Also: U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear Camp Lejeune water case

By Martha Quillin

McClatchy Newspapers

WHITE LAKE, N.C. -- The U.S. Marine Corps taught Jerry Ensminger to be a tenacious fighter, a dogged investigator and an arresting public speaker.

"They created me,'' the retired master sergeant says. "And now I've turned this weapon on them.''

Ensminger, a crew-cut career Marine now retired and living outside White Lake, is one of a handful of leaders in a nationwide fight to get the Corps to release information about contaminated drinking water that circulated through Camp Lejeune for decades before poisoned wells were closed in the mid-1980s.

He and others spend countless hours digging through records, presenting their findings to members of Congress and posting them on a Web site, The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten. They have kept the issue alive, they say, in hopes of getting help for people made sick by the water or who lost loved ones to illnesses caused by it.

Ensminger's daughter, Janey, died in 1985 of leukemia, which Ensminger believes she contracted from exposure to the water at Camp Lejeune. She was 9 years old.

In 1997, a federal agency that studied the contamination and its possible effects issued a report that said adults who drank, bathed in and cleaned with the tainted water faced almost no increased risk of cancer or other illness. Last month, Ensminger and his cohorts claimed a victory when the agency retracted that report.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry also acknowledged for the first time that the water contained benzene, a known carcinogen. And it is working on a modeling project expected to show that tainted water flowed to the spigots of many more people than the Marine Corps originally reported and for much longer.

By some estimates, 1 million people -- Marines and their dependents along with civilians who lived and worked on the base -- are thought to have been exposed to a stew of chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders and other illnesses.

The contamination likely started within a few years of when Camp Lejeune was established in 1942, according to the toxic substances agency. It grew worse as thousands on tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals used for military vehicles, munitions, construction and pest control were spilled, dumped or buried all over the 244-square-mile base. Additional chemicals seeped into the water after leaching from a dry cleaner's and other businesses just outside the base.

The report the agency pulled from its Web site last month had said that the greatest health risks from the water were potential effects on fetuses and young children from exposure to two solvents: tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, and trichloroethylene, or TCE.

After the agency withdrew the report, U.S. Sens. Kay Hagan and Richard Burr sent a joint letter to the secretary of the Navy asking for a meeting to discuss why the Marines, which fall under the Department of the Navy, have been slow to release information when they have been ordered by Congress to do so.

"Victims and their families have been patiently waiting for closure on this issue for over two decades,'' the senators scolded.

First Lt. Brian Block, spokesman for the Marine Corps Headquarters in Quantico, Va., said the Marines have readily shared information about the water at Lejeune with the toxic substances agency.

"The health and safety of our Marines, Sailors, civilians and their families is our highest priority,'' Block said in an e-mail response to a reporter's question. "The Marine Corps is committed to the ongoing scientific studies and research efforts to find answers to questions and concerns about health issues associated with exposure to contaminated water. Like our former residents and employees, we too are eager to have reliable scientific answers so that we can take the next appropriate step.''

Ensminger is more tenacious than patient.

He came into the Marines angry over his brother having been shot in the head in Vietnam during the war. He still remembers the officers coming to the house in Pennsylvania, where he grew up, to tell his parents about the injury. His brother would survive, but Ensminger volunteered immediately.

"I wanted to get revenge,'' he says. "Which I never got.''

What he did get was a 24-year career and a belief in the Marine Corps slogan, "Semper Fidelis'' (''Always Faithful''), and its motto: We take care of our own.

Ensminger was first stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1973 to 1975. That time, he and his wife lived in Tarawa Terrace, a base housing complex that relied, as the entire base still does, on a series of wells for its water.

When they left Lejeune for their next post, Ensminger's wife was three months pregnant. Janey was born in July 1976.

Also: U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear Camp Lejeune water case

By Martha Quillin

McClatchy Newspapers

WHITE LAKE, N.C. -- The U.S. Marine Corps taught Jerry Ensminger to be a tenacious fighter, a dogged investigator and an arresting public speaker.

