126. The Baby Heaven (Camp Lejeune)

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This episode of swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

And somehow, always in your mind, you're prepared for the fact that

One of us can go before the other, but you're never prepared for that with a child.

A child is your legacy that's supposed to outlive you.

And so when you live for years and years

with

a child that you're always consciously aware of,

could die

anytime,

life is never the same.

Life was never the same for the Anderson family.

after three-year-old Jimmy was diagnosed with leukemia in January 1972.

His parents, Anne and Charles Anderson, initially thought it was just a severe cold, like everyone else in the household had dealt with in recent weeks.

But Jimmy's symptoms never went away.

He remained pale for two weeks, and a blood test revealed that his white blood cell count was half of what it should have been.

As expected, the cancer treatment was intense and had a disruptive effect on Jimmy's youth as the years passed.

Jimmy developed more slowly and weakly than his peers.

He was nauseous constantly or had diarrhea.

Of course, the chemo made his hair fall out.

And unsurprisingly, all the time missed from school affected his cognitive development as well.

Jimmy was held back from sixth grade because he read at a third grade level.

He didn't have many friends because he was socially immature.

Jimmy's siblings quietly resented him for the constant consideration his condition required.

But Anne Anderson was a dedicated caretaker of her youngest child.

She routinely drove him to the specialist in Boston for treatments.

It was during those trips that Anne noticed something alarming.

She started to recognize many of the other parents in the doctor's offices waiting with their children who had the same diagnosis as Jimmy.

She had seen them walking around or taking the trash out or shopping in the same neighborhood in the same suburb where she lived, Woburn, Massachusetts.

Across the way in that street going down that way

were two children diagnosed with leukemia, a young adult diagnosed with leukemia, and then across the pond and back was another child diagnosed, and down the street away across from the main street was another child diagnosed.

And then a few streets over another child was diagnosed.

The very next street another child was diagnosed.

This was not a normal neighborhood.

Woburn, Massachusetts is a working-class industrial suburb 12 miles north of Boston.

There were about 35,000 residents living in Woburn when Anne Anne and Charles Anderson moved to the east side in 1965, a few years before Jimmy was conceived.

A decade later, the Andersons found themselves living in a neighborhood that appeared to be the nucleus of a cancer cluster.

Two-year-old Kevin Kane was diagnosed with leukemia in 1973, a year after Jimmy Anderson.

A block away, seven-year-old Michael Zona died from the disease in 1974.

Michael's next-door neighbor, a 32-year-old man named Pete Gamache, shared the same diagnosis.

The disease Pete Gamash has is leukemia, and doctors say he has very little time left to live.

I worry about my family.

That's my job, you know, and I take care of my family.

And it

worries me to death that I may not be able to do that in the future.

Pete Gamosh died within weeks of that interview.

East Woburn residents, Jared Alfiero, three years old, Patrick Toomey, 11 years old, and Robbie Robbins, eight years old, joined him.

Eight-year-old Robbie Robbins is one of the victims.

His entire world is chemotherapy and other treatments.

I need to go into the hospital and get a bone arrow.

And

if it says it's okay, I can get near some kids, I think, and

play with them.

He knows now what he has.

He doesn't know, you know, just how severe it is.

You know, the hell that it is in the end.

You know, and actually, you know, watching them die,

it's something you'll never forget.

The leukemia epidemic in Woburn went mostly unnoticed by the locals, but Anne Anderson had a theory.

It was the town's water.

She thought there may be a virus in it or something.

It smelled horrible and tasted even worse.

It corroded the pipes, ruined clothes, and blackened the insides of dishwashers.

Anne said her family had replaced the faucets in their home three different times over the years because of the damage.

Don't be so hysterical, Anne was told by everyone with whom she raised the issue.

Doctors, nurses, city hall, even her own husband, dismissed Anne's water concerns as those of an emotionally involved mother, desperate for an explanation for something that defied explanation.

After a while, I myself wondered if I was crazy, Anne later said.

admitting she'd learned to keep her silly conspiracy theories to herself.

The people of Woburn didn't appreciate such allegations that could threaten their property values.

Anne's husband, Charles, eventually consulted with Reverend Bruce Young at their neighborhood Episcopal Church to help talk some sense into this blabbering woman.

But when a second child in Reverend Young's parish was diagnosed with leukemia, he too became suspicious.

Even to me, it was beginning to seem weird, Young told the New York Times.

But I wondered if it wasn't like starting to see Volvos on the road after I bought one.

Before long, Anne Anderson and Reverend Young's suspicions were confirmed, and it had nothing to do with the Badermeinhoff phenomenon.

One morning in May 1979, construction workers found 184 barrels of polyurethane dumped in a vacant lot near the Aberjona River, one of the sources from which East Woburn's municipal production wells G and H drew water.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering tested those wells in response.

The good news, none of the polyurethane from those barrels had leached into Woburn's water supply.

The bad news, those wells in East Woburn were already significantly contaminated with chemicals TCE and PCE, which was even worse.

TCE is trichloroethylene, a colorless, volatile organic compound that gained widespread use as a cleaning solvent and degreaser in the 1920s.

It's non-flammable, so it's used in paints, refrigerants, sealants, adhesives, wood finishes, and hoof polish for horses.

PCE, or perchloroethylene, is a similar VOC.

It's most commonly used in fabric finishers and dry cleaning.

Tests revealed that well G contained 257 parts per billion of TCE and 21 parts per billion of PCE.

Well H contained 118 parts per billion of TCE and 13 parts per billion of PCE.

At the time, the U.S.

public health standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency for these toxic, halogenated hydrocarbon chemicals in public drinking water was five parts per billion because of their persistent nature and potential to cause harm to both the environment and human health.

Yet, at the time, the science was still inconclusive.

But the people who make TCE disagree.

They say that a number of other chemicals in the drinking water may be making people sick, and they insist that the link between TCE and human cancer has never been proven.

The trace amounts, or parts per billion, do not pose a health threat to people.

However, according to the EPA, it wasn't the actual chemical corporations that polluted Wuburn's water source.

It was the users of their products.

After closing the whales, the agency traced the contamination back to three specific properties.

One was the Cryovac plant, the manufactured stainless steel food processing equipment, admittedly a heavy user of TCE for cleaning and paint thinning.

Cryovac was owned by the international conglomerate W.R.

Grace and Company, which would be bankrupted by asbestos litigation in the not-so-distant future.

WRG had owned and operated the plant in Woburn for almost 20 years.

