A Trust Betrayed (18 page)

He also joined The Stand, volunteering to be on the group's board. “It's not just for the Byron family; it's for all these people,” he said. “We want to make sure they get help.”

Tom Townsend, now in Moscow, Idaho, learned about the water contamination from a veterans' newsletter, not a government health survey. Though he and his wife had lost their son, Christopher, less than four months after he was born at Camp Lejeune in 1967, the federal agency was studying health problems only among babies born at the base after 1968, when computer records became available. Townsend asked his wife, Anne, to contact the agency mentioned in the newsletter, the
ATSDR
, and soon afterward an official there told the retired Marine couple that their infant son would be included in the survey. “Some thirty-three years later we were learning that the death of our three-and-a-half-month-old son from a congenital heart defect was the result of in-vitro [sic] contamination from the drinking water at Camp Lejeune,” Anne Townsend wrote shortly after discovering what had happened. “Now there is a certain sense of relief in knowing that the cause of the loss of our son was not our fault. We were just in the wrong place, at the wrong time—and drank the water.”
⁷

Tom Townsend did not take the news so well. “My wife spent 30 years wondering if she did something wrong,” he told a newspaper
reporter based in Montana. “I love the Marine Corps, but I'm suing them for big money. I'm talking Philip Morris dollars.” Townsend proceeded to go after the Marine Corps with a vengeance, conducting a one-man investigation from his home in Idaho. He had been a logistics officer during his two decades as a Marine, so he knew something about how the military provided water on its installations. Townsend gathered enough information about mismanagement of the system at Camp Lejeune to put together a criminal complaint that he sent to the Department of Justice in Washington. Federal prosecutors told him they were actually looking into the case when along came September 11, 2001, and suddenly nearly all the department's resources were diverted to terrorism investigations. Townsend's complaint was handed off to the Environmental Protection Agency, and Justice Department attorneys transferred their files to
EPA
investigator Tyler Amon in North Carolina—with copies to Townsend. “All of a sudden out of the blue came a packet of information and I started piecing it together,” Townsend said years later. “It was like a cathedral where the windows were blown in and I needed to put the pieces of glass back together.” He learned how to use the federal Freedom of Information Act to request more documents and filed hundreds of requests—all handwritten on yellow legal pads—over the next few years.

Jerry Ensminger, now living not far from Lejeune in North Carolina, had also started digging for information about the contamination. His effort began as soon as he heard a TV report about the
ATSDR
study. The years since his daughter's death had been very difficult for Ensminger. He and his wife divorced, his small farm had put him deep in debt, and most of all, he was haunted by the mystery of his little girl being taken by a horrific disease. “When we did get divorced, right after Janey's death, I felt like I was going to come out of my skin,” Ensminger told
Daily
Beast
reporter Lloyd Grove in 2011. “I started going to some of these grief groups. One time I told my story about Janey and about the divorce, that I felt my world was falling apart, I felt like a freak and that something was wrong with me, and when the thing was over with, as I was walking out, the moderator pulled me over to the side and said, ‘Hey, Jerry, I want to show you something.' She pulled a book out. It was statistics of couples who lose a child through a long-term catastrophic illness, where you watch them go through the hell we watched Janey go through, watch them die a little bit at a time. And it was 87 percent of the couples ended up getting divorced. I said, ‘Wow.'”
⁸

When he found out about Lejeune's poisoned water, Ensminger never suspected anything sinister; he felt it had to be an innocent but awful mistake. “I wanted to believe the Marine Corps,” he said. “I felt they'd step up to the plate and do the right thing. But the more documents we discovered, the reality came to me that they were covering their ass.” Everyone in the Navy that Ensminger asked about the pollution downplayed its significance, he said. “They said the
ATSDR
was blowing it out of proportion, the chemicals were trace amounts—there's no way it could have caused my daughter's illness.” The more denials he heard, the more motivated Ensminger became to seek the truth. His experience as a drill instructor equipped him perfectly for the job: he was relentless, determined, and very forceful. “They created me,” Ensminger has said many times about the Marine Corps. “And now I've turned this weapon on them.”

Ensminger expanded his arsenal in 2002 by connecting with Jeff Byron through the
Watersurvivors.com
website and by contacting Tom Townsend after reading his comment online about suing the Marine Corps “for big money.” Townsend told Ensminger he had received a packet of documents from the government after filing a criminal complaint, so Ensminger headed to Idaho to meet with
Townsend. At his home in Moscow, Townsend pulled out a pile of Lejeune documents—and some disks that he hadn't even examined yet. When they popped the disks into Townsend's computer, Ensminger and Townsend realized they had struck gold. “This guy had sent Tom a master file of their document files,” Ensminger said. “It hadn't been scrubbed.” A full-bore investigation of the Marine Corps by a highly motivated group of former Marines was now under way.

