Millions spent on incinerators in Afghanistan that were never used

SIGAR: Millions spent on incinerators in Afghanistan that were never used
Stars and Stripes
Alex Pena
December 16, 2013

Troops and personnel at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Afghanistan resorted to hazardous open-air burn pits to dispose of waste after the U.S. Army spent $5.4 million on faulty incinerators that couldn’t be used, a government watchdog said in a report released Monday.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that because of construction delays and safety issues with the facility’s electrical supply, the incinerators were unusable.

Open-air pits can pose serious health hazards to troops and personnel living in surrounding areas, the report said. Their continued use after a base of a certain size has been established is also in violation of a 2011 U.S. Central Command regulation, according to the report. That regulation says that once a base exceeds 100 personnel for more than 90 days — a threshold that FOB Sharana met — it must establish a plan for installing waste-disposal technologies such as incinerators.

“Nearly 3 years after the initial scheduled completion date for the incinerator facility at FOB Sharana, the incinerators have never been used,” the report said.

Despite known problems with the incinerators, SIGAR said, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers accepted possession of them and paid the contractor, Denver-based International Home Finance and Development LLC, the full contract price $5.4 million.
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Burn Pits leave generation of troops with health problems and they knew it

The Military’s Open-Air Burn Pits Have Left A Generation Of Troops With Health Problems
Business Insider
HARRISON JACOBS
NOV. 5, 2013

One of the most dangerous hazards of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was a product of the U.S. military, according to a new investigative report by The Verge's Katie Drummond.

U.S. soldiers have been coming home with respiratory issues that they say are a result of the noxious fumes spewing from burn pits on U.S. Military bases.

Burn pits, many as large as 10 acres wide, have been used extensively on military bases to incinerate the Army’s trash since the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The military burned nearly everything in the pits, including plastic, styrofoam, electronics, metal cans, rubber, ammunition, explosives, feces, lithium batteries and even human body parts, according to a 2010 report from The New York Times' James Risen.
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If you doubt this or think it is new, think again. Reports go way back on Wounded Times search under Burn Pit

Burn pit at U.S. Marine base in Afghanistan poses health risk

Burn pit at U.S. Marine base in Afghanistan poses health risk -inspector
WASHINGTON
Jul 11, 2013

(Reuters) - Open-air burn pits at a U.S. Marine base in Afghanistan pose a health risk to the 13,500 military and civilian personnel there and are still in use despite the installation of four incinerators at a cost of $11.5 million, an inspector general said on Thursday.

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in a letter to two top U.S. generals that burn pits at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province were "potentially endangering" the health of U.S. military and civilian personnel.
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VA Whistleblower Ignites Firestorm Over Vets’ Illnesses

Dr. Steven S. Coughlin talked about many issues our veterans face including suicide and the lack of proper care. This is what they come home to. This is what some of us already assumed but now with his testimony, we know how much worse it all really is.

Taking care of our veterans and giving them the best possible treatment is not a political thing but it is the right thing. Remember what Washington said and ask yourself if we are even coming close to living up to it.

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, is directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated" -- George Washington

VA Whistleblower Ignites Firestorm Over Vets’ Illnesses
Epidemiologist says VA hid and manipulated data regarding burn pits and Gulf War syndrome
American Conservative
By KELLEY VLAHOS
May 10, 2013

It’s not every day that a scientist creates such intense drama on Capitol Hill.

But Dr. Steven S. Coughlin’s charges that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials hid, manipulated, and even lied about research pertaining to Gulf War Illness (GWI) and health problems plaguing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are still causing fallout a month after his stunning testimony before a key House subcommittee.

“The implications of his testimony are profound,” declared Anthony Hardie, 45, a Gulf War veteran who serves on the congressionally appointed Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses (RAC).

Veterans and their advocates, as well as many in the scientific community, have long believed that the VA avoids responsibility for veterans’ care by downplaying or outright ignoring evidence linking wartime experiences—such as exposure to Agent Orange, chemical weapons, or toxic pollution—to veterans’ chronic medical issues back home.

Coughlin, a senior epidemiologist with the VA’s Office of Public Health (OPH), gave the VA’s critics what they say is a smoking gun: after conducting major surveys of 1991 Gulf War veterans and “New Generation” veterans from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan, Coughlin told the committee he quit his post in December. He claims the VA is hiding important survey results about the health of veterans and that his colleagues watered-down analysis that might have shed light on whether recent vets got sick from open-air trash-burning pits on overseas bases.
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US military faulted for burn-pit use

US military faulted for burn-pit use
By Ernesto Londoño
The Washington Post
Published: April 25, 2013

The U.S. military spent $5 million on incinerators at a base in Afghanistan that never became operable, forcing troops to use a type of open-air burn pit that has been linked to serious respiratory problems among veterans, according to a government report.