"They created me,'' the retired master sergeant says. "And now I've turned this weapon on them.''

Ensminger, a crew-cut career Marine now retired and living outside White Lake, is one of a handful of leaders in a nationwide fight to get the Corps to release information about contaminated drinking water that circulated through Camp Lejeune for decades before poisoned wells were closed in the mid-1980s.

He and others spend countless hours digging through records, presenting their findings to members of Congress and posting them on a Web site, The Few, the Proud, the Forgotten. They have kept the issue alive, they say, in hopes of getting help for people made sick by the water or who lost loved ones to illnesses caused by it.

Ensminger's daughter, Janey, died in 1985 of leukemia, which Ensminger believes she contracted from exposure to the water at Camp Lejeune. She was 9 years old.

In 1997, a federal agency that studied the contamination and its possible effects issued a report that said adults who drank, bathed in and cleaned with the tainted water faced almost no increased risk of cancer or other illness. Last month, Ensminger and his cohorts claimed a victory when the agency retracted that report.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry also acknowledged for the first time that the water contained benzene, a known carcinogen. And it is working on a modeling project expected to show that tainted water flowed to the spigots of many more people than the Marine Corps originally reported and for much longer.

By some estimates, 1 million people -- Marines and their dependents along with civilians who lived and worked on the base -- are thought to have been exposed to a stew of chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders and other illnesses.

The contamination likely started within a few years of when Camp Lejeune was established in 1942, according to the toxic substances agency. It grew worse as thousands on tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals used for military vehicles, munitions, construction and pest control were spilled, dumped or buried all over the 244-square-mile base. Additional chemicals seeped into the water after leaching from a dry cleaner's and other businesses just outside the base.

The report the agency pulled from its Web site last month had said that the greatest health risks from the water were potential effects on fetuses and young children from exposure to two solvents: tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, and trichloroethylene, or TCE.

After the agency withdrew the report, U.S. Sens. Kay Hagan and Richard Burr sent a joint letter to the secretary of the Navy asking for a meeting to discuss why the Marines, which fall under the Department of the Navy, have been slow to release information when they have been ordered by Congress to do so.

"Victims and their families have been patiently waiting for closure on this issue for over two decades,'' the senators scolded.

First Lt. Brian Block, spokesman for the Marine Corps Headquarters in Quantico, Va., said the Marines have readily shared information about the water at Lejeune with the toxic substances agency.

"The health and safety of our Marines, Sailors, civilians and their families is our highest priority,'' Block said in an e-mail response to a reporter's question. "The Marine Corps is committed to the ongoing scientific studies and research efforts to find answers to questions and concerns about health issues associated with exposure to contaminated water. Like our former residents and employees, we too are eager to have reliable scientific answers so that we can take the next appropriate step.''

Ensminger is more tenacious than patient.

He came into the Marines angry over his brother having been shot in the head in Vietnam during the war. He still remembers the officers coming to the house in Pennsylvania, where he grew up, to tell his parents about the injury. His brother would survive, but Ensminger volunteered immediately.

"I wanted to get revenge,'' he says. "Which I never got.''

What he did get was a 24-year career and a belief in the Marine Corps slogan, "Semper Fidelis'' (''Always Faithful''), and its motto: We take care of our own.

Ensminger was first stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1973 to 1975. That time, he and his wife lived in Tarawa Terrace, a base housing complex that relied, as the entire base still does, on a series of wells for its water.

When they left Lejeune for their next post, Ensminger's wife was three months pregnant. Janey was born in July 1976.

The family moved back to Jacksonville in 1982, into a house off base. In the summer, the children frequently came on post to swim, and Ensminger worked there daily.

In 1983, Janey was diagnosed with leukemia. She died in 1985.

When the shock wore off, Ensminger plowed through his family history, then his wife's.

