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By Lori Freshwater
Camp Lejeune is located in Onslow County on the coast of North Carolina. The county was named for Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of Commons in the British Parliament for over 30 years. Ironically, his family’s motto — Semper fidelis—was incorporated as the Marine Corps motto in 1883. The town of Jacksonville at the time was still only a barely populated outpost. The people worked curing tobacco, fishing, in lumber, and making turpentine by distilling resin from Longleaf pines.
Everything changed after December 15, 1940, when the government decided it was going to take 100,000 acres within Onslow County and turn it into a Marine Corps base. There were around 700 families who were forced from their homes and farms. Some of those pine forests are still dotted with the old barns, skeletal tractors, and other assorted ghost tracks from the days before the government claimed the land to build the military base that would be involved in most every conflict and war and mission that was still to come in our history.
It was not long after Camp Lejeune was built that the contamination started. And since that time, Camp Lejeune has taken its place in history as the site of the country’s most egregious water contamination case in the United States (thus far at least). More than four decades of Marines and their families were exposed to chemicals linked to multiple cancers including both childhood and adult leukemia, male and female breast cancer, immune system diseases, male and female infertility, miscarriages, birth defects (including neural tube defects), and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinons’s. Among the chemicals, TCE – a known human carcinogen also linked to immune dysregulation – was found in the water at levels of 783 parts per billion. For the sake of comparison, the maximum contaminant level of TCE today considered safe by federal regulators is 5 ppb.
If industry (as opposed to government) was responsible for poisoning hundreds of thousands of innocent Marines and civilians, there would have been massive criminal complaints against those industry stakeholders brought by the government. Yet for Camp Lejeune there have been zero criminal complaints filed for the contamination or for the government’s cover-up. At this moment, the civil cases filed are estimated to be around 500,000 and will most likely eclipse 3M and asbestos making it the largest civil water contamination disaster in U.S. history.
Although this contamination occurred on a Marine Corps base, the number of civilian women and children rivals the number of Marines who have been affected by the toxic water because they drank, bathed in, and cooked with water containing some of the highest levels of toxic chemicals ever seen. In 2017 the Veterans Administration listed eight specific illnesses as “presumptively service connected” due to the water contamination; this, in turn, gave veterans health care and expedited disability compensation. Despite this “benefit” costing Americans an estimated $2 billion annually, only a fraction of Marines who are suffering from illnesses caused by the water contamination are receiving benefits, and family members don’t even qualify.
Red Hill
Camp Lejeune is only one of this country’s tragic stories born from war and still causing devastating harm to our homeland and innocent American citizens.
Near Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, there are secretive underground fuel tanks known as the Red Hill Fuel Farm. Built by the U.S. military in 1943, these extraordinarily massive fuel tanks were built to power the Pacific fleet during the upcoming war. Soon thereafter, Pearl Harbor was attacked. “We had about 4.5 million barrels of oil out there and all of it was vulnerable to .50-caliber bullets. Had the Japanese destroyed the oil, it would have prolonged the war another two years,” said Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet.
Conceived in the early years of World War II as a plan to bury four fuel containers horizontally in a hillside at the U.S. Navy facility at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility ultimately encompassed the design and construction of 20 vertical storage tanks – each large enough to contain a 20-story building – buried in the volcanic hillside and connected by tunnels to a harbor-side pumping station more than two- and-a-half miles away.
This is an ongoing story and one that until recently was flying very much under the radar. It is being fought locally in Hawaii and is receiving some national media attention after families and service members became ill in 2021. However, the situation at Red Hill may very well get much worse before it gets better – this is the island’s sole water supply; if Honolulu’s one water supply on this island is destroyed, it would be catastrophic for Hawaii and for the U.S. Military.
The Red Hill tanks survived the second World War and then, it appears, they were forgotten. The tanks were left to slowly corrode, eventually causing irreparable harm to our military families and the people of Hawaii. The New York Times headline from December of 2021:
In the year since the news about Red Hill broke, the issue has been gravely mishandled: First, the decision to de-fuel the tanks at Red Hill was forced on the Navy and Department of Defense; and now, the defueling is currently delayed, which is causing more controversy. And as we have seen at Camp Lejeune, where there is delay, there is harm and suffering.
There have also been other major problems with base housing in Hawaii – few of these disputes have made it to the courts. One of the most important stories unfolding is how our military housing has been privatized – just as the powers-that-be are pushing for the VA to be privatized. One must stop and wonder … who is prioritizing the innocent victims?
Last year Reuters published an investigative series that was shocking to many who thought that America ‘supported our troops’ and their families when they are not deployed:
Ambushed at Home: The hazardous, squalid housing of American military families
At Red Hill, the government has really doubled down: first, the catastrophic failure of the fuel tanks, and then one of the first stories reported on military housing.
Fort McClellan
In all fairness, the U.S. Navy is not the only branch of the military responsible for poisoning its own. Fort McClellan is an Army base in Alabama with a history dating back to the Spanish-American War. The War Department formally established Camp McClellan on July 18, 1917, and re-designated it as Fort McClellan on July 1, 1929. The Army built a 3,000 person Prison Internment Camp for prisoners of war at Fort McClellan in 1943. While there, many prisoners painted murals of their homeland on the walls. Those German and Italian prisoners who perished while in captivity were buried at Fort McClellan.
After the war, Fort McClellan became the home of the Military Police Corps and the Chemical Corps, including a school that trained in chemical warfare and human experimentation. All of the toxic waste and damage from this chemical program continued until the base was closed in 1999.