Another property identified by the EPA was a tannery owned by Beatrice Foods, which also owned an adjacent 15-acre lot that had been used as a chemical dumping ground for at least 10 years.

Dozens of decaying 55-gallon barrels of waste were found on that lot when the contamination was detected.

The third culprit was a nearby PCE using industrial dry cleaning operation owned by a company called UniFirst.

In addition to the three companies, an analysis of recent decision-making by Woober and city officials revealed that the municipality itself should share in the blame.

20 years earlier, as rapid development threatened the suburb with a chronic water shortage, local officials commissioned an engineering study to determine if the swampy east side of town was suitable for wells.

That engineering study concluded that no, it was not.

Because the groundwater in East Woburn was already heavily contaminated with industrial waste, the city drilled the wells anyway.

And now, 20 years later, cancer rates in Woburn had increased by 17% at a time when they were expected to decrease by 3%.

A Massachusetts Department of Health study later found 19 cases of childhood leukemia in the suburb from 1964 to 1985.

Statistically, six cases would have been expected.

Those elevated levels were determined to have been caused by the town's contaminated water.

Chemicals entered the body from bathing in it, drinking it, and breathing the vapors.

Other severe health effects, including liver disease and neurological disorders, were also found to be three times higher in Woburn than the national average.

Toxic wastes first came to Woburn in the 1800s when leather tanneries arrived and were followed by chemical plants.

The legacy, chromium and other chemical lagoons, decomposed mounds of chemically tanned hides left near water which flows into drinking wells, and childhood leukemia said by state health officials to be occurring at two and a half times the normal rate.

One of the leukemia victims, Jimmy Anderson, died at age 12.

His mother, Ann, led the fight to investigate the well.

Jimmy Anderson died in January 1981 after nine long years of painful, debilitating cancer treatments and deflating relapses.

He was 12 years old.

During an ambulance ride to the hospital in his final days, Anne Anderson said one of the firemen on the crew told her that his son, too, had recently died of leukemia.

Anne continued her crusade even after Jimmy's death.

As Dan Kennedy wrote for the Boston Phoenix, Anne's tenacity and courage established her as a national symbol of the fight against corporate carelessness.

And the town of Woburn, like Love Canal a few years earlier, became a national symbol of environmental tragedy.

But were corporations and governments actually listening?

After Love Canal, a New York State Health Department report coldly said a few dozen extra deaths in a state would be unlikely to draw public attention.

The draft report actually devised cost-benefit equations to determine when it's economically desirable to reduce the possibility of cancer.

The implication was that often it's not.

There was only one way to make them listen, make it economically undesirable.

On May 14th, 1982, eight families from Woburn, including Anne Anderson, sued W.R.

Grace, Beatrice Foods, and Unifirst, the three companies deemed responsible for the contamination.

They were represented by a young medical malpractice lawyer named Jan Schlickman.

Woburn would become a bellwether case for toxic waste law.

The reason this case has national significance is it's the first courtroom battle over whether corporations can be held responsible for death or disease that may have been caused because of toxic chemicals dumped at their plants.

Unifirst settled before the trial for $1.1 million.

Schlichtman reportedly turned down the settlement offers from WRG and Beatrice without even consulting the families.

He used the million from Universe to fund the trial, where a verdict, he hoped, would yield unimaginable riches for everyone involved.

A company that engages in this kind of conduct is going to be made to pay the price.

But that's not what happened.

Even though the plaintiffs secured a crucial victory in the first phase of the trial, which held W.R.

Grace responsible for the contamination, the second phase would require proof that the pollutants caused the illnesses.

Tracing an individual plaintiff's illness to a specific pollutant would be nearly impossible, and such studies would take years to complete.

But Schlichtman pushed forward anyway.

If they lose the next round, the families go home empty-handed.

But if the jury finds that the victims, five of them children, died because of the chemicals, damages could top tens of millions of dollars.

However, the judge declared a mistrial for phase one, which meant the entire case would have to be retried.

Instead, on September 23, 1986, the plaintiffs and W.R.

Grace reached an out-of-court settlement in which each family received an average of about $300,000.

The company released a statement, We continue to maintain and are now more convinced than ever that we, W.R.

Grace and Company, did not pollute the wells and we were in no way responsible for the tragic events that affected our fellow residents in the Woburn community.

W.R.

Grace and Company was later indicted by a federal grand jury for lying to the EPA during its investigation of the contamination.

The company pleaded guilty to two felony counts and was fined $10,000.

For more on the trial, there was a best-selling book published in 1995 by Jonathan R.

called A Civil Action

and a 1998 movie with the same name starring John Travolta as Jan Schlichtman.

The movie depicts the lawyer as a passionate defender of justice who pursued the case until he was financially bankrupt.

Critics suggest that in reality, it was Schlichtman's arrogance, greed, and courtroom bumbling, not passion for justice, that ultimately led to his financial ruin and cost his clients millions of dollars in the end.

WR Grace, along with Beatrice Foods, Unifirst, and two other companies, eventually agreed to finance a $70 million cleanup of the contaminated sites in Woburn, which had been delayed because of the trial.

WGR's old Cryovac plant was ultimately torn down and replaced with a Red Robin gourmet burger restaurant, which did not survive the pandemic.

To this day, the sites of wells G and H remain contaminated, so the legacy of the Woburn water contamination lives on.

But that's not the only reason.

Thanks to people like Anne Anderson, the Woburn contamination brought attention to the importance of groundwater conservation and led the stricter state and federal regulations on how companies handle and dispose of toxic substances.

Regulations that directly and indirectly helped uncover what was taking place at Camp Lejeune.

Hello, I'm John Travolta.

What follows is a very compelling story.

It's about water.

That's right, John.

The story is about water.

It's about betrayal.

It's about a decades-long cover-up.

It's about the worst toxic contamination incident in American history on this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials to find accounting for their violations of the ASTA law and clearly unethical pay to play against taxpayer dollars that were wasted.

They have tens of millions of dollars.

Doubted up the books and records

responsible for the collapse of the entire system.

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I mean, most people don't realize

when you have a child that's diagnosed with a long-term catastrophic illness,

after the shock of the diagnosis wears off, and without exception, the first thing that pops into your mind after your shock wears off is why?

And

unfortunately,

That's a question that

very few people ever get an answer to.

Master Sergeant Jerry Insminker says he joined the Marine Corps in 1969, seeking revenge.

His older brother had been severely injured in Vietnam when an explosion sent 78 pieces of shrapnel into his body, including his brain.

