A Trust Betrayed (8 page)

In addition to Hadnot Point and New River, a third water system at Camp Lejeune, this one serving the Rifle Range area, also became a focus of concern in the spring of 1981. One part of the Rifle Range had been used as a chemical dump for years, and a groundwater sample taken near the dumpsite on March 30, 1981, showed high levels of “chlorinated organic materials,” according to a memo that
LANTDIV
sent to the commanding general at Camp
Lejeune on May 8, 1981. The memo pointed out, however, that a second round of tests in April had shown “greatly reduced levels of organic contaminants,” and it was unclear why there was such a big discrepancy. The
LANTDIV
engineering chief, J. R. Bailey, said more tests were planned, but there was no need to stop using the Rifle Range Water Treatment Plant. “Based on the low level of contaminants found relative to the total trihalomethane standard . . . it is not believed that there is an imminent threat to human health presented by consumption of water from the Rifle Range
WTP
and distribution system,” he wrote.
¹⁰

When Betz received the memo about potential contamination at the Rifle Range, she wrote her own memo saying that it appeared to her that the results were flawed, partly because “old acid bottles” had been used to collect the samples in March, and they may not have been properly cleaned. But the fact that
LANTDIV
sent the results at all was a sign that Navy engineers were beginning to worry about Camp Lejeune's water supplies, if only because state regulators were getting more involved.
¹¹

A 1982 memo written at
LANTDIV
and obtained later by congressional investigators said the Navy was aware that North Carolina had assumed responsibility for Safe Drinking Water Act enforcement in March 1980, “and therefore would have the right to sample and test the drinking water at Camp Lejeune for any contaminants regulated under the act.” The memo indicated that
LANTDIV
officials “were concerned that the state's testing might discover problems that the Navy had not previously identified.”
¹²

The threat of enforcement action from the state appeared to serve as an incentive for a full-scale environmental investigation at Camp Lejeune.
LANTDIV
made the base a part of the Navy Assessment and Control of Installation Pollutants (
NACIP
) program that had been launched by Navy headquarters in 1982 in the wake of the national scandal over Love Canal, the toxic waste dump uncovered
at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1978. The Pentagon thought it wise to check whether there were any ticking time bombs at its many installations around the country.

The
NACIP
process in the early 1980s required three steps: an initial assessment study, a confirmation study, and remedial measures. At Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps hired Grainger Laboratories, a state-certified environmental lab based in Raleigh, North Carolina, to conduct a
NACIP
study in 1982.
¹³

The effort was barely under way when Grainger engineer Mike Hargett called base chemist Elizabeth Betz on May 6, 1982, to report that in tests for
THM
s at both the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point water systems, “peaks” of the cleaning solvents
TCE
and
PCE
had been found. It was essentially a repeat of the findings by the Army lab eighteen months earlier.
¹⁴

Betz immediately notified her supervisor, Danny Sharpe, who sent the results “up the chain of command” to the base maintenance officer and the utilities director. About a week later, Betz was asked to brief Colonel Kenneth Millice and one of his assistants at base headquarters. But when she met with Millice and a lieutenant colonel on May 14, 1982, neither seemed to have been informed about the test results; Millice simply requested that Betz prepare a report for him to read later on the status of testing for
THM
s. “No mention was made of extra peaks [of the other contaminants,
TCE
and
PCE
] that Grainger found in the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point systems samples,” Betz wrote in a memo summarizing the meeting. Betz also noted that she didn't bring up the solvents issue because the meeting was focused on the contaminants that were being regulated.
¹⁵

On August 10, 1982, Bruce A. Babson of Grainger wrote the base commander that his lab was continuing to have problems with the tests for
THM
s. “Interferences which were thought to be chlorinated hydrocarbons hindered the quantification of certain
trihalomethanes,” Babson said. “These appeared to be at high levels and hence more important from a health standpoint than the total trihalomethane content. For these reasons we called the situation to the attention of Camp Lejeune personnel.”
¹⁶

Babson later said he remembered the report because he had been congratulated by his managers for making such an important discovery for a new client. Grainger's contract with Camp Lejeune had been a “prize,” and they wanted to be sure to obtain the most accurate results possible for the Marine Corps.
¹⁷

Shortly after Babson sent his report to Camp Lejeune, his colleague Mike Hargett was asked by Betz to come to the base and explain the problem to top officers. Hargett readily agreed because he considered the presence of solvents in the base water to be a serious concern. Betz took Hargett in to meet with a lieutenant colonel whose name he could not later recall, but he did remember the brush-off he received. Betz introduced Hargett as an expert on water systems in North Carolina and state regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act (which North Carolina began to implement in 1980); Betz said Hargett was there to discuss water-quality issues in residential areas of the base. “The lieutenant colonel responded that this was something he would have to look into and we were dismissed,” Hargett testified years later to a congressional committee. “The total time in the Lt. Col.'s office chair was less than five minutes.”
¹⁸

At the time the solvents were discovered, the Environmental Protection Agency did not have regulations setting limits for
TCE
and
PCE
in drinking water, but the
EPA
had issued warnings about both chemicals in 1979 in the form of guidance known as a Suggested No Adverse Reaction Level. A
SNARL
was not an enforceable standard, but only a scientific guess of the amount of contaminant that could be unsafe for humans to consume.