Fort McClellan was also the home of the Women’s Army Corps. As in many cases, the women involved are the ones overlooked in Department of Defense contamination. The Women’s Army Corps (WAC) was located at McClellan and has a trove of stories about women who fought the brunt of sexism and racism in order to serve their country. On top of these and other struggles these women faced, we now know they were exposed to their toxic environment where they lived and worked.
Form the American Legion piece titled: The Long Shadow of Fort McClellan
Kathy Keefer had no idea that Fort McClellan was adjacent to one of the nation’s most contaminated communities when she returned for her second Army stint in 1987 while pregnant with her eldest daughter. She didn’t know that decades of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) pollution from the nearby Monsanto plant had permeated the tree bark in Anniston, Ala., and turned domestic pigs into hazardous waste. Or that the drinking water had been tainted by heavy metals, solvents and other hazardous waste from the Anniston Army Depot, Fort McClellan and other industrial sources.
She’s thought a lot about it in retrospect, given the strange health problems visited upon herself, her husband – also a Fort McClellan veteran – and her children, problems entirely at odds with their family medical histories.
“If I had known that Fort McClellan was a potential hazard for my unborn child, I would have found a way to stay off base and petitioned not to have gone at all,” Keefer says.
We also have the legacy of war affecting people who are not even connected to the military. When I first began working on military contamination, one of the first groups of mothers to reach out to me was from St. Louis where waste from processing uranium for the Manhattan Project – the U.S. government research project that produced the first atomic bombs – has poisoned their neighborhoods.
For the Spring 2016 issue of Earth Island Journal, I published a cover story on the situation.
This was a result of reporting on two groups of mothers who had begun to fight for their communities in St. Louis.
The story of how nuclear waste got into Coldwater Creek, a 20-mile tributary of the Missouri River that runs past the westernmost boundary of the site and flows along homes, parks, and schools in North St. Louis County, dates back nearly three-quarters of a century. In 1942, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a company based in downtown St. Louis, began secretly processing uranium for the Manhattan Project. The project was codenamed “Tube Alloy Process” which sanitized the effort. Even after the war ended in 1945 – following the US dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Mallinckrodt continued to process tens of thousands of tons of uranium for the US military through the early years of the Cold War. From 1942 to 1957, the company was the only source of processed uranium in the entire country. During this time, Mallinckrodt processed about 50,000 tons of uranium at various locations in and around St. Louis.
Ironically, the company now manufactures pharmaceuticals, including the opioids that many innocent victims who have been diagnosed with cancer have become tragically addicted to after years of treatment and intense suffering.
Processing the radioactive element produced enormous amounts of nuclear waste, some of which was more radioactive than the processed uranium itself. As early on as 1946, Mallinckrodt began running out of space to store this waste at its facilities. The company began shipping the waste offsite to a 22-acre field acquired by the Manhattan Project, in a sparsely populated area north of St. Louis City, near the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. From 1946 to 1962, before there were any federal laws regulating disposal of hazardous waste, an estimated 133,007 tons of radioactive waste was carelessly dumped at this site. Although it’s hard to fathom, some of the uranium waste was buried, some was stored in barrels that soon rusted, and the rest was simply left in piles, open to the elements.
Over the years, wind erosion, stormwater runoff, groundwater discharge, and flooding carried unknown volumes of this extremely hazardous waste into Coldwater Creek. And the rest is history.
Pease AFB
In the 1930’s, Pease Air Force Base began as the Portsmouth Municipal Airport in New Hampshire. In the build-up to WWII the airport was closed to civilian traffic and in 1942 it began to be used for defense purposes. The Air Force eventually took over the airport in 1951.
In 1991 Pease became a Superfund site with 41 hazardous waste sites identified. It has now been developed as the Pease Tradeport. “A former Strategic Air Command base, Pease International Tradeport now is a business park encompassing 3,000 acres with light industrial industry and office zoning. The site include Pease International Airport.”
According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR):
Approximately 8,000 people work at or frequent the Pease International Tradeport. There are also two daycare centers located on the site. In May 2014, drinking water wells that supply the Pease International Tradeport were sampled. The Haven Well, one of three wells that serves the Pease International Tradeport, and the New Hampshire Air National Guard base at Pease, showed elevated levels of the unregulated contaminant perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS). How long PFOS may have been present in this well is not clear. The well has been taken off line. The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services asked the ATSDR to help evaluate possible follow-up actions.
Fort Ord
Located in Steinbeck country, Monterey, California, Fort Ord is one of the most beautiful and complex ecosystems on the Pacific Coast. But the Sea of Cortez met war games around 1917 and the result is one of the nation’s Department of Defense superfund sites. The 27,827-acre site was established in 1917 by the Army as a field artillery range. “Prior to closing in September 1994, the base’s primary mission was training infantry military personnel. EPA placed the site on the Superfund program National Priorities List (NPL) in 1990. The site contained leaking petroleum underground storage tanks, a 150-acre landfill used to dispose of residential waste and small amounts of commercial waste generated by the base, a former fire drill area, motor pool maintenance areas, small dumpsites, small arms target ranges, an 8,000-acre firing range and other limited areas that pose threats from unexploded ordnance”
However, now the land is being allowed to return to what it was before we commandeered it for war.
This may be the best way to see the hope in all of these tragic actions. If we clean all of this land and return it back to nature, ecosystems will rebuild. But first, through activism in and out of the court system, we must force our own Department of Defense to stop poisoning our water on and off our military bases. The tidal wave of PFAS cases caused by firefighting foam used for training and other purposes by the military is still coming into focus. The damage is currently impossible to measure. And it happened after the Department of Defense knew these chemicals were a danger to water supplies and public health. We must force the military to take a broader view of national security which includes protecting the health of our environment and citizens here at home.
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