Fortunately, as a drill instructor, Jerry never saw much action during his service, spending most of his time based in Japan, Norway, and the States.

But tragedy managed to find him anyway.

In the spring of 1983, Jerry's six-year-old daughter, Jane Yoshi Insminger, had a bad case of strep throat.

The smorgasbord of antibiotics the doctors had given her didn't work.

Janie's condition persisted for weeks until she developed a high fever and what appeared to be little hickeys all over her torso.

Jerry took Janie to the Marine Base's urgent care clinic, where the doctors delivered some devastating news.

He said,

We think your daughter has leukemia.

And I tell you, I just,

I went to my knees

right there in the hallway.

The next two years were the most difficult of Jerry's life.

He watched helplessly as Janie underwent endless painful procedures like bone marrow extractions and spinal taps.

He watched sores develop around her mouth.

He watched her hair fall out and her steroid-induced weight gain.

Jerry did his best to hold in his rage and tears when Janie would come home from school crying because the other kids were calling her names, he watched her leukemia return from remission in September 1985.

Jerry knew it was the beginning of the end.

It's

a hell of a thing.

And

these kids, when they have these serious illnesses and they

They're smarter than people think they are.

They know what's going on

Janie knew she was dying and

I walked into the room one day.

She was sitting up on this windowsill.

I walked in the room and she said,

Daddy, I want to talk to you.

I said,

you're okay.

About what?

She said,

I want to talk to you about my funeral.

That's a conversation that I don't think any parent should have have.

I hadn't cried in front of Janie before that time because she was pulling her strength from me and I had to be strong for her, Jerry wrote.

If I had to cry, I went somewhere else.

But that day, I started crying, and she looked up at me, and she had pneumonia that bad she could hardly talk.

But she said, stop it.

And I said, stop what?

She said, stop crying, Daddy.

I love you.

That was the last words my daughter said to me.

She went into a coma.

35 minutes later, she took her last breath.

Janie Insminger died at Duke Children's Hospital on September 24th, 1985.

She had just recently turned nine years old.

After that, nothing was ever the same for Jerry Insminger.

He and his wife, Janie's mother, divorced.

He retired from the Marine Corps.

He lost his faith.

If we have a loving and caring God, he thought, then why is he allowing these kids to go through this hell when he could stop it?

Why is a question that nobody had been able to answer.

Why did his daughter get leukemia?

Jerry had asked every doctor in the cancer research departments at both Penn State and Duke.

He researched his family history and Janie's mother's family history.

There were no other cases.

Jerry had become resigned to the fact that life can be a cruel mistress sometimes.

But that all changed one evening.

12 years later, August 1997.

Jerry, who typically worked from sunup to sundown on his soybean farm near Jacksonville, North Carolina, for whatever reason, perhaps divine intervention, decided to call it an early day to cook himself dinner.

While exiting the kitchen with his food, he caught a glimpse of the Channel 12 evening news.

According to the anchor, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry had just released a report on Camp Lejeune.

and the chemicals which had been found in the base drinking water could possibly be linked to childhood cancer, primarily leukemia.

I dropped my damn plate of spaghetti on the living room floor.

Jerry and his family had spent almost half of his 24 years of service at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

They lived in the Terrawood Terrace neighborhood of military-built townhomes from 1973 to 1975 and then moved back in 1982.

My daughter Janie was the only one of my four daughters to have been conceived, carried, or born while we lived on base housing at Camp Lejeune.

This was the first time Jerry had heard that the water at Camp Lejeune might have been contaminated.

And the only reason he was hearing about it now was because he had retired nearby and remained in the Camp Lejeune TV market.

Was this the answer he had been seeking for all these years?

I started thinking about it.

I thought, my God,

what about all the other people that had been through Camp Lejeune that are now literally spread out all over the country, or all over the world.

I knew right then and there, Jerry realized, the only way those people would ever have a chance of finding out was for me to push for answers and do everything I could to make sure they got notified.

That started this journey for the truth.

Nothing could have prepared Jerry Innsminger for what his journey for truth would uncover.

The first Marine base on the East Coast came into being after military planners began searching in July 1940 to find an area that could provide all aspects of amphibious training for Marines.

Another piece of trivia involves the way the camp's name is pronounced.

Most people tend to call it Camp Lejeune, but the pronunciation of the general's name is actually Legerne instead of Lejeune.

Despite the phonetics, one thing was certain.

Camp Legerne was about to make a major impact in North Carolina and beyond.

Marine Barracks New River was built in Onslow County, North Carolina in 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II.

Later that year, it was renamed to Camp Lejeune to honor General John A.

Lejeune, the greatest of all leathernecks who had recently died.

The location of Camp Lejeune was logistically and environmentally ideal for Marine Corps training operations.

The base's proximity to rivers, streams, coastlines, ports, marshes, forests, bogs, and swamps would help prepare the troops for any situation they may encounter while delivering democracy to a foreign land.

We have 78 live fire ranges, 98 maneuver areas, 34 gun positions, 50 tactical landing zones, three combat towns, and 11 miles of beach for amphibious training.

All that training that is required for all the occupational specialties in the Marine Expeditionary Force is being conducted here at Camp Lejeune.

Over time, Camp Lejeune grew to be the largest marine base on the East Coast.

Its 156,000 acres, while mostly undeveloped, featured battlefields, airfields, rifle ranges, combat towns, and enough housing to accommodate up to 180,000 service members and their families at one time.

To provide fresh water to its residents, the base built eight treatment plants and drilled dozens of wells.

The first indication that something was wrong with the water at Camp Lejeune came in October 1980.

A representative from the Navy's Atlantic Division arrived at the base to collect composite samples for testing to ensure that there wasn't some kind of love canal or wooberin situation, which had recently dominated the news.

Those samples tested positive for TCE and PCE, among other contaminants.

No further action was taken.

Later that same month, the U.S.

Army Environmental Hygiene Agency tested the taps at Camp Lejeune to ensure compliance with new federal standards for drinking water that were set to take effect in 1982.

Samples collected from the Hadnot Point Treatment Plant, one of the base's largest systems, which served housing and the hospital, again tested positive for nearly a dozen potentially toxic compounds.

Water is highly contaminated with low molecular weight halogenated compounds, warned Army Lab Chief William Neal Jr.

10 days later in a handwritten report delivered to the Navy's Atlantic Division HQ.

No response.

Heavy organic interference.

You need to analyze, Neil warned again a few months later in January 1981.

No response.

You need to analyze for chlorinated organics, he pleaded for a third time in February.