The
ATSDR
survey that would be “virtually impossible” to complete, as Navy epidemiologist Jeffrey Hyman claimed in 1997, was in fact successfully completed in January 2002 after the agency and its contract employees had contacted the parents of 12,598 children who had been conceived or born at Camp Lejeune between 1968 and 1985. Of those who were reached, 10,040 agreed to participate—just under 80 percent of the total. The parents were all asked a number of questions about the health of their children, including whether they had birth defects or had developed childhood cancer.
ATSDR
investigators then set about trying to obtain medical records for those cases of serious illnesses identified by parents. By the summer of 2003, the survey findings were confirmed—and the results were stunning.

A total of 103 children with birth defects or childhood cancer were found among the 12,598 Lejeune babies surveyed, the
ATSDR
's chief of epidemiology, Wendy Kaye, announced on July 16, 2003. “These include anencephaly, spina bifida, cleft lip, cleft palate, childhood leukemia and childhood lymphoma,” she said in a news release. In other words, out of 12,598 babies born at Camp Lejeune when drinking water on the base was known to be contaminated, one out of every 122 had either a serious birth defect or a deadly form of cancer. Jerry Ensminger did his own calculations
using government statistics and found that for Lejeune babies, the rate of neural tube defects (spina bifida and anencephaly) was 265 times higher than the national average, and the childhood cancer rate was 15.7 times higher.
⁹

Asked at a congressional hearing in 2007 how many of those children might still be alive, decades after their horrific starts in life, the
ATSDR
's Frank Bove said it was hard to say. “The neural tube defects, including in particular anencephaly, they die pretty much right after birth, so those would definitely be dead,” he said. Bove's colleague at the
ATSDR
, Tom Sinks, focused on the bright side. “I was just going to add that most of the clefts—cleft palate, cleft lip—would not be fatal,” Sinks said. “We've had a tremendous success in treating childhood cancers over the past fifteen to twenty years, so I would think that a significant number of the kids with leukemia would have survived.”
¹⁰
Of course, that was no consolation to Jerry Ensminger, who was sitting just a few feet away when Sinks made his statement.

9

EPA
VS
. DOD

It is a World Trade Center in slow motion.

—
DAVID OZONOFF, EPIDEMIOLOGIST, BOSTON UNIVERSITY

W
hen the industrial cleaning solvent trichloroethylene was found in Camp Lejeune's water supply in 1980, toxicologists had a pretty good idea that
TCE
was a killer even if ingested at small doses. Government studies compiled that year in a handbook of toxic chemicals concluded that the widely used degreaser causes liver cancer, “attacks the heart, liver, kidneys, central nervous system and skin,” and can be especially damaging to developing fetuses and young children. The effects of
TCE
on children were dramatically illustrated in 1981 when the Massachusetts Department of Public Health published a report saying that in the industrial city of Woburn, where drinking water was laced with
TCE
in the 1960s and 1970s, “the incidence of childhood leukemia was significantly elevated,” with a dozen observed cases at that time in a community of only 35,000 people.
¹

A decade later, when the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry began investigating whether people had been harmed by chemicals in Camp Lejeune's water, even more was known about the dangers of
TCE
and its sister compound, the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene, or
PCE
. Studies in New Jersey, where thousands were exposed to drinking water contaminated with the chemicals in the 1970s and 1980s, found “a statistically significant association between the concentrations of
TCE
and
PCE
and the overall leukemia rate among females from 1979 to 1984 in 27 towns,” according to a report by the state Department of Public Health. And in Woburn, by 1986—the same year that W. R. Grace and Company reached an $8 million settlement with families whose children had died of leukemia or had experienced other serious illnesses linked to
TCE
-tainted water—twenty-one cases of childhood leukemia had been documented.
²

With mounting evidence of
TCE
's toxicity, in 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency set a federal limit for the chemical in drinking water at 5 parts per billion—the equivalent of five teaspoons of the solvent in an Olympic-size swimming pool. Almost immediately, the
EPA
began pursuing further research to determine if the regulation needed to be even more stringent. It took more than a decade of studies and evaluation, but in 2001 the health scientists at the agency issued a new assessment saying that there was enough evidence linking
TCE
to a range of illnesses to indicate that the limit for public exposure should indeed be ratcheted down. “Under
EPA
's proposed (1996) cancer guidelines,
TCE
can be characterized as ‘highly likely to produce cancer in humans,'” the report said. “
TCE
has the potential to induce neurotoxicity, immunotoxicity, developmental toxicity, liver toxicity, kidney toxicity, endocrine effects, and several forms of cancer.”
³

Bluntly translated, the assessment meant that thousands of cancer cases and birth defects could very likely be attributed to
TCE
exposure. “It is a World Trade Center in slow motion,” said David Ozonoff, an epidemiologist at Boston University who had studied the chemical's effects extensively.
⁴

The 2001 assessment, released in draft form to allow a period for public review and comment, did not suggest what the limit for drinking water should be—that would be a number for
EPA
scientists to determine later. But most informed observers of the process assumed the agency was headed toward a limit of just 1 part per billion for drinking water.