A Trust Betrayed by Mike Magner Read Free Book Online Page A

LANTDIV , which was overseeing NACIP at Camp Lejeune. 4
    A notice about the study was placed in a base newspaper, The Globe , in June 1984 so that residents would be prepared for workers in spacesuits digging around various sites at Camp Lejeune. The crews would be wearing protective gear, but “we do not expect to expose anyone to any contaminants,” advised Colonel M. G. Lilley, assistant chief of staff for facilities, in the article. 5
    In the meantime, Shiver of the state environmental department started snooping around on his own for possible sources ofgroundwater pollution. He noticed that within a short distance of one of the Tarawa Terrace wells that had tested positive for solvents, there were three cleaning establishments and a gas station that would have storage tanks for chemicals and fuel. It didn’t take long to identify the worst operation of the bunch. ABC One-Hour Cleaners, a thirty-year-old dry-cleaning service at 2127 Lejeune Boulevard, was directly across the highway from Tarawa Terrace. Shiver went to the service and asked the workers to show him around. “I observed solvent leaking from a big tank or its piping system and draining across a cement floor to a sump,” Shiver said in an interview with federal investigators in 2004. “The sump pumped the liquids to a septic field. I realized that ABC Cleaners was the probable source of contamination at Tarawa Terrace.” His suspicions were confirmed after three test wells were drilled and sampling showed that a plume of solvents in the groundwater, including tetrachloroethylene (or perchloroethylene, PCE ), was migrating directly toward the housing area on the other side of the highway. 6
    At this point, some in the Marine Corps leadership thought all the water problems at Camp Lejeune had suddenly been solved. A commercial polluter was responsible for contamination moving into the base wells and would be forced to clean up the mess at its own expense. It didn’t take long for that bubble to burst.
    On November 30, 1984, the environmental staff at Camp Lejeune received an urgent call from the Navy engineers at LANTDIV . A test on a drinking-water well very close to the Hadnot Point fuel farm showed the presence of benzene and several solvents. The levels found included 121 parts per billion for benzene, an astounding 1,600 ppb for trichloroethylene ( TCE ), 630 ppb for trans-1,2-dichloroethylene (or trans-1,2- DCE , a solvent contained in many products, including waxes and resins), and 24 ppb for 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane (1,1,2,2- T e CA , mostly found in oils andlubricants). The well was immediately shut down. But this time the problem could not be blamed on ABC Cleaners. Not only was the well far from the cleaning service, the benzene was a telltale sign of fuel in the water, not cleaning solvents.
    Less than a week later, on December 6, 1984, LANTDIV provided test results on samples from seven other wells serving the Hadnot Point water system. One showed benzene at 720 ppb and both TCE and trans-1,2- DCE at levels above 300 ppb; another well had TCE at 230 ppb. Both of those wells were shut down. The other five wells had only small traces of solvents, including levels of methylene chloride, also known as dichloroethane ( DCE ), that were determined to be the result of laboratory contamination. But the findings at Hadnot Point were alarming enough for LANTDIV engineers and the base environmental staff to decide to have every water well at Camp Lejeune tested for volatile organic compounds, or VOC s, starting in January 1985. 7
    Those tests were barely under way one day in late January when the wife of Camp Lejeune’s chief of staff smelled fuel in her water at the officers’ housing on Paradise Point. The area was served by the Holcomb Boulevard water system, which also pumped water to housing areas at Berkeley Manor, Watkins Village, Hospital Point, Midway Park, and Stone Street. When maintenance workers checked the