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. Local utilities, the Defense Department and some in the Department of Veterans Affairs insist Fort Ord’s water is safe and always has been.īut that conclusion was made based on limited data, and before medical science understood the relationship between some of these chemicals and cancer. Indeed, the concentrations of the toxics are tiny, measured in parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of an immediate poisoning. There is rarely a way to directly connect toxic exposure to a specific individual’s medical condition. The AP also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed military, medical and environmental scientists. The Associated Press interviewed nearly two dozen of these veterans for this story and identified many more. Soon, the group grew to hundreds of people who had lived or served at Fort Ord and were concerned that their health problems might be tied to the chemicals there. Included in that pollution were dozens of chemicals, some now known to cause cancer, found in the base’s drinking water and soil.ĭecades later, several Fort Ord veterans who were diagnosed with cancers - especially rare blood disorders - took the question to Facebook: Are there more of us?
But in 1990, four years before it began the process of closing as an active military training base, Fort Ord was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the most polluted places in the nation.
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