Ex-Lejeune residents show water toxin effects - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Ex-Lejeune residents show water toxin effects

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — The ailments some former Camp Lejeune residents and civilian employees rattled off were too varied to keep track.

Numerous birth defects. Diabetes. Miscarriages. Plus an array of cancers including colon, brain, kidney, breast and leukemia.

Behind each illness there’s a story. The mother who cradled her baby boy as he took his last breath. Parents who watched their children suffer. Children whose parents’ lives were cut short.

All agree their stories have one common theme — they drank, bathed and played in water contaminated with toxins as much as 40 times over today’s safety standard.

These are the stories that put a human face on the potential adverse health effects tied to water contaminated with dry cleaning fluids and industrial solvents. On Thursday, a 14-member committee from the National Research Council, the operational arm of the National Academies, heard from several former base residents and civilian employees at what was called a “ground-truthing” session at the Jacksonville USO.

About 30 people attended the session. As many as 1 million Marines, dependents and civilian employees drank and bathed in the tainted tap water from 1957 to 1987. Almost 900 have already filed suit against the Pentagon.

Mary Freshwater lived in base housing during the 1970s. She carried a box to the podium when she was called to address the committee. From what she called her “treasure box,” she pulled out a stained baby body suit, the one her son — born with an open spine — was wearing when he died in her arms.

Freshwater cried as she spilled over the box’s other contents — a baby bottle and diapers.

“This is what I have left of my son,” she said.

After his death, Freshwater got pregnant again. She gave birth to another boy, this one born without a cranium or a brain.

“I have two graves out in Onslow Memorial Park,” she said. “We are not numbers. We are human beings. No matter how many years pass by, the pain never stops.”

Terry Dyer, who lived with her parents and two sisters in Tarawa Terrace for 15 years, said many former residents were not likely at the session because they’re sick, dying or already dead.

“Many people are depending on you,” she said. “We truly need the help to get the answers we deserve to have. There are literally thousands, possibly millions of us. You might not see their faces, but guard their stories with your heart.”

Military officials discovered the presence of trichloroethylene— a volatile organic compound known generally as TCE — in well water at the base in 1980. Five years later, 10 wells were shut down when their TCE contamination levels were found to be a staggering 1,400 parts per billion, well above the government maximum level of 5 ppb.

Marine officials have said they followed environmental and health regulations at the time.

Results of the first scientific study on the possible health effects of the contaminated water will be available this spring. The study, by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta, Ga., is looking at children born at Camp Lejeune during the time the contaminated wells were in operation.

Former residents and employees can register at the Corps water study Web site, for notification and information about the water contamination, including updates via letter or e-mail about the ATSDR health study. Those who register must have lived or worked on the base before to 1987.

The site can be found at http://www.usmc.mil/camplejeune/clbwatersurveyinfo.nsf.

Some former residents fear the effects of drinking the water are extending into a third generation.

Jeff Byron, a former Marine who moved to Tarawa Terrace with his family in 1983, said his youngest daughter was born two months before he was honorably discharged from the Corps. She was born with myriad birth defects.

“I can’t remember them all they’re so many,” he said.

Byron said her son is developmentally disabled.

“It’s going to take 100 years for this to filter out of my family’s gene pool,” he said.

He and a handful of other former residents accompanied the committee on a bus tour of the base later that afternoon. Small wooden stakes marked by white sheets of paper indicated the closed well sites.

As committee members asked questions, the former Marines and dependents reminisced. This is where they went to school. This was how close their home was to one of the contaminated wells.

The trip wasn’t a walk down memory lane for Byron.

“I’m here for justice,” he said. “I want to speak to the commandant of the Marine Corps. We want to speak to the commandant without lawyers. They’ve taken our children’s lives.”