Survivors of Camp Lejeune`s toxic water share their stories

Survivors of Camp Lejeune`s toxic water share their stories
VIDEO

Veterans exposed to cadaver parts from contaminated lab

Veterans exposed to cadaver parts from contaminated lab
Bloomberg
By Kathleen Miller
January 24, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs ordered $241 million of cadaver tissue and other material derived from human and animal bodies in the last three years, some of it from vendors warned by federal regulators about contamination in their supply chain.

About $4.7 million of the VA purchases came from Alachua, Fla.-based RTI Surgical Inc. and the nonprofit Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, of Edison, N.J., according to data obtained by Bloomberg News under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The VA ordered human tissue from the two suppliers after they were warned by the FDA for safety deficiencies — RTI for contaminated products and processing facilities, and Musculoskeletal Transplant for distributing tissue from tainted donor bodies, according to federal contracting data compiled by Bloomberg.

The suppliers said they have addressed the problems, which weren't tied to human harms.

The disclosures come as Congress and veterans' advocates are pressing the VA about whether it tracks body parts and other implants used to treat veterans well enough to warn patients of potential dangers. In September 2012, the VA shelved a system it was building to help alert patients when the parts are recalled. Some of the VA's buying was made outside standardized purchasing contracts without required justifications, the Government Accountability Office said earlier this month.

"It's a big accident waiting to happen," said Rick Weidman, executive director for government affairs with the Silver Spring, Md.-based Vietnam Veterans of America.
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Atomic Sailors suffering for service

The Atomic Sailors
Tampa Bay Times
William R. Levesque
December 21, 2013

It was the Navy's dirtiest job. The crew of the U.S.S. Calhoun County dumped thousands of radioactive barrels into the Atlantic Ocean from 1946 to 1960. The Navy says the work was safe. But 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the ship's sinking. The Calhoun County's own Navy ordered it scuttled because it was a radioactive hazard. Now a Pasco County widow fights to prove her husband's death is tied to the vessel.

ABOUT THIS STORY
The Tampa Bay Times examined thousands of pages of documentation and interviewed more than 50 former crewmen of the U.S.S. Calhoun County for this story. Bernice Albernaz of New Port Richey provided the Times with all Department of Veterans Affairs reports and correspondence she and her late husband received starting in 2001. Albernaz also provided letters the couple wrote to the VA, government officials and others and allowed the newspaper to review George Albernaz’s medical records still in her possession. Albernaz also provided a copy of her daily diary from the time her husband first became ill in 1988.

The Times examined the file maintained by the U.S. Court of Veterans Appeals in Washington, D.C. on Harvey Lucas’s VA claim and examined ship records at the National Archives in College Park, Md. and New York City, including the ship’s deck logs and muster rolls. These logs documented where the U.S.S. Calhoun County traveled and often noted when the ship dumped radioactive waste.

The Times interviewed Deborah Derrick, a former aide to U.S. Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., by phone and at her Arlington, Va. home. She also generously answered numerous questions by email about her research, which began in 1998. Derrick last week published a book about the ship, Half Lives: The True Story of an Atomic Waste Dumping Ship, a Government Cover-up, and the Veterans’ Families Shaped By It All. For more information about the ship and her work, visit HalfLives.com.

Derrick is president of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C. Times researcher John Martin and photographer Joseph Garnett contributed to this story.
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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

Camp Lejeune contamination controversy continues as Marines suffer

Flap Continues over Lejeune Health Assessment
Associated Press
by Allen G. Breed
Aug 19, 2013

RALEIGH, N.C. -- A bipartisan group of U.S. senators and congressmen is urging the Centers for Disease Control to complete a new, comprehensive report on the health effects of toxic tap water at the Camp Lejeune Marine base.

The lawmakers also want the agency to investigate whether people were exposed to airborne toxins inside buildings after contaminated wells at the North Carolina base were closed in 1985. And they asked the agency to look into the feasibility of a "cancer incidence study" for Lejeune.

The four senators and two representatives were reacting to news that the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, a division of the CDC, intends to issue a less comprehensive report than the one it released in 1997. The original public health assessment was withdrawn four years ago because of incomplete data.

They said they also are concerned the agency will ignore "the potential for harmful exposures via inhalation" in the decade and a half after contaminated wells at the coastal North Carolina base were taken off line.

