Joan Palumbo wasn’t told the danger she was in when she stepped under the showerhead in her bathroom in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
She wasn’t told about the toxins mixing into her daughter’s food every time she blended formula with water from the kitchen sink.
Or that cooking her own food in that same water would eventually lead to her death.
Palumbo didn’t know that in 1953, toxic chemicals had begun seeping through the ground into two of the eight water treatment plants on Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps base near Jacksonville where she and her husband, Fred, lived in the Tarawa Terrace neighborhood.
Trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, benzene and vinyl chloride, deadly chemicals known to cause health problems including miscarriages, birth defects, cancers and childhood leukemia, leaked from underground fuel storage tanks, an off-base dry cleaning facility, industrial area spills and waste disposal sites. The contamination of the base’s waters continued through 1987 and mostly affected the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point neighborhoods.
It is estimated that more than 1 million people were likely exposed to the toxic waters on Camp Lejeune. Beginning in August, half of those people had filed claims asking for the government to make right what happened to its Marines and their families — but no offers from the government have been extended. And without those offers, the claimants have been forced into litigation –…
