For nearly 80 years, recruits reporting to central California’s Fort Ord considered themselves the lucky ones, privileged to live and work amid sparkling seas, sandy dunes and sage-covered hi…
By MARTHA MENDOZA, JULIET LINDERMAN and JASON DEAREN | The Associated Press
Decades later, several Ford Ord veterans who were diagnosed with cancers — especially rare blood disorders — took the question to Facebook: Are there more of us? 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.
But that conclusion was made based on limited data, and before medical science understood the relationship between some of these chemicals and cancer. Waves break in the Pacific Ocean beneath sand dunes at Fort Ord on Thursday, April 29, 2021, in Fort Ord, Calif. Former barracks line a hill at Fort Ord on Thursday, April 29, 2021, in Fort Ord, Calif. Many veterans of Fort Ord who believe their cancers were caused by exposure to chemicals at the base have been denied disability and medical benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“It was incredibly beautiful,” she said. “You have the ocean on one side, and these expansive beaches, and the rolling hills and the mountains behind.” 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.
“It gets on your body, it gets in your face, you get splashed with it, and we’re using pumps to spray this stuff,” he said. “It’s got 250 pounds of pressure and we’re spraying it into the air and it’s atomized.” “The water from the aquifer above leaks down into the aquifer below and the pollution just gets deeper,” said Dan O’Brien, a former board member of the Marina Coast Water District, which took over the Army’s wells in 2001. “The toxic material remains in the soil under where it was dumped. Every time it rains, more of the toxin in the soil leeches down into the water table.”
Contractors initially brought in to clean up the contaminated groundwater were warned not to tell community members what they found in their drinking water, specifically not the news media or even local public agencies, according to a 1985 military memo. TCE “circulates in the body real effectively when you breathe it or drink it,” Burke said. “It’s related strongly to kidney cancer, the development of kidney cancers and suspected in several other cancers.”
When the Colombian doctors couldn’t find a cause, Akey was sent to the U.S. for what she assumed would be a quick trip. She left plants on the mantle, food in the refrigerator and clothes at the dry cleaners.After weeks at the Cleveland Clinic, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer that attacks plasma cells, and is most often detected in elderly African American men. The disease is treatable but has no cure.
He has health insurance through the VA, but when he applied for disability payments that would have allowed him to stop working, Tracy said, his claims were denied — twice. In 1991, the Army surveyed dozens of community members to find out what they knew about groundwater contamination at Fort Ord. Everyone said they were concerned, and no one reported receiving any information from the Army.
William Collins, who is leading Fort Ord’s cleanup for the Army, said he’s never heard of anyone sickened by pollution at the base. Like the VA, Collins points to the 25-year-old study that found no likely human risks from exposure at Fort Ord. He said anyone can request a new, updated study if they want, which is what happened at Camp Lejeune in 2017.LeVonne Stone and her husband, Donald, were living at Fort Ord when the base shut down.
Numerous bills have been introduced seeking to compensate veterans sickened by exposure to toxic chemicals during their service, but nothing significant has passed.
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