The Pentagon banned burn pits at large war-zone bases after facing a flurry of lawsuits and health claims by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were exposed to toxic fumes during deployments. The pits are used to burn everything from cafeteria waste to feces.

The case of the inoperable incinerators at Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, detailed in a new inspector general report, sheds light on the continued challenges of waste disposal in combat zones and the stark choices that commanders in Afghanistan are having to make as the U.S. military footprint continues to contract.
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Vietnam "burn pit" veteran wins appeal after reporter took action

Vietnam veteran to get his benefits
VA rules on appeal after more than two years
Paul Muschick
The Watchdog
April 6, 2013

I've shown repeatedly how the Department of Veterans Affairs doesn't move swiftly to process veterans' claims for benefits. Maybe veterans would accept that pace if they knew the agency made up for it with accuracy.

Vietnam veteran Matthew Ford had been waiting an inexcusable two years and seven months on his latest appeal for disability benefits when I wrote about his case three weeks ago.

Eight days after that column, the agency granted Ford his benefits, saying a previous denial was "legally erroneous."

"Why didn't you guys catch this in the first place?" said a frustrated Ford, who had been seeking benefits since 1995 for breathing problems he contended were the result of his Army service.

The VA had ruled against him several times. Each time he appealed, and each time his claim was remanded, keeping it alive. That led to his most recent appeal in 2010, which had been languishing without explanation.

The wait ended March 25 when the Board of Veterans' Appeals ruled in his favor.

Veterans law Judge Jeffrey Parker said a previous board decision in 2010 that denied Ford benefits for bronchial asthma "was clearly and unmistakably erroneous."

Parker said the board improperly discredited the opinions of Ford's private physicians, who said his lungs could have been damaged when he burned human waste with gasoline in a camp cleanup detail in Vietnam in 1970.

"They were not supposed to rely on their own VA doctor," said Ford, of Hanover Township, Northampton County. "That is the law, and that is what they did."

Why it took the Board of Veterans' Appeals so long to decide his appeal is one of those Washington mysteries. For five months, his case was unaccounted for somewhere in the system.
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Veterans Health Data being covered up by the VA?

Oh no! Why would they do this? No big shocker but glad someone finally came out and said it.

Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data
Kelly Kennedy
USA TODAY
March 13, 2013

WASHINGTON — Department of Veterans Affairs officials purposely manipulate or hide data that would support the claims of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent paying costly benefits, a former VA researcher told a House subcommittee Wednesday afternoon.

"If the studies produce results that do not support the office of public health's unwritten policy, they do not release them," said Steven Coughlin, a former epidemiologist in the VA's public health department.

"This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War," Coughlin said. "On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible."
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Command Sgt. Maj. James Hubbard's widow warning on burn pits

Woman blames husband, veteran's death on toxic smoke from burning waste pits
KCTV News
Posted: Jan 17, 2013
By Laura McCallister, Multimedia Producer
By Alice Barr, News Reporter
LEAVENWORTH, KS

President Barack Obama just signed into law a bill that may help veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who were exposed to a potential health risk - pits of burning waste.

A Leavenworth, KS, woman blames exposure to that toxic smoke for her husband's death and is speaking out about the danger he and other veterans faced.

With more than three decades of service to the U.S. Army, Command Sgt. Maj. James Hubbard certainly earned his place in Leavenworth National Cemetery. But proving the reasons he is now buried there were caused by his service turned out to be much more difficult.
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Burn-pit registry for veterans signed into law

Burn-pit registry for veterans signed into law
Army Times
By Patricia Kime
Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Jan 10, 2013

President Obama signed legislation Thursday requiring the Veterans Affairs Department to establish a registry for troops and veterans who lived and worked near open-air burn pits used to dispose waste in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.

In addition to including new requirements for providing a casket or urn for veterans with no known next of kin and establishing care for a military cemetery in the Philippines, the Dignified Burial and Other Veterans Benefits Improvement Act, S. 3202, aims to pinpoint the number of veterans who may have been exposed to burn-pit smoke so VA can track their medical histories and keep them apprised of new treatments for associated conditions.

Troops deployed in support of contingency operations and stationed at a location where an open burn pit was used will be eligible to register.