Water is highly contaminated with other chlorinated hydrocarbons, solvents, read Neil's final ringing of the alarm in March.

No evidence has been found that officials at the Navy's Atlantic Division communicated those results to Camp Lejeune, and no further analysis of Camp Lejeune's potentially contaminated water took place until almost a year later.

In April 1982, Raleigh-based Granger Laboratories was contracted to test the systems for trihalomethanes, which are byproducts of chlorine produced during the water treatment process.

Mike Hargett, the co-owner of Granger Labs and conductor of the tests, was unable to determine if the water at Hadnot Point in Terawater Terrace contained trihalomethanes because the samples were were too contaminated with organic solvents such as TCE and PCE.

The first set of samples we received from the base were not in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act and had a very significant interference present.

This interference was exceptional and after discussions with the analytical chemist Mr.

Bruce Babson and his supervisor Mr.

Paul Brappord, we decided to request an additional set of samples from the base.

A second set of samples presented similar results.

Granger Labs issued repeated warnings to officials at Camp Lejeune, specifically the base chemist Elizabeth Betts in the Environmental Office.

If that water had been the effluent of a wastewater treatment plant, that plant would have been in violation and fined, Mike Hargett later told a newspaper.

Yet again, these concerns disappeared into the void of the Navy's chain of command.

Granger Labs performed follow-up tests of the water at Adnot Point in Terrawar Terrace in July 1982.

Those results were the most concerning yet.

This is epidemiologist Dr.

Richard Clapp.

At least one measurement in 1982 showed that in one of the drinking water treatment plants, there was a 1,400 parts per billion level of trichlorethylene in the drinking water.

And this is about

280 times what would currently be allowed in drinking water in this country.

And it's five times the level that was found at about that same time in the water in Wooburn, Massachusetts.

This time, my Harget at Granger Labs secured a meeting with the Lieutenant Colonel, who was the deputy director of base utilities at Camp Lejeune.

I basically said, this is a problem with your water, Harget remembers.

People should not be drinking this water.

The lieutenant colonel stared back at him blankly.

He did not want to discuss it, Harget recalled.

I was amazed at how unimportant this discussion was for him.

The lieutenant Colonel responded that this was something that he would have to look into,

and we were summarily dismissed.

The total time in the Lieutenant Colonel's office was less than five minutes.

Granger Laboratories continued to issue persistent warnings to Camp Lejeune about the dangerous water over the next two years, each report more dire than the last.

Subsequent tests had revealed that the raw water at a treatment plant contained the toxic solvents, which meant that the contamination was occurring in the ground, in the wells, before even touching a pipe.

Officials at Camp Lejeune refused to shut down those wells, dismissing the results results as flukes or anomalies.

There were no federal regulations on the books for TCE and drinking water, the base chemist Elizabeth Betts correctly pointed out in a memo, ignoring the fact that there were mounting government studies at the time, concluding that the chemicals were extremely hazardous to human health, ignoring the fact that the EPA had recently issued recommendations for the handling of TCE after the recent Woburn, Massachusetts incident, and ignoring the fact that other military bases had shut down wells in the 1970s for the same exact reasons because the Navy had issued its own standards of water safety in the early 60s warning that organic solvents such as TCE and PCE posed contamination dangers.

That's the disheartening part of this, Mike Hargett from Granger Labs told McClatchy newspapers.

They, the Navy, continued to distribute the water for others to drink.

Their reasoning, it's been theorized, is that Camp Lejeune was already struggling to meet its water demands.

Shutting off wells would have only exacerbated the issue.

So, not only did the base not shut down its wells, it asked the state of North Carolina for permission to reduce the frequency of testing those wells, citing, quote, low contamination levels.

The Marines also withheld the concerning test results from the EPA, which was preparing a report of potential cleanup locations as part of the new Superfund law in April 1983.

Camp Lejeune's report stated, quote, there are no sites on the base that pose an immediate threat to human health.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mike Hargett at Granger knew that, so he tipped off the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which was working on their owned groundwater initiatives.

Upon request, Camp Lejeune officials had provided state regulators with their recent water reports.

Again, not one mention of possible contamination.

When the State Environmental Department started investigating on its own, it found an immediate cause for concern.

On the other side of the highway from Terawa Terrace in Camp Lejeune, there was a dry cleaning service, ABC One Hour Cleaners, that had been serving the base for 30 years.

ABC stored PCE in a large 250-gallon tank behind its building.

The state discovered that that tank was leaking into the ground.

This is part of the base.

This is Terrawa Terrace family housing.

This is where I lived whenever Janie was conceived.

Now the water in this housing area was contaminated by a dry cleaner's that was right across the street from

the housing area.

There was a well right there.

Internally, Camp Lejeune officers were almost relieved to hear this news.

It was a private business, not the military, that was responsible for the water contamination they'd been keeping under wraps for years.

ABC cleaners would have to foot the bill for the cleanup, cleanup, not the taxpayers.

Not so fast, North Carolina's Environmental Department alerted.

After further investigation, it was discovered that there was more than one source of pollution at Camp Lejeune.

In fact, there were as many as 70.

There were burn pits and dump sites for every type of hazardous waste imaginable, including mercury, mortar shells, battery acid, and TCE.

Containers of mustard gas, PCBs, and other solvents were found buried in the ground.

There were at least least two locations where pesticides, such as DDT, had been dumped.

One was covered by a new basketball court.

Even worse, the building where the pesticides had been stored and mixed now served as Camp Lejeune's daycare center.

There was a 6,300 square foot playground built outside of it where soil tests revealed extremely high levels of DDT and DDE.

Worst of all, believe it or not, was the fuel depot in Hadnot Point.

The underground storage tanks have been leaking for years.

There was reportedly a 15-foot deep layer of gasoline floating atop the aquifer that the wells in the area pulled from.

In their report, they said they had found a 15-foot thick layer of pure gasoline floating on top of the shallow aquifer.

15 feet thick,

deep.

And that

plume was about two acres.

And they were actually, they're actually pumping, they've got pumping treat plants all over the top of that plume.

They're actually pumping that product out of the ground and they're selling it.

In July 1984, a test on the well closest to the Hadnock Point fuel farm revealed extremely high levels of benzene in the water, a telltale sign that it had been contaminated by the nearby fuel leaks.

Camp Lejeune immediately shut down that well.

As for the others, it would take another four months.

But the Marine Corps didn't shut the wells off until 1984, two years after an outside contractor found chemical solvents like trichloroethylene and benzene in the water.

12 wells in total were taken out of service as a precautionary response to the potential widespread contamination.

