Family links tainted water at
Camp Lejeune to children's illness
By Sandra Jontz, Washington
bureau
Raymond T. Conway / Stars and Stripes
The Rose family, clockwise from left, Dahlia, Nathan, Hilda, Jeff and Daniel, play a game
of cards before dinner at their Vilseck, Germany, home. Nathan and Daniel have health
problems that the family thinks are related to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, N.C. |
When Hilda Rose left Camp Lejeune 15 years ago, she carried with her a legacy of her
stay: two small, sick sons and a load of guilt.
Rose could not stop blaming herself for the children’s birth defects and resulting
complications. Doctors told her the conditions were hereditary, but neither she nor her
husband, Sgt. Jeff Rose, could find any evidence in their respective family trees to
support the diagnosis.
Last year, Rose, now a 39-year-old mother of three living in Vilseck, Germany, found
out shocking news.
The water she drank, cooked with and bathed in throughout both the pregnancies at Camp
Lejeune was contaminated with chemicals that are known to interfere with normal fetal
growth.
Rose’s oldest son, Daniel, was born six weeks prematurely, afflicted with a heart
murmur, and now is developing a stomach ulcer at age 16. His brother, Nathan, was born two
weeks prematurely with a debilitating kidney problem he will have for the rest of his
life. Both children were conceived and delivered at Camp Lejeune.
Their sister, conceived and born in Florida, is perfectly healthy.
Marine Corps officials told Rose that there was no scientific evidence linking birth
defects or childhood illnesses to the contaminated water discovered 18 years ago at Camp
Lejeune.
But Rose believed that she finally had an answer to the question that had plagued her
for almost two decades: Why my kids?
Volatile chemicals
It was May 1982 when scientists doing routine testing first found traces of the
degreaser tricholoroethylene, or TCE, and the dry-cleaning solvent tetrachloroethylene, or
PCE, in the drinking water at the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point housing units at Camp
Lejeune.
The amounts of the two chemicals was small, well within the safety margins dictated by
the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines, said Fred Cone, deputy assistant
chief of staff for facilities at Camp Lejeune.
Scientists were concerned enough to perform repeated tests of the water, but the
results were inconsistent.
“They could go for months and not get anything, and then get a spike,” Cone
said, using the term for intermittent readings of elevated levels of chemicals.
At first, lab technicians thought the spikes in the water samples were caused by paint
that coated the inside of the water lines. But when the technicians took samples of water
from the base water processing plant, no such contamination showed up.
No one ever considered the chemicals might be leaching into the system from ground
water, Cone said.
“Today, we know about ground water contaminants, how they flow, how they get in
the system,” Cone said. “Twenty years ago, this [concept] was new to us.”
Further tests for chemical contamination continued to be inconclusive. And during the
1980s, Camp Lejeune residents continued to drink, bathe and cook in base water.
Including a pregnant Hilda Rose.
New parents
Hilda and Jeff Rose met in the early 1980s in Jerusalem, where the young sergeant was
assigned to embassy duty.
Over the objection of Hilda’s Palestinian parents, the couple married in January
1984. That same month, they moved to Tarawa Terrace, where Hilda soon became pregnant.
Six weeks before her due date, Hilda went into labor. Because the base hospital was
ill-equipped to care for premature babies, Hilda was rushed to a Navy hospital in
Portsmouth, Va., where Daniel was born. The elated parents counted 10 fingers and 10 toes.
But doctors soon discovered the newborn had a heart valve defect.
The condition is usually genetic, but neither Hilda’s nor Jeff’s families had
a history of heart problems. For the first year of his life, Daniel took digoxin, an
anti-arrhythmic medication, to prevent his heart from skipping beats.
Leak discovered
In January 1985, as Daniel was taking his first steps and babbling his first words,
Camp Lejeune officials tested all eight of the base’s water treatment facilities and
all 100 of its wells.
This time, they found chemical contamination in the two wells that serviced Tarawa
Terrace, the enlisted quarters where the Rose family lived, and another two contaminated
wells serving the officer’s quarters of Hadnot Point.
The chemical levels exceeded federal guidelines. Base officials immediately shut down
the four wells, Cone said.
Then, on Feb. 8, 1985, nearly three years from the initial discovery of chemicals in
some of the base’s potable water sources, base officials sealed off 12 more wells
they said were chemically contaminated after repeated tests yielded similar results.
In March 1985, Hilda became pregnant again. Two months before the new baby was due, she
and Jeff left for Camp Pendleton, Calif., where Nathan was born two weeks premature.
