A Trust Betrayed (11 page)

By now, all the top officials at Camp Lejeune knew they had a very serious problem that required immediate action. The results of tests conducted on all wells at the base rolled in during February and March, and a dozen wells had to be removed from service owing to the presence of volatile organic compounds: one in the Rifle Range system; one in the New River system serving the air station; two at Tarawa Terrace primarily containing
PCE
, the solvent that had leaked from ABC Cleaners; and eight in the Hadnot Point system containing benzene,
TCE
, and other
VOC
s.
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As expected, the well closures posed a difficult supply problem for the base managers. The loss of two wells at Tarawa Terrace, which had about 6,000 residents at the time, meant they would be
short about 300,000 gallons per day during the spring and summer months when water was in highest demand, according to a March 1, 1985, memo by the assistant chief of staff for facilities at Camp Lejeune, Colonel M. G. Lilley. Lilley outlined seven different options for replacing the water, including having it hauled in by tanker trucks at a cost of about $2,000 a day or building a new well at Tarawa Terrace for about $80,000. Lilley also noted that the two contaminated wells could be turned on when needed “to maintain adequate water levels” at no cost to the base, but he warned that “the potential health hazards must be weighed against the need and cost of providing water from other sources.”
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It was ultimately decided that an auxiliary line would be built connecting the Holcomb Boulevard system to the Tarawa Terrace area. The line was to be completed by June 1985.

Meanwhile, Lilley began preparing a defense for not taking action years earlier when tests showed the presence of solvents in the water at Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace. Julian Wooten, the longtime environmental manager at Camp Lejeune who was demoted when engineer Bob Alexander arrived in the early 1980s, was assigned to write what was later described by critics of the base management as a “cover your ass” memo in March 1985. Wooten was told to contact Paul Hubbell, a top civilian official at Marine Corps headquarters, to gather information about standards existing in other places around the country for volatile organic chemicals in drinking water. “Mr. Hubbell expressed surprise at the lack of information,” Wooten wrote in his March 11, 1985, memo. The intended implication was that Camp Lejeune did not appear to be violating any regulations even if it had measurable levels of
VOC
s in its drinking water.
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A more telling sign that the Marine Corps was worried about its culpability for allowing contaminated wells to be used for years is that test results from numerous updates to the
NACIP
confirmation
study of 1984 have been kept under wraps for decades. That study, conducted by Environmental Science and Engineering, Inc., “to determine existence and possible migration of specific chemicals” at Camp Lejeune, was required to be updated on a monthly basis before the final report was issued in January 1985.
The Globe
, the newspaper on the base, had reported in June 1984 that as the report was being conducted that year, if any contaminants were discovered in the base water supply, “a review of alternatives will determine action necessary to meet health and environmental standards.” Presumably, the contractor was sampling all the wells at Hadnot Point during this time and reporting the results to Lejeune officials. But when the progress reports for 1984 were requested years later under the Freedom of Information Act, the Marine Corps said they had been destroyed in a 1999 warehouse fire for which the cause was never determined. As a result, test results from wells conducted in August, September, October, and November of 1984—just months before eight wells in Hadnot Point were shut down—have never been made public.
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Residents at Camp Lejeune—or at Tarawa Terrace, to be precise—were finally told about the water contamination on April 30, 1985, in a “Notice to Residents of Tarawa Terrace” from the base commander, Major General L. H. Buehl. The notice was later described by veteran congressional investigator Dick Frandsen as “one of the most outrageous things” about the military's handling of the base's water problems. “Two of the wells that supply Tarawa Terrace have had to be taken off line because minute (trace) amounts of several organic chemicals have been detected in the water,” the commanding general said in the signed notice. “There are no definitive State or Federal regulations regarding a safe level of these compounds, but as a precaution, I have ordered the closure of these wells for all but emergency situations when fire protection or domestic supply would be threatened.” The notice went
on to encourage Tarawa Terrace residents to do all they could to reduce water usage during the upcoming warm months, such as flushing the toilet “only for sanitation purposes” and taking shorter showers. Car-washing on the base was banned, and lawn-watering was limited to a few hours on weekday mornings.
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The general's notice was misleading and deceptive in several ways. The description of the contamination as “minute” and “trace” did not match the reality of
PCE
levels above 100 parts per billion found in the two Tarawa Terrace wells, not to mention the fact that levels of
TCE
above 1,000 ppb had been discovered in other base water systems that were undoubtedly used at times by residents of Tarawa Terrace. The omission of the word “volatile” with “organic chemicals” also made the pollutants seem less hazardous than they were; if they had been accurately defined as “volatile organic compounds,” many more residents probably would have been concerned about what was in their water. And the statement that the wells would be closed “for all but emergency situations when fire protection or domestic supply would be threatened” left open the possibility that contaminated wells would be brought back online if water demands could not be met.

Ten days after the notice went out, the
Jacksonville Daily News
reported about the chemicals in the base wells. Gunnery Sergeant John Simmons of the public affairs department at Camp Lejeune was quoted as saying that “no state or federal regulations mandate an unacceptable level of these organic chemicals in drinking water.”
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The following day, May 11, 1985, the
Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star
also reported on the water problems at Camp Lejeune. The newspaper quoted Chuck Rundgren of the state's water supply branch as saying he did not think base residents needed to worry about bad water. “I think we kind of caught it right at the beginning,” he said.
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Just as Camp Lejeune was shutting down its poisonous wells, Jeff and Mary Byron—still living in Tarawa Terrace—had their second child. Rachel was born on April 27, 1985. Her newborn profile at Onslow Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville listed no abnormalities, but when the Byrons took her to the base hospital for her first checkup, there were numerous concerns.