Veterans advocacy groups and families of service members who have become ill since their deployments hailed passage of the law as a “victory.”
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Also
Obama signs Katie's Law, burn pit registry bills

9 years later, Iraq veteran gets welcome home

9 years later, Iraq veteran gets welcome home
By Stephanie Loder - The (Vineland, N.J.) Daily Journal
Posted : Friday Dec 28, 2012

Former Army Sgt. Wayne U. Games returned from Iraq in 2003, but never got a welcome home celebration.

A 1987 graduate of Vineland High School, Games became seriously ill during his deployment and had to be flown directly to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was admitted to the intensive care unit suffering from high blood pressure, heart and lung problems, and had to be placed on dialysis.

Games, 42, has been classified as 90 percent disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Most recently, he was diagnosed with Waldenstrom lymphoma.

“I never got a homecoming. I just remember getting sick, being flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, then to the United States. It took two days and when we got to Walter Reed it was nighttime and we were met by veterans who handed us some bags,” said Games. “That was my homecoming.”

On Dec. 16, Games received a much more appropriate welcome home and thank you from family, friends and officials who arrived at his Myrtle Street home.

The event was initiated by the “Welcome Home Committee” formed by Mayor Robert Romano to welcome back every soldier. The event was attended by Romano, as well as state Sen. Jeff Van Drew and state assemblymen Nelson Albano and Matthew Milam. read more here

Would Burn-pit registry be waste of time and money?

You've heard the expression "time is money" so anything the congress mandates will take time to implement and money to fund it. Considering the backlog of claims, lack of mental health workers and influx of new veterans waiting too long for the country to live up to their end of the deal, will this help or hurt veterans?

VA: Burn-pit registry would not be effective
By Rick Maze
Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jun 13, 2012

Veterans Affairs Department officials are opposing legislation to create a registry of service members who may have been exposed to toxic fumes of open burn pits in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they say they do not see the value of such an effort.

“VA can identify all service members that deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and has used this information in the development of an injury-and-illness surveillance system,” said Curtis Coy, VA’s deputy undersecretary for economic opportunity, at a Wednesday hearing at which a burn-pit bill was discussed.

Coy said there are two other reasons why the Obama administration doesn’t support S 1798, a burn-pit bill pending in the Senate.

“The most recent Institute of Medicine report on burn pits identified air pollution, rather than smoke from burn pits, as the most concerning potential environmental hazard,” he said.

He also noted that all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans already are eligible for up to five years of post-discharge health care, free of charge, from VA.

“Special authority for such a registry is not required,” Coy said.
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Then again since it seems as if the "Institute of Medicine" wants to call toxic fumes "air pollution" these veterans may need a lot more help than they are getting.

Families link burn pits to health woes, debt

Families link burn pits to health woes, debt
By Patricia Kime - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Feb 6, 2012 13:36:19 EST
Army Reserve wife Rosie Torres, 38, stood in line Jan. 19 at a Texas Health and Human Services office to apply for assistance with her mortgage, bills and groceries.

Mounting debt related to her husband’s medical bills has pushed the couple into arrears; between insurance deductibles, house payments and overages, they owe more than $55,000.

LeRoy Torres, 39, a Reserve captain and former Texas state trooper, was assigned to Joint Base Balad, Iraq, in 2008 and believes exposure to the camp’s open-air burn pits left him with debilitating respiratory problems. He can’t walk long distances, perform daily tasks or even roughhouse with his kids.

But although he can’t work full time, between his drill pay and Rosie’s part-time pay, they make too much to qualify for a grant.

“My husband actually said that with our insurance, we’d be better off if he’s not around,” Rosie Torres said. “I don’t want to hear that. That’s not what our family needs.”
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Rep. Todd Akin "Military’s Burn Pits Screwed Our Soldiers"

Burn Pits are the Agent Orange of this generation. With the Gulf War, they are still not sure what caused so many health problems. Why is it that after combat veterans end up discovering they have more to worry about after it than during it?

Congressman: The Military’s Burn Pits Screwed Our Soldiers
By Katie Drummond
November 3, 2011
A few months after he came home from Iraq, the Sergeant started having trouble breathing, and noticed numbness in his feet and hands. The military doctors he saw blamed his smoking habit: At 27-years-old, he’d been indulging in half a pack a day for five years. The Pentagon swore that the noxious smoke emanating from the military’s open-air burn pits — massive heaps of household trash, computer parts and even human waste that were used at bases in Iraq until last year, and are still being used in Afghanistan — weren’t at all responsible.

“We all knew that huge plumes of smoke going into the air, all the time, can’t exactly be good for you,” says the Sergeant, who requested anonymity because he fears reprisal from his commanding officers.