For
TCE
, the
SNARL
was 2,000 parts per billion (ppb) if water
containing that amount of the chemical was consumed for one day in normal amounts; it was 200 ppb if the water was consumed for ten days; and it was 75 ppb for long-term exposure to the water. For
PCE
, the
SNARL
was 2,300 ppb for one day of consumption, 175 ppb for ten days of use, and 20 ppb for long-term exposure.

By the end of the summer of 1982, the highest levels of solvents found in Camp Lejeune's water were 1,400 ppb of
TCE
in the Hadnot Point system and 104 ppb of
PCE
in the Tarawa Terrace system. But base chemist Betz said the average levels in eight different samples taken over the summer by Grainger Labs were 20 ppb of
TCE
at Hadnot Point, which was within all the
SNARL
limits for the chemical, and 90 ppb of
PCE
at Tarawa Terrace, which exceeded only the long-term
SNARL
.

Betz advised her bosses in an August 1982 memo that
PCE
, “in high doses, has been reported to produce liver and kidney damage and central nervous system disturbances in humans.” Still, neither Betz nor any other official at Camp Lejeune recommended shutting down wells that showed measurable levels of contamination. Betz suggested instead that the problem might be in the pipes—that is, that
PCE
could be coming from coatings inside the pipelines serving Tarawa Terrace. She also believed that since the levels of contamination varied so greatly from month to month, there must have been flaws in the sampling methods. However, Betz later said she was unaware at the time that wells were being rotated in the base water systems—with some turned off for days at a time to spread the pumping around the aquifer. If she had known that the readings were high only when certain wells were being used, it would have been possible to pinpoint the sources of contamination, she said.
¹⁹

For years after the water contamination was discovered, the Marine Corps insisted that there was no reason to shut down the water systems in 1981 or 1982 because none of them had violated
drinking-water regulations then on the books. “At the time, no environmental standards or regulations in regard to the use and disposal of
TCE
or
PCE
were in place,” Camp Lejeune's commander in 2007, Major General Robert Dickerson Jr., said at a congressional hearing. He noted that the first federal regulation for
TCE
went into effect in 1987, and the first limits on
PCE
took effect in 1991, both under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
²⁰

What Dickerson omitted from his testimony, though, was that the Navy had its own standards for drinking water that had been established in the early 1960s. These standards were largely ignored. Under rules written by the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, known as
BUMED
, all installations were advised that “drinking water shall not contain impurities in concentrations which may be hazardous to the health of the consumers.” More specifically, the regulations stated that “substances which may have deleterious physiological effect, or for which physiological effects are not known, shall not be introduced into the system in a manner which would permit them to reach the consumer.”
²¹

Navy regulations also required annual testing of water supplies using a method called Carbon Chloroform Extract (
CCE
), described in a Navy manual as a “technically practical procedure which will afford a large measure of protection against the presence of undetected toxic materials in finished drinking water.” The Marine Corps was asked by the
Tampa Bay Times
in 2013 to provide evidence that
CCE
testing was conducted regularly at Camp Lejeune, and no records were found. “A cursory review of the more than 8,000 documents that have been produced did not yield any
CCE
analytical results,” Marine Corps spokeswoman Captain Kendra Motz told the newspaper. “However, the absence of records fifty years later is not an indication that an action was or was not taken, only that no records are available.”
²²

When NBC News asked Motz about past
CCE
testing in 2013,
she said the method would not have been effective in finding solvents such as
TCE
and
PCE
, because those chemicals would have evaporated before the test was completed.
CCE
testing was mainly good for detecting pesticides or other contaminants that were not as volatile, she said.
²³

While the leadership at Camp Lejeune continued to ignore the warnings about solvents in the water through the rest of 1982, base chemist Elizabeth Betz and the consultants from Grainger Laboratories continued to be concerned. Betz wrote a “memorandum for the record” on September 8, 1982, recounting the results of sampling at the Rifle Range the previous spring. A dozen different contaminants—none of which were regulated yet under the Safe Drinking Water Act—had been detected over a three-month period, she noted, including
TCE
,
PCE
, methylene chloride, toluene, and benzene; the highest reading was 182 parts per billion of 1,1-Dichloroethylene (1,1-
DCE
), a toxic compound that forms as
TCE
breaks down.
²⁴

In December 1982, Grainger's Bruce Babson reminded the base commander that the ongoing testing for
THM
s continued to be disrupted by the presence of solvents. Out of forty water samples tested at Camp Lejeune, five contained
PCE
and five others contained both
PCE
and
TCE
, Babson's memo said.
²⁵

If those warnings weren't enough, there were many other signs of environmental problems at Camp Lejeune that, had they been noticed, might have kept the base commanders up at night:

     
•
    
In March 1977, SCS Engineers of Reston, Virginia, completed a study of oil pollution at the base that the Marine Corps had requested the year before. The survey found “problems associated with petroleum storage areas, maintenance facilities, grease racks, motor pool operations, parking lots, and other activities utilizing petroleum products,” according to a
brief description in a memo to base headquarters, but the Marine Corps has refused to release the full study.
²⁶

     
•
    
On September 22, 1977, the Environmental Protection Agency cited Camp Lejeune as “a major polluter” for violating permit standards at its seven sewage treatment plants and for making illegal discharges to storm drains. The commander of
LANTDIV
responded to the
EPA
by ordering the commanding general at the base to take several hundred corrective actions, with a goal of getting into compliance by July 1, 1981.
²⁷