A Trust Betrayed by Mike Magner

Author:Mike Magner [Magner, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306822582
Publisher: Da Capo Press

11

OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE?

I personally would have been using different water.

—THOMAS SINKS, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, AGENCY FOR TOXIC SUBSTANCES AND DISEASE REGISTRY

In 2006, twelve years after the “Republican revolution” under Newt Gingrich had given the GOP a majority in Congress, Democrats regained control of both the House and the Senate. Democrat John Dingell of Michigan resumed chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a position he had held from 1981 to 1994. One of Dingell’s first priorities was to hold the military accountable for its environmental problems, and Camp Lejeune’s escalating health crisis topped the list. Another Michigan Democrat, Congressman Bart Stupak, took over the panel’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. Stupak scheduled a hearing for June 12, 2007, entitled “Poisoned Patriots: Contaminated Drinking Water at Camp Lejeune.” It would mark the first time since the contaminated water issues had surfaced more than two decades earlier that all the major players in the unfolding drama were together on the same stage.1

Stupak opened the hearing by noting that one of the principal pollutants at Lejeune, TCE, was the same volatile organic compound that had poisoned people in Woburn, Massachusetts, in a case made famous by the book and movie A Civil Action. “As bad as the contamination was at Woburn, the concentrations of TCE at Camp Lejeune were as much as ten to fifteen times higher,” he said. “We have a chart. . . . There is a current standard, five parts per billion; Woburn is 267; Hadnot, which is one of the wells [at Lejeune], was 3,400. In Hadnot on February 7, 1985, over 18,000 parts per billion [were found] in the water.”

The lead witnesses at the hearing were Jeff Byron, Mike Gros, and Jerry Ensminger, who by this time had assembled their own website—“The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten”—which was filled with stories and documents related to Lejeune’s water. Testimony by these three relentless advocates for victims of the contamination was a fitting start for an event intended to expose to the public—and more importantly to members of Congress—what was probably the biggest water-contamination case in history, both in terms of the levels of pollution and the number of people exposed to it. Their heartrending personal stories captured the wide range of health problems apparently linked to the tainted water. Driven by anger and grief, Byron, Gros, and Ensminger—along with Tom Townsend in Idaho and others who believed they had been harmed by the pollution—had managed to uncover more information about Lejeune’s water issues than two federal agencies and the Navy itself had compiled during twenty-two years of investigation.

“From documents that we obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests,” Byron testified, “we were able to determine that the Marine Corps/DOD environmental personnel on base were well aware of the VOC contamination before our family moved into base housing, and therefore could have intervened and prevented the adverse health effects suffered by my family as well as other families, whose medical history is very similar to my own.”

After providing more background information, he said, “I was raised to believe that to get something done you had to do it yourself.

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