Ten of those wells would ultimately be permanently shut down.

including one that served the elementary school.

One of those wells that served the Terawa Terrace-based housing units was intermittently turned back on at least three times in the following months to maintain the dwindling water supply despite its presumed toxicity.

As news of Camp Lejeune's tainted water became public, officials felt compelled to reassure its residents that everything was fine.

The base's commanding general, L.H.

Buell, provided notification in April 1985, quote, two of the wells that supply Tarawa Terrace have had to be taken offline because minute trace amounts of several organic chemicals have been detected in the water.

This was a blatant lie.

There was nothing minute about the chemical levels found in the water, which Buell had described as simply organic, choosing the drop that typically used descriptor, volatile.

Buell had even better news, quote, there are no definitive state or federal regulations regarding a safe level of these compounds, but as a precaution, I have ordered the closure of these wells for all but emergency situations when fire protection or domestic supply would be threatened.

The base's newspaper also released several articles around this time repeating these assurances that the contamination levels at Camp Lejeune were considered safe by the EPA and that much of the pollution came from ABC one-hour cleaners.

Again, it seemed the Navy was being intentionally misleading.

At the same time, the EPA was actively preparing to declare Camp Lejeune as one of, if not the most, contaminated places in the United States.

The agency proposed granting the base priority status on its Superfund list, estimating that it would take 30 years to restore the environment at the site.

Camp Lejeune was officially declared a Superfund location four years later in 1989.

By then, the contamination had already taken an immeasurable human toll.

More people were exposed, maybe up to a million people, some had incredibly high levels of toxic exposures to chemicals such as trichloroethylene.

So there's nothing else like that that I'm aware of in the history of this country.

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The story to military base as anything else we've got, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina is synonymous with the U.S.

Marine Corps and the tough Marines it has produced for generations.

But some of those on base have been stopped by an enemy they couldn't couldn't see.

Liver cancer, bladder cancer, skin cancer, stomach cancer, bone cancer, esophageal cancer, male breast cancer, leukemia, neurological issues, tremors, tingling, depression, paranoia, seizures, migraines, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, early menopause, infertility, Parkinson's disease, asthma, rashes, blisters, brittle teeth.

These are just a few of the conditions experienced by former Camp Lejeune residents, most of whom had no hereditary history of their afflictions.

Some were former Marines who had spent years on the base.

Others were civilians who had only spent days.

Some had moved to Camp Lejeune as children and grown up there.

Many others were born there but moved away.

Hundreds, maybe thousands more, were not born at all.

Baby Boy, son of Captain and Mrs.

Keith E.

Kitchens,

It was the base baby.

There's another one, a staff sergeant.

Here's

Sergeant.

This is what they call baby heaven.

There's a section of the city cemetery in Jacksonville, North Carolina that contains row after row of children who never lived to see their first birthday.

They call it baby heaven.

The burial plots were donated to grieving parents by funeral directors in the area who purchased the space back in the 70s when there was an epidemic of unexplained stillbirths and congenital disorders.

Death was so frequent that infants were being buried two or three at a time to save space.

We were at a party at one of my friends' house one night.

There was five of us in different stages of pregnancy.

Every one of us lost our baby to a birth defect.

That's a woman named, and you can't make this up, Mary Freshwater.

Her third child, Russell, was born at Camp Lejeune with an open spine.

He lived for about a month before dying in her arms on New Year's Eve, 1978.

Doctors couldn't tell her why.

Soon after, Mary's fourth child, Charles, was born without a cranium, brain exposed and half-developed.

He died the same day.

Her fifth and sixth children, twins, didn't survive long enough to get names.

Mary gave up on expanding her family after that.

She eventually died from leukemia at the age of 68,

but not before she found out who to blame.

I blamed myself for years till this came out.

I hated myself.

I hated my body because I thought I had failed my children.

I had a son, Russell Alexander Thorpe, that was born November the 30th, 1977 with an open spine.

There was no hope for him.

This is my treasure box that I have of him.

This is the suit he was wearing the day he died in my arms at 10 minutes past 12 New Year's Eve.

This is vomit I have never been able to wash off.

This is what I have left of my son.

And then

the doctors did not have any idea what was causing it.

So they suggested we try again.

We did.

And I had a son born without a cranium.

So I have two graves out in Angelo Memorial Park.

Those feelings of self-hate and self-blame were common among the women at Camp Lejeune.

There were no explanations for their failed pregnancies.

Medical professionals would often suggest that they see a psychologist.

Maybe that would help.

But now, nearly three decades later, everything suddenly made sense.

The eye infections, the nosebleeds, the sneezing, the funny smelling water with the terrible taste they would mask from their kids with Kool-Aid, the reactions to the baby formula that was mixed with the water, the skin rashes after bathing, the debilitating, often fatal diseases that plagued them for years later.

This was a monumental tragedy.

This is worse than any love canal, Jodi McPherson told the Tampa Bay Times.

Her husband was born on the base and died of prostate cancer at an early age.

This is worse than Hurricane Katrina, she said, and nobody knows anything about it.

Many of Camp Lejeune's victims, those who are still alive at least, didn't hear about the base's history of water contamination until the late 90s and early 2000s, decades after they had been exposed.

And not because the government alerted them.

No, their illumination to the facts was mostly thanks to One Man's Crusade.

Capitol Hill has become a second home to Jerry Ensminger.

The retired Marine drill sergeant says he's still fighting for the rights of Americans.

As soon as he heard about the water contamination in 1997, Jerry Innsminger launched a grassroots investigation into what happened at Camp Lejeune.

With assistance from a few other veterans and victims, such as Tom Townsend, Jeff Byron, Mike Gross, and Mike Partain, Innsminger's group managed to unearth never-before-seen Marine Corps documents and piece together a detailed timeline that shed light on the incident.

The ultimate goal was to help Camp Lejeune victims in need.

an effort that would persist for literal decades.

Naively, Insminger initially believed that the U.S.

Marine Corps, to which he and many others had dedicated their lives, would make things right in the form of health care or compensation if presented with the full scope of the issue.

Superfidelis, always faithful, no man left behind, ooh rah, bullshit.

As Jerry discovered through his research, the Marines had been uncooperative since day one.

They stonewalled regulators at every turn.

They coached their engineers on how to respond to questions about the contamination.

They They purposely withheld information, documentation, and funding that could have helped avoid or alleviate an untold amount of suffering.