Now, one congressman wants the Pentagon to start paying attention to the accumulation of ailments. Rep. Todd Akin today announced a new bill that’d create a database of military personnel afflicted with health conditions they blame on burn pits.

“I have worked with a number of my constituents who were exposed to burn pits while serving in the military,” Rep. Akin, a Republican from Missouri, said in a statement. “The health consequences have been severe.”
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The Burn Pits of Iraq and Afghanistan Killing Soldiers

Toxic Trash: The Burn Pits of Iraq and Afghanistan
Published on August 24 2011

Billy McKenna and Kevin Wilkins survived Iraq—and died at home. The Oxford American sent filmmaker Dave Anderson and journalist J. Malcolm Garcia to Florida to investigate this deadly threat to American soldiers.

"Smoke Signals," by J. Malcolm Garcia

Published in the Fall 2011 Issue of The Oxford American.

Strange to think about it, the black smoke.

As it turns out, the eventual killer of Billy McKenna was lurking in the photographs he snapped in Iraq. Billy wrote captions beneath some of his photographs: typical day on patrol reads one. The photo is partially obscured by the blurred image of a soldier’s upraised hand. Brown desert unfurls away from a vehicle toward an empty horizon, and a wavering sky scorched white hovers above. Off to one side: Balad Air Base and the spreading umbrella of rising dank smoke from a burn pit.

Billy told his wife, Dina, in e-mails from Iraq that the stench was killing him. The air so dirty it rained mud. He didn’t call them burn pits. She can’t recall what he called them. He didn’t mean killing him literally. Just that the overwhelming odor was god-awful and tearing up his sinuses. He didn’t wear a mask. It would not have been practical. In heat that soared above a hundred degrees, what soldier would wear one?

Dina doesn’t know when she first heard the words “burn pit.” A Veterans Affairs doctor may have said it. The doctors were telling her a lot of things when Billy was on a ventilator. All she could think was, How can he have cancer? He’s indestructible. He’s been to hell and back. He can build houses, race cars, fish, camp. He was an Eagle Scout as a kid. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes.

But Billy had been exposed to something much more harmful than cigarettes. Since 2003, defense contractors have used burn pits at a majority of U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan as a method of destroying military waste. The pits incinerate discarded human body parts, plastics, hazardous medical material, lithium batteries, tires, hydraulic fluids, and vehicles. Jet fuel keeps pits burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
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Service members who are reporting respiratory problems

Debate Swirls Around Research Showing Lung Problems for Returned Troops
By JAMES DAO
Published: June 19, 2011


As a teenager in northern New York, Gary Durham ran cross-country and hiked the Adirondack’s high peaks. In Army basic training, he did two-mile runs in under 13 minutes. But after a yearlong deployment to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division in 2003, he says he started gasping for air while just mowing the lawn.

An emerging body of research indicates that Mr. Durham is one of a significant number of American service members who are reporting respiratory problems like coughing, wheezing or chest pains that started during deployment and continued after they returned home.

In 2009, a major survey of military personnel, the Millennium Cohort Study, found that 14 percent of troops who had deployed reported new breathing problems, compared with 10 percent among those who had not deployed.

Though the percentage difference seems small, when extrapolated for the two million troops who have deployed since 2001, the survey suggested that at least 80,000 additional service members had developed post-deployment breathing problems.

But now, a fierce debate is under way over just how long-lasting and severe those problems really are.

On one side are scientists, many working for the government, who say that a large number of returning troops have serious and potentially lifelong ailments. They point to an array of respiratory hazards in Iraq and Afghanistan — including powerful dust storms, fine dust laced with toxins and “burn pits” used to incinerate garbage at military bases — as potential culprits.
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Debate Swirls Around Research Showing Lung Problems

Troops near burn pits to get masks, respirators

Troops near burn pits to get masks, respirators
By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Feb 10, 2011 16:51:02 EST
Under pressure from Congress, the Defense Department is moving toward short-term and long-term protections against the risks posed by open-air burn pits that have been used to dispose of garbage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Protective equipment such as respirators and gas masks are expected to be made available to deployed troops near the burn pits, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen pledged in a letter to two U.S. senators dated Monday. He said a policy on how to promote the use of protective equipment should be ready within 60 days.