While Daniel’s health issues at birth were relatively mild, the Roses’
youngest son had an urgent problem: holes in his kidneys that caused urine to build up to
potentially toxic levels in his tiny body — a condition called urinary reflux.
Surgery closed the holes, but Nathan suffered countless infections during the first year
of his life, Hilda Rose said.
Once again, doctors told the Roses their son’s birth defect was genetic. And once
again, the couple searched their respective family trees, only to turn up no evidence of
malformed kidneys.
A leak source found
In May 1987, following an investigation, the North Carolina Solid and Hazardous Waste
Management Branch determined a leak from a private dry cleaner business near the base was
the culprit behind the chemical contamination of some of the base’s water sources.
The North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development ordered
ABC Cleaners to “cease and desist” from dumping solvents in septic tank systems.
Then the clean-up process began, run by the Environmental Protection Agency and funded
in part by the federal government through the SuperFund clean-up program.
Scientists are using the “pump and treat” method, in which ground water is
pumped to the surface, treated for chemicals and returned to the aquifer.
It could take as long as 30 years to fully clean contamination from the chemical leak,
said Carl Terry, EPA spokesman for Region 4 in Atlanta.
Although ABC Cleaners was not fined or punished when the leak was first traced back to
the business, the EPA is negotiating with the company to recover past and future clean-up
costs, Terry said.
The Marine Corps has spent about $90 million since 1992 on remediation of all
contaminated sites, and anticipates spending another $147 million over the next two
decades, environmental engineer Rick Raines said.
The efforts have included turning off the wells, closing the treatment plant at Tarawa
Terrace and building an auxiliary supply line from another plant, and helping the North
Carolina environmental regulators determine the source of the contamination, said Capt.
Alan Crouch, Marine Corps spokesman at Camp Lejeune.
The eight water treatment facilities have been consolidated to five at Camp Lejeune,
and the water is tested routinely for compliance with federal and North Carolina safety
standards.
In fact, they exceed guidelines, said Cone, the Camp Lejeune engineer. The state
requires water to be tested for volatile chemicals every three years. Scientists at Camp
Lejeune test treated water every month. Wells are tested annually, except for those within
1,500 feet of a known contaminated site, which are tested every six months, he said.
“And it’s clean,” Cone said of the tested water.
ABC Cleaners isn’t the only source of water pollution. Cone and Raines said many
of the contaminants date back to the 1940s and ‘50s — from auto body and
maintenance shops, underground storage of petroleum, solid waste, gas stations and
underground housing heating tanks, to name a few. Much of the pollution happened before
anyone knew better, before state and federal regulations put a stop to the practice of
arbitrary dumping.
The mystery of Camp Lejeune’s polluted water had been solved and the problem was
being tackled.
And the Roses are doing some tackling of their own.
‘I’ve cried so many tears’
Hilda Rose is now director of the Vilseck School-Aged Services Facility, a program to
care for children before and after school. Her husband, who left the Marines in 1987,
works as a free-lance writer in Germany.
Daniel is 16. He has been diagnosed with a mild form of attention deficit disorder
— an inability to sustain focus on a required task — and he recently learned he
is developing an ulcer.
Nathan is 15. Only 40 percent of his right kidney works; his left kidney is smaller
than normal.
“I take medication so they won’t fail on me,” Nathan said.
To ward off kidney infections and other complications, Nathan follows a complex regime
that includes downing medications, vitamins and iron supplements two to three times a day.
He visits a doctor every six months for a check-up. At some point, it’s likely he
will need a kidney transplant.
“I’ve cried so many tears,” Hilda said. “I watched as doctors
picked at Nathan and put tubes in him as a baby. It was very, very hard for a mother to go
through that, seeing them treating a little baby like that and him looking at me with eyes
saying, ‘Mommy, what’s going on?’ and I couldn’t explain it to him.
“And now, I see him taking all this medication and I wonder what’s the
long-term damage.”
Dahlia is the Roses’ 13-year-old daughter. She was conceived and born in Florida
in 1988, after the family moved to Eustis so Hilda could accept a job with the public
school system there.
Dahlia arrived perfectly healthy and right on time. No birth complications. No birth
defects. No major illnesses then — or since.
Looking for answers
In November 1999, the Marine Corps sent out a mass media call to find former base
residents who conceived or bore children between 1968 and 1985 to participate in a survey
sponsored by the federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry in North
Carolina.
