had breast cancer, now numbering more than twenty. “Jerry [Ensminger] called me and was blown away,” Partain said. “He told me it was the anniversary of Janey’s death.”

  ATSDR epidemiologist Frank Bove told CNN that the level of contamination in one sample taken at Camp Lejeune was “the highest I’ve ever seen in a public water system in this country.” But he was cautious: “Whether exposures were long enough and high enough at Camp Lejeune to cause disease—that’s the question.” Clapp also appeared in the CNN stories and was more emphatic. “I think if cancer of the breast in men or other kinds of cancer have been linked to this exposure, that we ought to know about that,” he said. “The families deserve that. The veterans themselves should know about that, and they should be compensated if the link can be made.”40

  Soon after the stories ran, the number of male breast cancer cases tracked down by Partain rose to fifty. “The media was fascinated by the story,” he said. “It was such an irony that the roughest, toughest men in the world were being affected by a women’s disease.”

  The tide was starting to turn against the Marines and in favor of the victims. The ATSDR, facing increasing criticism in Congress for declaring in 2007 that trailers containing high levels of formaldehyde posed no threats to the health of hurricane victims who were using them for temporary housing, was like a battleship slowly changing direction. The agency was forced to back off its position on the trailers and admit that the chemical fumes were making people sick. The health agency was also backing away from another report, which had been issued in the spring of 2009. In that document, the ATSDR had said that heavy metals and the remains of explosives at the Navy’s Vieques Island base in Puerto Rico could not have been a health hazard for the residents there. The ATSDR reversed course in November 2009, however, saying that it had found gaps in its original environmental data from Vieques. Key members of Congress stepped up the pressure. “It seems to have gotten into their culture to do quick and dirty studies and to be willing to say there are no public health consequences,” said Congressman Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat who chaired a House subcommittee investigating federal health research and reports. “People should be able to count on the government to tell them the truth.”41

  Miller and the two senators from North Carolina, Republican Richard Burr and Democrat Kay Hagan, were already pushing legislation to require the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide health coverage for enlisted personnel, veterans, and family members who had been harmed by Camp Lejeune’s pollution. “We owe those who are sick the benefit of the doubt and the health care they need,” Burr said. But when their bill was considered by the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in January 2010, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki warned that coverage might be needed for as many as 500,000 people at a cost of more than $4 billion over ten years. Democrats on the committee, including then-chairman Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, argued that the Defense Department, which was responsible for the contamination, should be footing the bill for the health problems it caused. Burr and Hagan argued that the Pentagon could no longer be trusted to care for its own. “I can’t in good conscience agree to give these brave men and women a false hope that they’ll get health care,” Burr said. “Do you really believe the Department of Defense will accept responsibility for this health care when it still doesn’t accept responsibility for the contamination?” He vowed to block every nominee for a Navy appointment who came before the Senate until the impasse on health coverage for Lejeune victims was broken.42

  While the fight over health care was being waged, key members of Congress were also waging a battle with the Navy on another front—funding for ATSDR studies at Camp Lejeune. In December 2009, the Navy agreed to spend $2 million on a new review of cancer and birth defects in babies conceived or born at the base while some water systems were contaminated. The 1998 study on so-called “birth outcomes” had been inconclusive, but it had indicated that there could have been more than the expected number of health problems among children whose mothers had drunk tainted water. The decision to fund the study did not come easily, though. Congressman Miller of North Carolina and the two members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who were investigating the pollution problems at Lejeune, Congressmen John Dingell and Bart Stupak of Michigan, had to threaten Navy Secretary Ray Mabus with harsh action if the Pentagon kept delaying funds for ATSDR studies. “It would be great if the Navy did the right thing for the right reason, but fortunately the law requires any polluter, including the Navy, to pay for the studies necessary to find out just how much harm they’ve done to innocent people,” Miller, Dingell, and Stupak wrote to Mabus. “The law doesn’t make victims of toxic exposure beg and plead a polluter for justice; the law gives them rights.”43

  Two months later, citing the National Research Council report saying that further investigation of health problems at Lejeune would be fruitless, the Navy refused to pay $1.6 million for a mortality study of former residents at the base. The timing of the Navy’s funding refusal couldn’t have been worse, though. Barbara Barrett, a Washington-based reporter for the McClatchy Newspapers in North Carolina, dug up documents in February 2010 showing that over the years, storage tanks and underground pipes at Lejeune probably had leaked as much as 800,000 gallons of fuel near wells providing water to the Hadnot Point system. One memo Barrett uncovered said that a contractor had told base officials in 1996 that about half a million gallons of the fuel had been recovered. “The other 300,000 gallons? I know what happened to it,” Mike Partain told Barrett. “We drank it.”44

  Then, just a few days after Barrett’s story was published, the Associated Press reported that a Navy contractor, the Michael Baker Corporation, based in Pennsylvania, had grossly understated the benzene levels found in one well serving the Hadnot Point water system in a report to the ATSDR in 1992, just as the federal health agency was beginning its research at the base. The AP found documents showing that benzene in the well had measured 380 parts per billion in 1984, but the 1992 report by the consultants showed the level to be 38 ppb. Then, in a final report on the well that was sent to the ATSDR in 1994, the Navy’s consultant failed to mention benzene at all. “It was probably a mistake on the part of the contractor, but I can’t tell you for certain why it happened,”
the Marine Corps spokesman, Captain Brian Block, told the AP’s Kevin Maurer. A former enforcement officer for the Environmental Protection Agency, Kyla Bennett, offered a different assessment. “It is weird that it went from 380 to 38 and then it disappeared entirely,” she said. “It does support the contention that they did do it deliberately.”45

  Miller, chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, was livid. He said he would demand that the Navy turn over all relevant documents and data on Camp Lejeune. “We want to know what did [the Navy and the Marine Corps] know about the water, when did they know[,] and what did they do about it?” Miller told McClatchy’s Barrett. “Did they know about it during the 30 years when Marines and families were exposed to the water? Did they know about it and not do anything to stop it?” Navy Secretary Mabus responded that the ATSDR had “full access” to documents on benzene levels at Lejeune—they had been available in a county library in North Carolina since 1992. This just made Miller angrier. “I cannot imagine that this was inadvertent, that this was the result of inadvertence, that there were not officials at the Navy who didn’t look at the levels of benzene contamination that came back from tests of water supply wells and did not understand just what that meant,” he said.46

  More bad news for the Navy came after William Levesque, whose paper had been renamed the Tampa Times, kept digging for information about Lejeune after reporting about the breast cancer problems in 2009. Levesque discovered in March 2010 that the Navy and Marine Corps had failed to provide the ATSDR with databases containing more than 700,000 documents, including one estimating that leaks from the Hadnot Point fuel farm exceeded a million gallons. “This is catch me if you can,” Jerry Ensminger told Levesque for his story. “The Marine Corps just wants to delay ATSDR’s work as long as they possibly can.” The Marine Corps spokesman, Captain Block, again issued what had become the service’s standard response. “We are very interested in ATSDR completing their work, and the Marine Corps has made every effort to ensure that all information in our possession is available to ATSDR researchers,” Block said in a written statement. “We will continue to do so because we are committed to using the best science to get our Marines and sailors, their family members and former residents the answers they deserve.”47