For the long term, the U.S. Central Command is buying and installing about 200 solid-waste incinerators that will be used in Afghanistan, Mullen said in the letter to Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

The pits have been used to burn a wide variety of potentially toxic products, including industrial and medical waste, paint thinner and other solvents, batteries and plastic. Schumer and Nelson wrote to the Defense Department in early January after the death of Army Sgt. William McKenna, who had a rare form of lymphoma that the Veterans Affairs Department determined was connected to his exposure to burn pit fumes in Iraq.
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Troops near burn pits to get masks, respirators

Bun pit linked to another soldier's death

Soldier from W. Babylon dies of rare cancer
Originally published: January 3, 2011 4:58 PM
Updated: January 3, 2011 9:28 PM
By SOPHIA CHANG AND VICTOR MANUEL RAMOS


After a long year of watching the slow death of her husband, Army Sgt. William McKenna, Dina McKenna decided the final goodbye should be dignified without painful lingering.

"Because of my children, I wanted to keep it brief. We've been suffering for a whole year with his cancer and how much he has deteriorated," she said Monday after her husband was buried at Calverton National Cemetery. He died in Florida on Tuesday at the age of 41 from a rare form of lymphoma.

There was no eulogy at his funeral at the Johnstons' Wellwood Funeral Home in Lindenhurst, just a few miles from the West Babylon neighborhood where McKenna grew up.
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Soldier from W. Babylon dies of rare cancer

Burn pits leave burning questions

DAV Magazine
As reported in this article Burn Pits from the DAV Magazine, Balad Air Base and Anaconda were exposing troops to toxic fumes. By 2006 there were 25,000 men and women there.

Balad dioxin level was 51 times higher than what the DOD would even think was acceptable with particulate level 50 times higher, yet the risk of exposure, "twice as high" as acceptable, was something to avoid doing anything about including warning the troops and their families back home. Given the fact many Marines are unaware of the toxic exposure they and their families lived with 

CAMP LEJEUNE WATER CONTAMINATION : Veterans Today

this is not so unusual just as exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War was kept from them.

"Hundreds of thousands of tons of trash were burned daily." This left another bitter legacy far beyond what war is supposed to do. It is one thing to be fearing bullets and bombs and another to fear what your own military is doing to you.

For Kelly Kennedy, the reporter covering this story that has yet to ended, the DAV gave her an award for her work on reporting this issue few in this country are aware of. How many years will it take to get a proper accounting and fully know the health problems from this is any one's guess but if Vietnam is any indication of how slowly things get done, most of these veterans' kids will be going off to college by the time they get real answers.

VA, DoD seek better data on burn-pit exposure

VA, DoD seek better data on burn-pit exposure

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Feb 24, 2010 9:43:08 EST

As Veterans Affairs Department officials laid out a plan for the Institute of Medicine to look for links between certain symptoms and burn-pit exposure, they also quizzed Defense Department scientists about what they’ve already done in that regard.

“We have a particular need to solve this as best as we can,” said Victoria Cassano, acting director of VA’s Environmental Agents Service. “You tell us what the science is. You tell us what the evidence is. Do we have enough to [move] forward with a presumption or not?”

At the first meeting of the IOM’s Committee on the Long-Term Health Consequences of Exposure to Burn Pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cassano asked the panel to help VA determine if the symptoms of several sick service members could be linked to exposure to smoke from open-air burn pits in the war zones.

If so, Congress could create a law saying veterans potentially connected could automatically receive a “presumption of service connection” for those ailments, similar to a law that assumes service connection for Vietnam Veterans whose diseases could have come from exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam.
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VA, DoD seek better data on burn pit exposure

Military’s stance on burn pits assailed

Military’s stance on burn pits assailed

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Nov 6, 2009 13:01:40 EST

The Air Force bioenvironmental officer who was among the first to warn about the potential effects of open-air burn pits on U.S. troops deployed in the war zones said Friday that he does not believe the findings of a 2008 Army report that discounted the possibility of long-range health risks from exposure to the smoke, fumes and ash.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, a biomedical sciences officer who was deployed to Joint Base Balad, Iraq, in 2006 and 2007, told a Senate panel looking into military contracting issues that he believes the Army lacked the necessary data to conclude, as it did in a report from its Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, that long-term health effects from breaking smoke from burn pits is unlikely.

A new joint study by the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs Department is underway that focuses on comparing the health of 30,000 combat veterans who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and 30,000 veterans who never deployed to see whether there are signs of ill effects from exposure to burn pits. This is similar to post-Vietnam and post-Gulf War studies that took years to complete.

“Although I have no hard data, I believe that the burn pits may be responsible for long-term health problems in many individuals,” Curtis said. “I think we are going to look at a lot of sick people.”
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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/11/military_burnpits_curtis_110609w/