FORT ORD NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. (AP) — 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 hills.
But there was an underside, the dirty work of soldiering.
Recruits tossed live grenades into the canyons of “Mortar Alley,” sprayed soapy
chemicals on burn pits of scrap metal and solvents, poured toxic substances
down drains and into leaky tanks they buried underground.
When it rained, poisons percolated into aquifers from which
they drew drinking water.
Through the years, soldiers and civilians who lived at the
U.S. Army base didn’t question whether their tap water was safe to drink.
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. Included in that pollution were dozens of chemicals, some now known to
cause cancer, found in the base’s drinking water and soil.
Decades later, several Fort Ord veterans who were diagnosed
with cancers — especially rare blood disorders — took the question to Facebook:
Are there more of us?
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.
The Associated Press interviewed nearly two dozen of these
veterans for this story and identified many more. The AP also reviewed
thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed military, medical and
environmental scientists.
There is rarely a way to directly connect toxic exposure to
a specific individual’s medical condition. Indeed, the concentrations of the
toxics are tiny, measured in parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels
of an immediate poisoning. Local utilities, the Defense Department and some in
the Department of Veterans Affairs insist Fort Ord’s water is safe and always
has been.
No comments:
Post a Comment