A Trust Betrayed by Mike Magner Read Free Book Online

couldn’t hold off any longer, Ensminger said. “Your daughter has leukemia,” the doctor told him.
    â€œI went to my knees right there on the tile floor and my forehead hit the tile,” Ensminger said. “I started to sweat and shake. I was going into shock. The doctor got me up and I said, ‘I’ve got to get hold of myself.’ Janey was there with a female corpsman and I needed to go to her.”
    Janey’s blood platelet count was very low. The hospital had to have a supply flown in so the girl could make it through the night. The next day, Jerry and his wife arranged to have their daughtertransferred to the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, one of the military’s top medical facilities.

    When the first state regulations for groundwater quality in North Carolina took effect in 1983, Rick Shiver of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources was charged with overseeing their implementation in Onslow County and other parts of the coastal region. Shiver had actually lived at Camp Lejeune as a boy from 1954 to 1963 while his father was stationed there, and he had made many visits back since joining the state agency in 1973, having been assigned to Onslow County in 1978. So he was well aware of the base’s operations and the fact that for decades a variety of hazardous materials had been dumped at numerous locations around the 220-square-mile installation. Julian Wooten and Danny Sharpe, the two environmental supervisors on the base in the 1970s, had even taken Shiver on a tour of many of these disposal sites in the mid-1970s.
    It wasn’t until July 1984, though, that Camp Lejeune’s recently hired environmental engineer, Bob Alexander, showed Shiver the results of the 1980 and 1981 tests for trihalomethanes that indicated the presence of solvents in samples from the Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace water systems. Shiver was surprised that base officials hadn’t done anything since to try to pinpoint the source of the contaminants. The large water systems on the base were served by as many as thirty wells, and if a test for the entire system showed contamination, it was likely the amount was diluted by water from clean wells. “I would have tested the wells individually,” Shiver said. 3
    Bert Mundt, a water plant operator at Camp Lejeune from 1973 to 2004, didn’t find out about the tests until years later, but he was convinced that base officials knew some of the water containedpotentially harmful levels of toxic chemicals in the early 1980s. “They were perfectly aware,” Mundt said in an interview. “They were just hoping it was diluted enough that it wouldn’t be a problem.” Base commanders didn’t want to know if individual wells were contaminated, Mundt said, as the general foreman, W. R. Price, had written in 1983 that any shutdowns would have made it very difficult to meet summer demands for water.
    The top managers at Camp Lejeune also felt justified in not spending money to test each of the dozens of wells on the base because they believed that any problems would be found and addressed in the Navy’s environmental assessment and cleanup program, NACIP . After the initial assessment study, completed in 1982, which had identified more than seventy dumping sites on the base and recommended further assessment, the second phase, a verification study, was started in May 1984 by another Florida consulting firm, Environmental Science and Engineering, Inc., “to determine existence and possible migration of specific chemicals” at twenty-two locations at Camp Lejeune. “The objective of the verification step is to determine whether specific toxic and hazardous materials identified in the Initial Assessment Study, and possibly other contaminants, are present in concentrations considered to be hazardous,” according to the “work and safety plan” prepared for the consultants by