Iron Mountain vet wants to spread word about base’s polluted water

Hank Murphy

      It had been 19 years since Pat Flynn left Camp Lejeune on the North Carolina seaboard. He was waiting at a school bus stop in Kingsford last year when a man, also a former Marine who spent time at the base, asked him a strange question:  “Hey, did they contact you?”

      Since leaving Camp Lejeune as a Marine lance corporal in 1989, Flynn had no idea that for two years (1985-1987) he’d been using water polluted with industrial solvents and known carcinogens for drinking, cooking and bathing.

      Now the 48-year-old Iron Mountain resident and father of two wants to make sure that any other Marine, civilian or Navy corpsman who spent time at the base between the years of 1957 through 1987 knows that Camp Lejeune’s water was highly contaminated. He specifically is interested in spreading the word to former base personnel now living in northeast Wisconsin or the Upper Peninsula.

      In the early 1980s, two water supply systems at the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune were found to be contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchlorothylene (PCE), both industrial solvents, as well as other contaminants, including benzene and vinyl chloride. The large Marine base is the site of what some scientists call the worst public drinking-water contamination in the nation's history. An estimated 500,000 to 1 million people — including Marines and family living on base housing — drank, bathed and cooked using the water.

      Federal limits on TCE and PCE are 5 parts per billion. The highest level of Camp Lejeune water for TCE was about 1,400 parts per billion. PCE was found at levels exceeding 200 parts per billion. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reports that not all people exposed to TCE or PCE will experience health problems. Still, illnesses associated with people who drank water contaminated with TCE or PCE include non-Hodgkins lymphoma, bladder cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer. For those who worked with TCE or PCE, the list of associated illnesses includes Hodgkins disease, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, cervical cancer, kidney cancer, liver/biliary cancer, ovarian cancer, prostrate cancer and neurological effects.

      As an infantryman, Flynn and his fellow Marines drank large quantities of water at Camp Lejeune, he said.

      “When you’re going on a 25-27 mile hump, you drink a lot of water. They made you drink water, they watched you drink water,” he said. “We really didn’t know (it was polluted). The water just tasted bad; it tasted kind of nasty.”

      Flynn said he has been sick “for quite a long time now with different issues. I had no idea it was anything other than just being a natural thing.”

      His health problems include neurological disorders, osteoarthritis, high liver enzymes, a cyst on his kidney, gastrointestinal ailments and problems with his esophagus. Flynn said he cannot say with certainty that his health problems are related to the water at Camp Lejeune. In fact, most scientific studies are inconclusive.

.     What is conclusive, however, is that a large cluster of former Marines based at Camp Lejeune have developed breast cancer. According to the St. Petersburg Times, 40 Marines or sons of Marines who lived on base have developed breast cancer as of Oct. 1. A man has just a 1-in-1,000 lifetime chance of getting male breast cancer. Only 1,900 a year are diagnosed with the disease. The cluster of male breast cancer in men based at Camp Lejeune has been the subject of Congressional hearings and reports by national news organizations.

      Flynn said he’s not angry with the Marine Corps for his exposure to the contaminants, but he blames the Corps for not informing service men and women and their families of the potential risk.

      “My thought is it’s not their fault the stuff got into the system. It’s their fault that they never got to us to let us know. I’m concerned not only for myself but for the other Marines out there. I never knew about it until a guy came up to me at a bus stop” and asked if the IRS had contacted him through his Marine pay records, he said. “I guess there’s no reason to get angry. There’s nothing I can do now. If you got it, you got it. There’s nothing you can do about it now. It’s too late.”

      Flynn, however, said it isn’t too late to join the Camp Lejeune registry. He urges anyone who served at the base prior to 1987 to register. So far, more than 135,000 people have registered, including 3,695 from Michigan and 2,529 from Wisconsin.