The Aug. 9 letter to CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden was signed by U.S. Sens. Richard Burr and Kay Hagan of North Carolina; Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson of Florida; and U.S. Reps. Dennis Ross of Florida and John Dingell of Michigan.
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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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Gulf War veterans brain scans begin to offer hope

Brain scans lead to discovery of two types of veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome
By Alan Zarembo
Los Angeles Times
Published: June 16, 2013

LOS ANGELES - Using brain scans and exercise stress tests, researchers have identified two biologically distinct subgroups of veterans suffering from "Gulf War illness."

Their bodies reacted differently to physical exertion, and their brains had atrophied in different regions.

None of the patterns were seen in a control group of healthy subjects.

The findings, published online Friday in the journal PLOS One, are part of a growing body of work that the authors said could eventually lead to biological markers for the mysterious condition, which is still defined by its hodgepodge of symptoms.

"That's the hope," said Georgetown University researcher Rakib Rayhan, lead author of the study.

Still, the importance of the differences his team identified is far from clear, said Dr. Beatrice Golomb, an expert on Gulf War illness at UC San Diego, who was not involved in the research. There are many ways to parse any population of patients with a condition that is so variable and diverse, she said.

After the 1991 Gulf War, veterans began complaining of various problems, including pain, fatigue, headaches and cognitive impairment. The symptoms ranged from mild to debilitating.

Up to 30 percent of the 700,000 troops who served in the war are thought to be affected.
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Actress turns husband in over ricin mail

Texas Army veteran quizzed over poison letters sent to Obama and Bloomberg after his actress wife 'finds ricin in their FRIDGE'
Nathan Richardson's wife raised the alarm after finding a substance in refrigerator and internet searches for ricin, the Mayor and Obama
Richardson is an Army veteran and works at an army depot in Texas
Letters warned Bloomberg and Obama to stay away from gun law debate
Daily Mail
By HELEN LAWSON, JAMES NYE and LYDIA WARREN
31 May 2013

A Texas Army veteran is being questioned in connection with poison letters sent to President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg after his wife found a container in their refrigerator filled with what appeared to be ricin.

The man, who neighbors identified to KSLA as father-of-five Nathaniel Richardson, is a civilian employee of the Department of Defense who works at the Red River Army Depot. Sources said he is being treated as a person of interest.

His wife, actress Shannon Glass, told officers that as well as the container in the fridge, she also found internet searches related to ricin production, Obama and Bloomberg on their computer.

The development comes two days after it emerged that Bloomberg and his anti-gun group were sent two ricin-laced letters. On Thursday, it was revealed that another, identical letter was sent to Obama.
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Marine who dumped toxins felt illness was payback

Marine who dumped toxins felt illness was payback
May 18, 2013
USA Today

Ron Poirier, marine who dumped toxins onto the ground, felt cancer was payback for contributing to the worst drinking water contamination in the country's history.

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (AP) — Ron Poirier couldn't escape the feeling that his cancer was somehow a punishment.

As a young Marine electronics technician at Camp Lejeune in the mid-1970s, the Massachusetts man figured he'd dumped hundreds of gallons of toxic solvents onto the ground. It would be decades before he realized that he had unknowingly contributed to the worst drinking water contamination in the country's history — and, perhaps, to his own premature death.

"It's just a terrible thing," the 58-year-old veteran told the Associated Press shortly before succumbing to esophageal cancer at a Cape Cod nursing facility on May 3.

"Once I found out, it's like, 'God! I added to the contamination.'"

The cancer that killed Poirier is one of more than a dozen diseases and conditions with recognized links to a toxic soup brewing beneath the sprawling coastal base between the 1950s and mid-1980s, when officials finally ordered tainted drinking-water wells closed. As many as a million Marines, family members and civilian employees are believed to have been exposed to several cancer-causing chemicals.
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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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Camp Lejeune contamination may go back to 1948!

Contamination at NC Marine base lasted up to 60 years
By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer
NBC News

Some of the wells that supplied drinking water to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina were contaminated by cancer-causing solvents for as long as 60 years, a new federal report shows.

Month-by-month calculations show that Marines and their families at the base drank and bathed in water that may have been tainted with trichloroethylene (TCE) from 1948 through 2008. Other water sources were contaminated with benzene from 1951 to 2008, the report shows.