The Navy physicians reported that Rachel Byron was slow to gain weight and had a heart murmur, a double ear infection, an umbilical hernia, brachial dimples, ears rotated toward the back of her head, a large hemangioma (raised birthmark) on her lower back, and an atrial septal defect in her heart, Jeff Byron recounted in testimony to a congressional committee in 2007. “She was labeled a ‘failure to thrive' baby,” Byron said.

But the worst was yet to come for the Byrons. Jeff's stint in the Marine Corps ended in June 1985, and the family returned to Ohio, where Jeff and Mary had grown up. Six months after they arrived back in the Cincinnati area, their oldest daughter, Andrea, who was three years old, was diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease, aplastic anemia. Initially it was believed that she would require a marrow transplant, but fortunately the disease went into remission before that was required. However, Andrea spent the next nine years of her young life undergoing treatment at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, including painful bone marrow testing and regular blood and platelet transfusions.

Early in Andrea's treatment, the head of the hematology department at the Cincinnati hospital asked the Byrons if their daughter had been exposed to any toxic chemicals. “Our answer? None,” Jeff Byron said. “They asked us for all of the names of cleaning and hygiene products that we were using. All of the products were ruled out.” Byron had read the “Notice to Residents of Tarawa Terrace” that the commanding general had distributed in
April 1985, but at the time he never connected any illnesses in his family to the “trace amounts” of “organic chemicals” found in the base housing's drinking water. Looking back, Byron was more disturbed by something else in the general's notice: his advice that they store water in the refrigerator for drinking. “So they want me to store poisoned water for my children to drink,” he told the congressional panel in 2007. “But they don't spell out that—No. 1, it says that these are—they found minute trace amounts of several organic chemicals. 1,580 parts per billion is not minute or trace.”
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Jerry Ensminger's daughter Janey turned nine years old on July 30, 1985, exactly two months after Major General Buehl sent his notice about the wells being shut down. Janey's leukemia had gone into remission for more than a year after it was discovered in 1983, but her father received some crippling news when he asked the Marine Corps in 1985 for a transfer to a Reserve unit in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, so that Janey could undergo treatment at the Penn State University Medical Center, closer to his family. One of the doctors who evaluated Ensminger's request wrote a letter saying that Janey's white blood count was over 150,000, “which put her in a high-risk category and limited the ability or the chances that she would have long-term survival,” Ensminger said. “I lived that nightmare every day from the time I saw that letter. Every day that entered my mind.”

Ensminger later transferred his daughter to the Duke Children's Hospital and Health Center in Durham, North Carolina, which specializes in pediatric cancer treatment. During a visit in September 1985, one of the doctors said that Janey had relapsed. “And that was the beginning of the end,” Ensminger said.

“Janey was a lot like me,” Ensminger told a writer for the
Daily Beast
, Lloyd Grove, for a story in 2011. “She's very forward. She asserts herself. Very alert, very aware of her surroundings. She wanted to know everything and she wanted her voice in everything.”

The doctors suggested another round of chemotherapy for Janey, but they warned that it would be painful, with lots of sores and ulcers. “I said no, I don't want that,” Ensminger told Grove. “Janey was laying over there in the bed, and she said, ‘Hey, you're talking about me, and I want a say in this. If there's a chance I can live, I want to do it.' I told the doctors, ‘You heard her.' They did it, and oh my God, I still have her purse and all the stuff she had in her room. She had little examining lights—these flashlights that doctors use—and a little compact in her purse with a mirror. And she was obsessed with these sores, and she would constantly shine that thing in her mouth.”

Grove told Ensminger that he thought it was incredible that his daughter could face such a terrifying illness and the excruciating treatments with such courage and practicality. “With any kid that has cancer and who's been in treatment for a long time,” Ensminger responded, “if you weren't sitting there looking at that child and knowing that they were a child, you would think you were talking to an adult. They're all that way.”
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Janey's final days were horrific, Ensminger said in testimony before Congress in 2007. “Every time she got stuck with a needle, I was there holding her,” he said. “She was screaming in my ear. Every time they stuck a needle through her bone in her hip to pull out bone marrow, I held her and she screamed in my ear, ‘Daddy, Daddy, don't let them hurt me.' And the only thing that I could say to her was, ‘Honey, the only reason they're hurting you is they're trying to help you.'”

In a later interview, Ensminger said he marveled at his daughter's strength in the face of death. “Janey told me she didn't want to die,” he said. “She wanted to live so she could make a difference in this world.” She even had a sense that her presence would be felt after she was gone. A few days before she died, Janey told her father, “Every time you see a rainbow, Daddy, it'll be me.”

Janey died on September 24, 1985. “And then on the day of her death, I started crying,” Ensminger told members of Congress. “I hadn't cried in front of Janey before that time because she was pulling her strength from me. And I had to be strong for her. If I had to cry, I went somewhere else. But that day I started crying, and she looked up at me, and she had pneumonia that bad she could hardly talk, but she said, ‘Stop it.' And I said, ‘Stop what?' She said, ‘Stop crying, Daddy. I love you.' That was the last words my daughter said to me. She went into a coma. Thirty-five minutes later, she took her last breath.”
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