The agency had been performing a series of studies on the health effects of
dry-cleaning chemicals, including PCE and TCE, the chemicals found in the water at Camp
Lejeune in the 1980s. Some of the studies, based on contamination levels in which traces
of the PCE and TCE were 142 to 285 times higher than levels detected at Camp Lejeune,
showed that adults experienced headache, dizziness, nausea, vomiting and intoxication.
Other studies showed that exposure to the dry cleaning chemicals can harm unborn
children, said Dr. Wendy Kaye, chief of epidemiology at the federal Agency for Toxic
Substance and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, in North Carolina.
“There have been several studies that have looked at the health effects of these
two chemicals on unborn children and have been linked to specific birth defects and
childhood cancers such as leukemia,” Kaye said during a November news conference at
the Pentagon.
Adverse effects of fetal exposure to dry-cleaning chemicals include heart
malformations, neural tube defects, oral clefts, low birthweight and increased chance of
death, according to a 1997 ATSDR report.
In 1997, the agency performed a dry cleaning chemical contamination study that
pinpointed Camp Lejeune residents. Researchers identified 6,000 infants whose mothers
lived in Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point during the 17-year period of contamination.
The male children of mothers who lived in Hadnot Point exhibited “statistically
significant” low birth weight, the report states. No differences were noted in most
mothers who lived in Tarawa Terrace.
The report notes that, by some scientific standards, Camp Lejeune residents were not
exposed to very high levels of TCE or PCE.
“Because the concentrations of TCE detected in the drinking water at [Marine Corps
Base] Camp Lejeune are so much lower (100 to 10,000 times lower) than the levels causing
the previously mentioned effects, it is unlikely that adults would have developed
noncancerous adverse health effects,” the report says.
Nevertheless, ATSDR decided it needed to look more closely at the effects of Camp
Lejeune’s water contamination. The agency especially wanted to perform additional
studies on the effects on children, in cooperation with the Marine Corps and Camp Lejeune
officials.
Using base housing records, the Corps and ATSDR have been able to identify 16,500
parents who qualify for participation in the study.
ATSDR needs at least 13,200 parents to respond to a survey before scientists can
determine if there is enough cause to purse a study.
So far, 10,238 eligible Camp Lejeune health survey participates have been located,
including the Roses. Finding the rest of the eligible parents is proving to be a daunting
task, Corps officials said.
“We have a very challenging situation and we want to do this the smart way,”
said spokesman Maj. Patrick Gibbons.
Officials have searched birth records, housing records and even motor vehicle records
to try to find former residents, said Col. Michael Lehnert, assistant deputy commandant
for installation, logistics and facilities.
The Privacy Act prohibits the federal government from releasing Social Security
numbers, so searchers are stuck with tracking people using their name alone.
“The problem is, if you have a Bill Smith, there are a lot of them out
there,” Lehnert said.
During a mass media campaign in February and March, the Corps contacted 1,373 daily
newspapers, 1,171 weekly newspapers and 1,027 television stations to write and air stories
about the search. Roughly 2,000 of the participants responded to the media blitz.
Who’s responsible?
Until further studies are performed, there is no hard link between the Rose
children’s health problems and the water they and their mother drank in the 1980s.
Yet even in the absence of scientific proof that anyone suffered adverse effects from
Camp Lejeune’s water, people associated with the base who have health concerns are
not going to stop wondering why. Did the base water make them sick? Why weren’t the
wells shut down sooner? And who is going to accept responsibility if and when science
shows the dry-cleaning chemicals were harmful?
“Who’s responsible? That’s not a question I can answer,” Lehnert
said. “That is still in the realm of speculation.”
Lehnert has heard of a few parents claiming the contaminated water led to birth defects
or contributed to the death of a child. That doesn’t make it true, he said.
“There are 16,500 people” whose children were exposed to the chemical
contamination, Lehnert said. “There are going to be people who die and get sick.
“I’m not trying to rationalize it away, but that happens.”
Whatever happens, the Corps will not pretend the issue isn’t important, Lehnert
said.
“As an institution, the Marine Corps has made a commitment to getting to the
truth,” Lehnert said. “If the truth is unpalatable, so be it.”
Meanwhile, Nathan Rose keeps taking his pills and hoping for the best.
“I have to go through this my whole life,” said the scrawny teen.
“It’s the same thing over and over every day.”
Hilda and Jeff can only watch.
“I just keep praying he’ll be OK,” Hilda said.
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