Federal officials have known for years that the base’s water supply was badly contaminated, from fuel leaks and probably from a dry-cleaning plant as well.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million people were exposed to the contaminated water from 1953 to 1987, when the last of several contaminated wells were closed. The new report takes the potential estimates back five years earlier.

"It is possible," Dr. Christopher Portier, director of the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, told NBC News. But he says he believes it more likely the contamination began in 1953, as previously estimated.
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Gulf War Illness May Be Due To Toxic Environments

Gulf War Syndrome, Other Illnesses Among Veterans May Be Due To Toxic Environments
Huffington Post
Lynne Peeples
February 7, 2013

In 1991, as part of Operation Desert Storm, former U.S. Army Spc. Candy Lovett arrived in Kuwait a healthy 29-year-old eager to serve her country. Two decades later, she's accumulated a stack of medical records over five feet high -- none of which relates to injuries inflicted by bullets or shrapnel.

"It's just been one thing after another," said the veteran, who now resides in Miami and whose ailments run the gamut from lung disease and sleep apnea to, most recently, terminal breast cancer. "At one point," she said, "I was on over 50 pills."

Former Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tim Wymore, who was deployed to Iraq in 2004, suffers from an array of health problems that mirror Lovett's. "Everyone has the same things," said Wymore, who has inexplicably shed 40 pounds in the last few months. "It's just weird."

Wymore and Lovett -- and countless others who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the desert region over the past three decades -- have struggled to understand this, but they share one nagging conviction: These ailments are tied to service in a war zone.

Their suspicions -- long rebuffed by insurance companies -- are now getting support from some doctors and environmental health researchers, who suspect that American soldiers are being unnecessarily exposed to heavily contaminated environments while serving overseas. Even when not engaged directly in combat, they say, servicemen and women -- typically without protective masks or other simple precautions -- live and work amid clouds of Middle Eastern dust laden with toxic metals, bacteria and viruses, and surrounded by plumes of smoke rising from burn pits, a common U.S. military practice of burning feces, plastic bottles and other solid waste in open pits, often with jet fuel.

Research published in December 2012 raises the possibility that in some instances, soldiers may have been exposed to airborne cocktails that included low levels of a deadly chemical warfare agent, the nerve gas sarin, which wafted hundreds of miles from U.S.-bombed Iraqi facilities.
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No record Marine Corps did testing on water at Camp Lejeune

No evidence Marine Corps conducted critical water test at Camp Lejeune
Tampa Bay Times
By William R. Levesque
Times Staff Writer
In Print: Monday, February 4, 2013

The Marine Corps has repeatedly argued federal law didn't regulate the cancer-causing pollutants that fouled the drinking water at Camp Lejeune until long after the contamination was discovered.

But the Corps' own regulations, starting in 1963, required water testing at the North Carolina base and other Marine bases using a method that some say could have provided a warning about tainted water, according to documents and interviews.

The method, called Carbon Chloroform Extract, or CCE, is a "technically practical procedure which will afford a large measure of protection against the presence of undetected toxic materials in finished drinking water," said the 1963 Manual of Naval Preventive Medicine, discussing requirements for all Navy and Marine bases.

The Marine Corps' regulations mandated such testing annually, or every two years if water quality was "stable."

But no record of CCE testing at Camp Lejeune can be found in the thousands of pages of documents detailing what some believe to be the worst drinking-water contamination in U.S. history.
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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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Chief Warrant Officer's worst enemy turned out to be burning garbage

Burn pit exposure cuts Poquoson soldier's career short
January 13, 2013
By Hugh Lessig
POQUOSON

Before he got sick, before the tremors, memory lapses and surgeries, Chief Warrant Officer Jeff Lamprecht guarded his buddies from an Apache attack helicopter, with Hellfire missiles at his fingertips.

The 40-year-old Poquoson native completed four combat deployments from 2003 to 2010: three to Iraq and one to Afghanistan.

He'd go back tomorrow if he could.

The narrow front seat of the lethal gunship was his second home, surrounded by laser range finders and target designators, a video monitor near his lap, a side-mounted helmet camera that offered a view similar to a two-way mirror.

That kind of multitasking and razor-sharp communication would be impossible today. Lamprecht can't feel much below his knees, and the simple act of standing up can make him dizzy.