When the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, which is part of the CDC, started investigating and publishing reports about the contamination, the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense pushed back with medical reviews and chemical studies funded by themselves that cast doubt on TCE's toxicity while explaining that a causal relationship between the contamination and certain health effects could never be proven.

In one of the most egregious examples of this, the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences concluded that there was, quote, insufficient evidence to determine whether an association exists between exposure to the chemicals and adverse health effects.

It was later discovered that not only had the Navy funded that study, it had also signed a $600,000 consultants contract.

with the National Academies of Sciences and assigned a scientist from the Honeywell Corporation, one of the world's largest chemical producers and polluters, to sit on the panel.

In the end, the Navy pointed to those results of its own corrupted study to justify withholding $1.6 million for an ATSDR mortality study of former Camp Lejeune residents.

The Department of Defense was doing everything in its power to avoid holding itself accountable or publicizing the issue.

Another example, in the late 1990s, when ATSDR proposed sending out a questionnaire in an attempt to locate babies born at Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps asked for it to be delayed because they did not want it to coincide with the December 1998 release of a civil action, the Travolta movie about the Wooburn leukemia cluster.

This is basically a friendly fire incident in slow motion.

And every possible measure has been taken by the Marine Corps and Department of the Navy to deny and delay providing any assistance whatsoever to their victims.

20 years after Camp Lejeune had been declared a Superfund site, no progress had been made on the cleanup and no conclusive studies on the health effects had been completed.

Therefore, the vast majority of veterans' health care claims related to the contamination had been denied by Veterans Affairs and no assistance had been provided to those affected.

When ATSDR finally revealed the results of a survey of birth defects and childhood cancers at Camp Lejeune in January 2002, which found both to be significantly higher than the national average, it was quickly determined that that study was flawed.

The Marines had provided ATSDR with inaccurate and incomplete data.

The effects of benzene, for instance, were not analyzed at all.

More comprehensive studies would take another decade to complete.

It was all just so sinister.

Jerry Insminger, who had become the face of the fight for justice, felt so betrayed.

But he had no plans on giving up.

They created me, the retired Master Sergeant told the Charlotte Observer.

And now I've turned this weapon on them.

If I hadn't dug in my heels, Insminger said, this damned issue would have been dead and buried, along with my child and everybody else's.

Jerry was prepared to continue his campaign for another two decades, if need be.

The Marine Corps must be held accountable.

Insminger used every opportunity he could find to share Camp Lejeune's pain.

Nothing

compares to watching one of your kids suffer

and go through hell.

And I blame the Marine Corps and Department of the Navy.

What they have filled me with is a terrible resolve

to expose their misconduct,

their arrogance, and their incompetence.

Those weren't acts of God.

They were the acts of our government.

Janie went through hell.

And all of us who loved her,

we went through hell with her.

Every time they stuck a needle through her bone in her hip to pull out bone marrow,

I held her

and she screamed in my ear, Daddy, Daddy, don't let them hurt me.

I am appearing here today as one spokesperson for the hundreds of thousands of Marines, sailors, their families, and the loyal civilian employees who were unknowingly exposed to horrendous levels of toxins to their drinking water at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Camp Lejeune is quite possibly one of, if not, the worst, water contamination incidents in history.

Ironically,

most of these people still do not have any idea that they were exposed to these contaminants at Camp Lejoungue.

They have not been notified.

and the United States Marine Corps has to date refused to institute any type of legitimate notification plan or policy.

I can assure you that there are many more individuals and families who are now literally spread out all over this country, if not this world,

that are wondering what happened to me,

what happened to my family member.

These people deserve an answer.

It is time for the United States Marine Corps to live up to our motto, which is Sepra Fidelis, which is Latin for always faithful.

The year 2011 brought hope for the victims of Camp Lejeune.

After only 80 years of suspicion, the EPA finally declared TCE a human carcinogen, which would assist the victims in their fight for justice.

Also, Jerry Insminger and Mike Partain, a male breast cancer survivor who was born at Camp Lejeune, were heavily featured in a documentary called Simper Fi, Always Faithful, directed by Tony Hardman and Rachel Liebert.

The film was nominated for an Oscar in 2012 and helped generate a ton of attention to their struggle, including on Capitol Hill.

That summer, Congressman Brad Miller from North Carolina and Senators Richard Burr and Kay Hagen, also from North Carolina, sponsored the Honoring America's Veterans in Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012, also known as the Janie Ensminger Act.

The bill, which passed both the House and the Senate, would provide health care to those who lived, worked, or were in utero at Camp Lejeune for at least 30 days from 1957 to 1987 and had developed one of 15 specific diseases.

President Obama signed the bill into law on August 6, 2012, with Jerry Insminger, Mike Partain, and the two directors of the Simplify documentary standing next to them.

This bill ends a decade-long struggle for those who served at Camp Lejeune.

Sadly, this act alone will not bring back those who've lost,

including Janie Insminger, but it will honor their memory by making a real difference to those who are still suffering.

The Janie Insminger Act was a step in the right direction, but it was far from perfect.

Among the criticisms was that the list of diseases was narrow and excluded many other health effects linked to the toxic exposure.

Also, those seeking medical care would bear the burden of proving their condition was linked to the chemicals.

And if successful, medical care is all they would receive.

The bill did not provide financial compensation or disability benefits for those affected, even though many of those affected could not work or had suffered economic consequences due to treating their disease.

Furthermore, neither the Marine Corps, the Navy, nor the federal government had acknowledged their roles or responsibility for allowing the contamination to continue for decades.

The fight was far from over.

This is not the epilogue.

This is the the end of the first act, Jerry Insminger told the Stars and Stripes military newspaper.

Because we still have not gotten the whole truth, nor the accountability of the people who were responsible for perpetrating this.

That's next.

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What makes it even more, even a stronger disappointment for me is to see the conduct of the leadership of the United States Marine Corps who actually put their signatures on lists of lies that they came out with about this issue.

I mean, it's

mind-boggling.

And, you know, I served as a drill instructor at Paris Island for two and a half years, and

I trained new Marines, over 2,000 of them, and

to see the upper echelon of leadership conduct themselves the way the Marine Corps has conducted themselves in this has been repulsive.

Nearly two years after the Janie Insminger Act was passed, the law granting health care to Camp Lejeune's victims still had not been implemented by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Thousands of former residents who applied for benefits had been denied coverage, ignored, or required to submit excessive documentation.

People are dying, Jerry Insminger told the Tampa Bay Times.

This is government bureaucracy at its finest.

The bill passed through Congress.

The president signed it into law.

