In the course of their work preparing for battle, they spilled solvents into the base’s drains, sloughed chemical sludge into underground storage tanks and discarded 55-gallon drums of caustic material in the base landfill, according to a 1982 hazardous waste inventory report.Ĭurt Gandy, a former airplane mechanic, recalls being routinely doused with toxic chemicals from the 1970s to the 1990s. Soldiers and their families lived in houses and apartments connected to its water system, and civilians worked at its airfields, hospitals and other facilities. It supported several thriving small towns on a piece of coastal land the size of San Francisco. Soldiers are often stationed at different bases during their years of military service, but neither the Defense Department nor the VA has systematically tracked toxic exposures at various locations.įort Ord’s primary mission was training troops who deployed to World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. Like Fort Ord, Camp Lejeune began closing contaminated wells in the mid-’80s. Men developed breast cancer, and pregnant women tended to have children with higher rates of birth defects and low birth weight. Servicemembers there were found by federal epidemiologists to have higher mortality rates from many cancers, including multiple myeloma and leukemia. base: Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and only during a 35-year window, between 1953 to 1987. To date, the military has only acknowledged troops’ health could have been damaged by drinking contaminated water at a single U.S. Fort Ord is 25 years into its cleanup as a federal Superfund site, and it’s expected to continue for decades. Dozens have contaminated groundwater, from Fort Dix in New Jersey to Adak Naval Air Station in Alaska. She’d learn this decades later, as she tried to understand how, at just 46 and with no family history of blood cancers, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.ĭespite the military’s claims that there aren’t any health problems associated with living and serving at Fort Ord, nor hundreds of other shuttered military bases, almost every closure has exposed widespread toxic pollution and required a massive cleanup. Among the contaminants were cancer-causing chemicals including trichloroethylene, also known as the miracle degreaser TCE. ![]() What she didn’t know at the time was that the ground under her feet, and the water that ran through the sandy soil into an aquifer that supplied some of the base’s drinking water was polluted. ![]() “You have the ocean on one side, and these expansive beaches, and the rolling hills and the mountains behind.” By then the base was mostly closed but still housed troops for limited purposes. And so the 25-year-old was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and lived at Fort Ord as a soldier. She enlisted in the Army on the condition that she could learn a new language. population.Īkey, now 50, arrived at Fort Ord in 1996 with a gift for linguistics. And in the region that includes Fort Ord, veterans have a 35 percent higher rate of multiple myeloma diagnosis than the general U.S. Veterans in general have higher blood cancer rates than the general population, according to VA cancer data. The CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 1996 that there were no likely past, present or future risks from exposures at Fort Ord.īut that conclusion was made based on limited data, and before medical science understood the relationship between some of these chemicals and cancer. Even after the contamination was documented, the Army downplayed the risks.Īnd ailing veterans are being denied benefits based on a 25-year-old health assessment. The AP’s review of public documents shows the Army knew that chemicals had been improperly dumped at Fort Ord for decades. ![]() and abroad, almost everywhere the military has set foot, and the federal government is still learning about the extent of both the pollution and the health effects of its toxic legacy. But the VA’s own hazardous materials exposure website, along with scientists and doctors, agree that dangers do exist for military personnel exposed to contaminants.
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