Marine base cancer concerns bring hundreds to Tampa

Jerry Ensminger stood in front of the standing-room-only crowd in Salon B at the Marriott Westshore and talked about his nearly 15-year fight to get answers from the U.S. Marine Corps about why his daughter died.

It's a battle that most of the 200 people in the room, many wearing USMC baseball caps, know firsthand.

In 1985, Ensminger's 9-year-old daughter Janey died of leukemia. "Like any parent," he told the audience, "I wanted to know why."

Then, one night in 1997, he tuned into CNN. It changed his life.

The network was reporting that contamination at Camp Lejeune, the sprawling Marine Corps base in North Carolina, was being linked to childhood cancer, primarily leukemia.

Ensminger served 24 years in the Marine Corps. He was stationed at Camp Lejeune when his daughter was conceived and born.

"I dropped my plate of spaghetti on the living room floor," he told the audience members, who came from as far away as Georgia and Kentucky. "It was like God opened the sky to me and said, 'Jerry, here is a glimmer of hope. You may have an answer to those questions.'"

Ever since then, he has been leading the struggle to get answers from the Marine Corps about why it took so long to clean up the chemicals found at Lejeune.

In other studies, those chemicals have been found to cause not only childhood cancers, but also non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and brain, bladder, breast, lung and liver cancer in adults.

Today's meeting at the Tampa hotel was sponsored by the Bell Legal Group of Georgetown, S.C. It was the latest in a series of meetings around the country designed to tell people about the pollution at Lejeune and let them know how to secure benefits and compensation.

In 1982, the Marine Corps stated it had discovered "volatile organic compounds" in the drinking water provided by two of the eight water treatment plants on base, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

The contamination at one plant came from the waste disposal practices at an off-base dry cleaning firm, the agency found. Water from the plant had 40 times the acceptable level of perchloroethylenes, a solvent.

The water at the other plant was contaminated primarily by trichloroethylene, a cleaning solvent also known as TCE, from underground storage tanks, industrial area spills and waste disposal sites. The TCE level was 280 times above the acceptable level. It was also contaminated by benzene.

The contamination dated to the late 1950s, the agency said, and the worst of the contaminated wells were not shut down until 1985, potentially exposing about 1 million Marines, spouses and children who lived on base during that time.

The Marine Corps said it shut the wells as soon as it learned of the contamination and began informing those who lived there.

Using documents provided by the federal agency, Ensminger and Mike Partain - a Tallahassee resident who was conceived and born on the base and now has breast cancer - made the case that Marine leaders knew about the problems well before they reacted.

The base first received warnings about the chemicals in 1980, according to the documents. A year later, the Navy and the Marines tested a well near the base rifle range and found 3 parts per billion of TCE and directed the camp not to use the well.

Ensminger said there is another problem - benzene contamination from up to 1.1 million gallons of gasoline that leaked into the groundwater on base.

In an e-mail Friday to The Tampa Tribune, Marine spokesman Lt. Gregory Wolf said the "Marine Corps began informing Camp Lejeune residents about the contamination beginning in 1984. ... We did not know then or now the full extent of the potential health risks. We are supporting the ongoing [agency] studies in order to identify those risks."

Wolf did not reply to a request for comment after today's meeting.

For Tom Mitchell, whose father Eugene served at Lejeune from 1962 to 1965, seeing documents showing the Marines were seemingly aware of the problems well before they acted was "appalling."

The 46-year-old Fort Lauderdale man was born on the base and four of his five siblings lived there. All of the siblings who lived at Lejeune contracted cancer, said Mitchell, who has skin cancer.

His brother James recently died of brain cancer. Mitchell said his mother died of cancer when he was 8 and his father, now 82, has prostate cancer.

"What are the odds that all five children who lived at the base would get sick and have the same problems, cancers and tumors and heart trouble?" Mitchell asked. "It feels like a slap in the face. We've been lied to. They covered it up."

Kristen Sellas, veterans and military affairs liaison for U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor, said seeing the documents and hearing the stories was "eye-opening."

Sellas said Bilirakis, who serves on the House Committee on Veteran's Affairs, will attend a Jan. 31 meeting between legislators and the Veterans Administration regarding the pollution at Lejeune.

As the crowd began filing out of the big meeting room, some people made a detour to share their stories with Ensminger and ask his advice.

Ensminger made it clear that he still loves the Marines, but not the people who lead the corps.

"I know for a fact that the core values of the Marine Corps are still being adhered to at the unit level," he said. "It is at the highest levels of leadership where the problems are."