Now, an agency doesn't want to do its job and is dragging its feet.

The VA released a statement defending itself.

Processing of medical benefit claims for Camp Lejeune family members will be complex and therefore will require sufficient time and resources.

The delays were projected to continue until at least 2015.

Meanwhile, thousands of service members had tried the alternative route of securing compensation by filing civil claims against the Department of the Navy.

Nearly all of those claims had been denied or ignored as well.

The Navy and the Marine Corps had been consistent in downplaying the contamination's role in health effects, and it had always been their intention to wait for ATSDR to complete its studies before compensating anyone.

In 2013, that was no longer a viable excuse, because after nearly 20 years of waiting, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry completed a state-of-the-art water modeling study, which estimated that contaminant levels in the water at Camp Lejeune were up to 153 times higher than what current standards considered safe.

This report is a vindication and validation of what I've said all along, Jerry Insminger told the media.

There's no doubt that

the people at Camp Lejeune

were poisoned.

Yeah, I can't tell you the level of frustration that has engulfed me over these years.

None of this is going to help Janie.

Janie's dead.

Janie wasn't the only one.

ATSDR confirmed as much in a mortality study also completed in 2013.

The agency said that the rate of all cancers was 10% higher at Camp Lejeune compared to Camp Pendleton, a similar Marine Corps base in California that was not contaminated.

Some cancers, such as liver cancer, kidney cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and multiple myeloma were 40 to 68 percent higher.

It was the most significant evidence yet that the water at Camp Lejeune harmed the health of those who lived there.

Some very startling information about the Marine base down in North Carolina, Camp Lejeune.

A new study points to water contamination at the base.

The CDC says people living on base were more likely to die from about a dozen different kinds of cancer than the rest of us.

Confronted with the ATSDR studies in January 2017, the Department of Veterans Affairs finalized rules that granted presumptive benefits to former Camp Lejeune residents who had been diagnosed with one of eight diseases.

at an estimated cost of $2.2 billion over the next five years.

Claimants could now avoid the arduous process for receiving disability and health benefits from the VA and would simply have to submit evidence of their diagnosis for automatic approval.

Or so they thought.

Instead, the VA continued to require the Camplajeune claims to undergo a subject matter expert review process, a process that no other VA claimants were subjected to.

The VA was hiring independent experts to make decisions on Camplajeune claims based on some unknown criteria without any physical interaction.

Approval rates plummeted to single digits.

So who are these doctors?

The VA remains quiet, but this April 24th letter to a veteran tells us about one, convicted felon Dr.

Sheila Muhammad of Florida.

This is her website advertising her pain clinic.

Records show Dr.

Muhammad pleaded guilty to seven counts of tax fraud in 2015 and went to federal prison for a year.

According to Mike Partain, another one of these experts was arrested for molesting his two sons and stripped of his medical license.

Sometime after he got out of jail, he went to work for the VA.

You can't make this up.

As for the civil claims against the Department of the Navy, those rates plummeted to zero.

In January 2019, the Trump-appointed Navy Secretary Richard Spencer announced that all 4,400 claims totaling $963 billion were being denied because there was no legal basis for paying them.

For starters, the Ferris Doctrine prevents active members of the armed services from bringing a civil tort suit against the federal government based on injuries sustained from military service.

In the Navy's opinion, the Ferris Doctrine applied to the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune.

Secondly, there's a federal law that limits government liability unless actual negligence is found, and that, according to the Navy, had not been established.

Lastly, a recent Supreme Court ruling upheld a North Carolina statute of repos that enforced a 10-year deadline on lawsuits related to toxic exposure.

Camp Lejume, the Navy reminded, was located in North Carolina.

The civil case against the global manufacturing giant CTS Corporation that started here in Asheville has now made it to the U.S.

Supreme Court.

After a cluster of childhood leukemia and other cancers started to appear in the late 90s, residents of a subdivision in Asheville, North Carolina discovered that their homes were built near the former site of a CTS Corporation plant where electronic components used in auto parts and hearing aids were manufactured from 1959 to 1986.

A nearby well contained TCE levels of more than 4,000 times the drinking water standard.

That site was placed on the Superfund national priorities list by the EPA in March 2012, and the residents sued the CTS Corporation more than 25 years after their factory Nasheville had closed.

Federal Superfund law says the clock on litigation starts ticking after a victim discovers they are sick.

However, this law conflicts with a North Carolina statute that imposes a 10-year limit on litigation after the polluter's last action.

In other words, what CTS is arguing is that the statute of limitations can run before you even get hurt, and therefore CTS walks away scot-free.

A federal judge sided with the company.

An appeals court reversed the decision.

And in 2014, the case ended up being heard by the U.S.

Supreme Court.

Victims of Camp Lejeune watched the proceedings with great interest, knowing that the decision would set a precedent for those like them who had been exposed to environmental contamination before they were even born.

The fate of thousands of Marines and others at Camp Lejeune now depends upon the CTS ruling.

Jerry Ensminger, a Marine who lived on the base, lost his nine-year-old daughter Janie to leukemia and has been fighting for justice ever since.

I'll give this up whenever they

pat me in the face with a shovel and blow taps over my dead.

On June 9th, 2014, by a vote of seven to two, the Supreme Court upheld the North Carolina statute that barred the Asheville residents from pursuing compensation from CTS.

This decision is ludicrous, Jerry Insminger told the Huffington Post.

Basically, what this is telling the industry and polluters is: hey, if you're deceitful and devious enough to cross that 10-year finish line, we're going to reward you.

The Navy's post-Supreme Court decision announcement of Camp Lejeune claims dismissals proved this to be true.

Seems Seems like every time we think we've reached the summit and

looks like we're going to start downhill the other side,

you know, they throw something up in front of us.

More than 30 years had passed since Camp Lejeune was placed on the EPA Superfund list and its victims' pursuit of justice was starting over again.

But that pursuit never stopped.

And in 2021, another opportunity presented itself in the form of the most comprehensive legislation yet.

The Camp Lejeune Justice Act would add more than 20 new presumptive conditions related to toxic exposures and get rid of the subject matter expert approval process.

The bill would also remove the time factor for veterans trying to file claims.

And most importantly, the bill would take away the government's immunity, meaning that if the VA didn't make a settlement offer within six months or the claim was denied, then the applicant could file a lawsuit against the U.S.

government.

This is Mike Partain.

The importance of the Camp Lejeune Justice Act is basically

we're not asking for a handout.

We're not asking for people to, you know, oh, give you money or something like that.

What we're asking is for our civil rights to be restored.