"No other child in either of our families had ever been diagnosed with leukemia,'' he says. "I always wondered why.''

Just when he thought he would never find an answer, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry came out with its 1997 report that said two of the contaminants in the water at Lejeune, PCE and TCE, could cause childhood leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and birth defects such as heart malformations, neural tube and spinal defects, and oral clefts.

The pronouncement launched Ensminger on a mission he takes as seriously as any he was assigned while he wore the Marine uniform.

Clues were not easy to come by. Except for the toxic substances agency's report and a mention in a Marine Corps newsletter that researchers were looking for people who had lived in base housing over a period of years, officials said little about who might have been exposed to what, for how long, and what the health effects might be.

Gradually, Ensminger found others who were searching for answers: a pair of sisters in Wilmington; Mike Partain, with male breast cancer and living in Florida; and Tom Townsend, a former officer at Lejeune whose wife conceived and bore their son, Christopher, while Townsend was assigned to the base. The baby died at 3 months, and an autopsy showed multiple heart defects and other problems. After the federal report, Townsend came to believe the problems were caused by the contaminated water.

Townsend, now 78 and living in Idaho, has worked with Partain, the son of Marine Capt. Warren B. Partain, and Ensminger to gather tens of thousands of pages of documents from the Marines relating to the water treatment plants and operations at Lejeune. They talk frequently about what they need to find next and where to look for it, or what to do with what they have.

"The relationship Jerry and I have, he's the front man,'' Townsend says. "He's the talking donkey that goes to Capitol Hill. I'm the butt end of the donkey, who stays out of sight.''

Ensminger is happy to go to Washington, as he has done three times to speak at congressional hearings on the Lejeune water issue, and proud to say he helped drive one woman in Marine Corps headquarters "nuts'' pestering her for answers.

So far, Ensminger and the others have revealed documents that show Camp Lejeune officials were told as early as October 1980 that there were high levels of volatile organic compounds, or solvents, in the drinking water. Yet they didn't begin testing the wells until 1984, in preparation for U.S. Navy standards that would identify serious contaminations on naval installations.

Lab tests began showing the pollution in July 1984. The base closed the tainted wells several months later.

Part of the Marine Corps' explanation for why it took more than four years to test and close the tainted wells has been that there were no state or federal drinking-water standards for the contaminants found in the water in the 1980s.

Ensminger says that doesn't matter; he recently found that the Marine Corps and Camp Lejeune had their own standards governing the safe operation of drinking water systems, which included keeping the water free of pollutants.

"Well, duh,'' Ensminger says. "You don't know how many times I have wished I could just go back in time and figure out what the heck these people were thinking.''

Since the contamination came to light, 1,548 claims seeking $33.9 billion in compensation have been filed with the Department of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's office. None has been paid, pending the findings from the toxic substances agency's water modeling project, and a report from the National Academy of Sciences, which is compiling research on the contaminants. Both are expected to be released this year or next.

One of the claims on file is for the death of Jerry Ensminger's daughter.

Ensminger says he believes that the contamination claims have become a catch-all for opportunists with run-of-the-mill illnesses that could be explained other ways. At the same time, he says, "There are people who are in financial ruin because their health has been wrecked by their exposure to these chemicals. And the Marine Corps is just kicking the can down the road. The longer they go, the more people die.''

Historically, the Department of Veterans Affairs has used the 1997 report, which says adults are not at serious risk from the chemicals, to deny service members' claims for medical benefits. Research has connected TCE and PCE exposure to Parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders as well as cancer.

It's the government's duty, Ensminger says, to take care of the veterans, their dependents and civilians who served at Lejeune trusting that the military would provide for such a basic need as safe drinking water.

"They need to step up to the plate, admit they were wrong, provide restitution to all these families and individuals who were harmed and help the people who need it.''

Until they do, he says, "We dig.''

(c) 2009, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.).