"Sometimes my feet don't do what I want them to," he said. "I'll stammer my tongue. I know what I want to say, but my tongue just vapor-locks and I won't make the word."

He can't blame the Taliban or al-Qaida, and it wasn't battle stress or nerves.

His worst enemy turned out to be burning garbage.
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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

Six Marines served together at Camp Lejeune, only one is healthy now

Local Marines die, face health issues years after service at Camp Lejeune
Nov 15, 2012
Written by
Roger Weeder

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Section 7, Site 584 is where you will find Robin Yerdon's final resting place at Jacksonville's National Cemetery.

He's one of six Terry Parker High graduates who joined the Marines in 1977. Of the six, three are dead, two have serious health issues following their service at Camp Lejeune. Only one is healthy.

Kyle Yerdon said dad never talked much about Camp Lejeune.

"I'm just really devastated that it all happened, really. I don't understand how our government could ever think about covering that up," Kyle Yerdon said.

PART 1: First Coast vets speak out on impact of contaminated water at Camp Lejeune

Kyle and his brother no longer have a dad. Kyle said he is just learning details of the tainted ground water at Camp Lejeune that likely explains what happened.

A million gallons of aviation fuel that leaked with benzene, vinyl chloride and tetrcloroenthylene is causing health issues. Marines and their families who can prove they spent at least one month on base some time turning a 30-year span starting in 1957 are eligible for help.
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Oregon National Guardsmen win $85 million from KBR

This happened when Congress didn't give a damn and KBR made a lot of money. This is how National Guards Soldiers were treated but too many didn't care to pay attention.

Iraq War Contractor Ordered to Pay $85 Million
By NIGEL DUARA and STEVEN DUBOIS
Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore.
November 3, 2012
(AP)

A jury on Friday ordered an American military contractor to pay $85 million after finding it guilty of negligence for illnesses suffered by a dozen Oregon soldiers who guarded an oilfield water plant during the Iraq war.

After a three-week trial, the jury deliberated for just two days before reaching a decision against the contractor, Kellogg Brown and Root.

The suit was the first concerning soldiers' exposure to a toxin at a water plant in southern Iraq. The soldiers said they suffer from respiratory ailments after their exposure to sodium dichromate, and they fear that a carcinogen the toxin contains, hexavalent chromium, could cause cancer later in life.

Rocky Bixby, the soldier whose name appeared on the suit, said the verdict should reflect a punishment for the company's neglect of U.S. soldiers.

"This was about showing that they cannot get away with treating soldiers like that," Bixby said. "It should show them what they did was wrong, prove what they did was wrong and punish them for what they did."

Each soldier received $850,000 in noneconomic damages and $6.25 million in punitive damages.

Another suit from Oregon Guardsmen is on hold while the Portland trial plays out. There are also suits pending in Texas involving soldiers from Texas, Indiana and West Virginia.

KBR was found guilty of negligence but not a secondary claim of fraud.
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Oregon National Guardsmen still fighting for justice after Iraq

Oregon National Guardsmen still fighting for justice after Iraq

While they were sure they were willing to face the risks of combat in Iraq, they had no clue they had to fear something else happening to them by a company paid by their own country.

National Guardsmen’s suit accusing Iraq War contractor KBR of concealing toxic danger begins
By Associated Press
Published: October 10

PORTLAND, Ore. — A war contractor knew a critical southern Iraq oilfield plant was riddled with a well-known toxin but ignored the risk to soldiers while hurrying the project along, firing a whistleblower and covering up the presence of the chemical when faced with exposure, the soldiers’ attorney said in opening arguments Wednesday in a federal civil suit.

An attorney for the contractor, Kellogg, Brown and Root, fired back in his opening salvo of a trial expected to last weeks that the soldiers’ injuries weren’t a result of their exposure to the toxin, called sodium dichromate. Geoffrey L. Harrison argued that the company had no knowledge of the chemical’s presence at the plant and when they found it, they promptly and repeatedly warned the military of the danger.

A jury of six men and six women will decide whether the company is culpable for 12 Oregon National Guardsmen’s exposure to the toxin, a known carcinogen, and whether that exposure led to their ongoing respiratory illnesses. The soldiers will also try to show that the fear of future illnesses is causing them to suffer emotional distress.
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Iraq contractor seeks appeal from law suit