Update on Camp Lejeune By ALLEN G. BREED, MICHAEL BIESECKER and MARTHA WAGGONER | Associated Press – Sat, May 18, 2013

A simple test could have alerted officials that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, long before authorities determined that as many as a million Marines and their families were exposed to a witch's brew of cancer-causing chemicals. But no one responsible for the lab at the base can recall that the procedure — mandated by the Navy — was ever conducted.

The U.S. Marine Corps maintains that the carbon chloroform extract (CCE) test would not have uncovered the carcinogens that fouled the southeastern North Carolina base's water system from at least the mid-1950s until wells were capped in the mid-1980s. But experts say even this "relatively primitive" test — required by Navy health directives as early as 1963 — would have told officials that something was terribly wrong beneath Lejeune's sandy soil.

A just-released study from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well — nearly 4,000 times today's maximum allowed limit of 5 ppb. Given those kinds of numbers, environmental engineer Marco Kaltofen said even a testing method as inadequate as CCE should have raised some red flags with a "careful analyst."

"That's knock-your-socks-off level — even back then," said Kaltofen, who worked on the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York, where drums of buried chemical waste leaked toxins into a local water system. "You could have smelled it." Biochemist Michael Hargett agrees that CCE, while imperfect, would have been enough to prompt more specific testing in what is now recognized as the worst documented case of drinking-water contamination in the nation's history.

Nearly three decades after the first drinking-water wells were closed, victims are still awaiting a final federal health assessment — the original 1997 report having been withdrawn because faulty or incomplete data. Results of a long-delayed study on birth defects and childhood cancers were only submitted for publication in late April. Many former Lejeune Marines and family members who lived there believe the Corps still has not come clean about the situation, and the question of whether these tests were conducted is emblematic of the depth of that mistrust.

In response to a request from The Associated Press, Capt In response to a request from The Associated Press, Capt. Kendra Motz said the Marines could produce no copies of CCE test results for Lejeune, despite searching for "many hours." "Some documents that might be relevant to your question may no longer be maintained by the Marine Corps or the Department of the Navy in accordance with records management policies," she wrote in an email. "The absence of records 50 years later does not necessarily mean action was not taken."

But the two men who oversaw the base lab told the AP they were not even familiar with the procedure. "A what?" asked Julian Wooten, who was head of the Lejeune environmental section during the 1970s, when asked if his staff had ever performed the CCE test. "I never saw anything, unless the (Navy's) preventive medicine people were doing some. I don't have any knowledge of that kind of operation or that kind of testing being done. Not back then." "I have no knowledge of it," said Danny Sharpe, who succeeded Wooten as section chief and was in charge when the first drinking water wells were shut down in the mid-1980s. "I don't remember that at all."

Last year, President Obama signed the Camp Lejeune Veterans and Family Act to provide medical care and screening for Marines and their families, but not civilians, exposed between 1957 and 1987 — although preliminary results from water modeling suggest that date be pushed back at least another four years. The law covers 15 diseases or conditions, including female infertility, miscarriage, leukemia, multiple myeloma, as well as bladder, breast, esophageal, kidney and lung cancer.