Civil rights, you say?

Sounds great.

How much does that cost?

Oh,

never mind.

The Camp Lejeune Justice Act, a bill that would bring relief to survivors.

Now, the bill has since been withdrawn in Congress.

It's due to a lack of funding.

The bill wasn't completely dead, just delayed.

The concept for which Camp Lejeune victims had become all too familiar.

Fortunately, they wouldn't have to wait too long.

In 2022, the Camp Lejeune Justice Act was rolled into even broader legislation called the Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022,

also known as the PACT Act.

In addition to Camp Lejeune victims, the PACT Act would expand and extend health care to veterans who were exposed to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, Agent Orange in Vietnam, and other toxic liberating substances.

The bill also authorized new VA facilities and staffing.

The estimated cost was $280 billion over a decade.

This time, the PACT Act was championed on both sides of the aisle.

No surprise.

These are United States veterans we're talking about here.

What kind of country would just chew up and spit out its bravest warriors like replaceable commodities of a war machine?

The U.S.

House of Representatives passed the PACT Act on March 3, 2022.

The bill was then sent to the Senate for a vote, where it passed on June 16, 2022, with 88 yays to 14 nays, unprecedented bipartisan support.

However, there was a little technical error with the bill dealing with constitutional taxation or something, so it was sent back to the House in July for a re-vote.

No problem.

It passed once again with even broader support and was sent back to the Senate where it died.

In the revote, more than two dozen Republican senators switched their votes to no, including Senators Tom Tillis and Richard Burr, two original sponsors of the bill.

These fiduciary war rewards claimed their change of heart concerned slush fund potential and what portion of the combined $1 trillion DOD and VA budgets would pay for it.

Veterans and supporters of the bill were incensed over the flip-flop.

Comedian Jon Stewart, who has been a vocal advocate about health care for first responders and veterans, was in Washington, D.C.

for the vote.

After it failed, Stewart gave a rousing, righteously angry speech outside the Capitol, which described how most reasonable people felt.

Here it is, edited for brevity.

Ain't this a bitch?

Ain't this a bitch?

America's heroes

who fought in our wars

outside sweating their asses off

with oxygen,

battling all kinds of ailments, while these motherfuckers sit in the air conditioning, walled off from any of it.

They don't have to hear it.

They don't have to see it.

They don't have to understand that these are human beings.

Do you get it yet?

I'm used to the lies.

I'm used to the hypocrisy.

I'm used to the cowardice.

I've been here a long time.

Senate's where accountability goes to die.

These people don't care.

They're never losing their jobs.

They're never losing their health care.

I'm used to all of it, but I am not used to the cruelty.

They passed it.

June 16th, they passed the Pact Act.

84 to 14.

You don't even see those scores in the Senate anymore.

They passed it.

Every one of these individuals that has been fighting for years, standing on the shoulders of Vietnam veterans who have been fighting for years, standing on the shoulders of Persian Gulf War veterans fighting for years, Desert Storm veterans to just get the health care and benefits that they earned from their service.

And I don't care if they were fighting for our freedom.

I don't care if they were fighting for the flag.

I don't care if they were fighting because they wanted to get out of a drug treatment center or it was jail or the army.

I don't give a shit.

They lived up to their oath.

And yesterday, they spit on it.

In abject cruelty.

These people thought they could finally breathe you think their struggles end because the PACT Act passes

all it means is they don't have to decide between their cancer drugs and their house

their struggle continues this bill does a lot more than just give us health care gives them health care gives them benefits lets them live

keeps veterans from going homeless keeps veterans from becoming addicts keeps veterans from committing suicide Senator Toomey's not going to hear that because he won't sit down with this man

because he is a fucking coward.

You hear me?

A coward.

And like I say, I'm used to it.

But this type of cruelty on those that we say we hold up as our most valued Americans,

then what are we?

What the fuck are we?

This is an embarrassment to the Senate, to the country, to the founders, and all that they profess to hold dear.

And if this is America first, then America is fucked.

After several days of veterans protesting at the Capitol, the Senate held another vote for the PACT Act on August 2nd, 2022.

It passed by a vote of 86 to 11.

and was placed on President Biden's desk on August 10th.

Once again, Jerry Insminger stood by the President's side as it was signed.

36 years had passed since Janie had died.

Victims of Camp Lejeune had two years to file claims for compensation after the PACT Act was enacted.

The U.S.

Navy reportedly received over 546,000 submissions by the cutoff date.

By August 2024, according to CNN, settlements had been offered to only 114 of those submissions.

Once again, the U.S.

government was failing to live up to its promise.

Thousands of lawsuits have already been filed in response, as the PACT Act allows.

The Camp Lejeune litigation is expected to produce the most significant civil case in U.S.

history, with claims already topping $3 trillion.

Those lawsuits will be heard eventually.

A lawyer named Andrew Van Arsdale, who was representing thousands of Camp Lejeune victims, told CNN that more than 2,000 of its plaintiffs had already died waiting for a response.

It's almost like the delays are by design or something.

This is Mike Partain.

The government has deep pockets.

There is no incentive to try to bring this to an end, which you see in the normal civil courts.

And there's every incentive to just slow roll it, deny, delay, and keep this going as long as they can.

And eventually, we'll all be dead.

There was some good news on the horizon, however.

Victims of Camp Lejeune's water contamination are celebrating a bittersweet victory.

The EPA announced they are banning two cancer-causing chemicals, both of which were found in the drinking water on the military base years ago.

On December 9th, 2024, the EPA banned all consumer uses and many commercial uses of TCE and PCE.

Jerry Ensminger was delighted with the development, despite it being decades late.

Quote, There exists a long history of political interference supported by industry, of blocking the EPA's ability to protect the environment and public health.

The future of our children and the health of our country vastly outweighs the needs of the almighty dollar.

Oh, really?

Says who?

This week, the Trump administration's new Veterans Affairs Chief sent out a memo announcing plans to cut more than 80,000 VA jobs.

The memo stated Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency will work with the VA on an initial goal, cutting staffing to 2019 levels of just under 400,000 employees.

That's on top of cuts already made.

In 2024, the VA had 9 million veterans enrolled, a record high after the VA expanded during the Biden administration to help younger veterans impacted by burn pits and toxic chemicals.

We finally got that approved, and people are coming forward now to get their benefits.

And now, all those claims that are sitting at the region level to be examined and approved are all frozen because of this.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka DeFormer, aka America is fucked.

For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at SwindledPodcast.

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Hi, my name is Josh from Colorado.

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