Federal health officials are conducting a new study to determine whether veterans once stationed at a now-closed California military base were exposed to dangerously high levels of cancer-causing toxins.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision comes nine months after an Associated Press investigation found that drinking water at Fort Ord contained toxic chemicals and that hundreds of veterans living at the base off the coast Central California in the 1980s and 1990s…
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Federal health officials are conducting a new study to determine whether veterans once stationed at a now-closed California military base were exposed to dangerously high levels of cancer-causing toxins.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision comes nine months after an Associated Press investigation found that drinking water at Fort Ord contained toxic chemicals and that hundreds of veterans living at the base off the coast Central California in the 1980s and 1990s developed rare diseases and terminal cancers of the blood.
In a letter last Friday to Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., CDC Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Director Patrick Breysse wrote that “there are sufficient data and scientific reasons for ATSDR to reassess the health risks associated with historical exposures to drinking water in Fort Ord.” Porter had requested a new study in February, two days after the AP published her story.
The agency did not immediately respond to a request for more details about the new study.
Army veteran Julie Akey, who lived in Fort Ord and was diagnosed in 2016 at the age of 46 with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer, said she is “confident that science will show that our high rate of cancers and diseases are not a coincidence. ”
Akey started a Facebook group for Fort Ord veterans with cancer. The number has grown to nearly 1,000.
In 1990, four years before the process of closing it down as an active military base began, Fort Ord was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the most polluted places in the nation. Included in that contamination were dozens of chemicals, some of which are now known to cause cancer, that were found in the base’s drinking water and soil.
AP’s review of public records showed the Army knew the chemicals had been improperly dumped at Fort Ord for decades. Even after the contamination was documented, the Army downplayed the risks.
One of those chemicals was trichlorethylene, or TCE, which was known as a miracle degreaser and was in heavy use at Fort Ord. The Army found TCE in the Fort Ord pits on 43 separate occasions between 1985 and 1994, and 18 of those tests showed that TCE exceeded legal safe limits.
The new health study will update one conducted more than 25 years ago. ATSDR’s previous public health study, published in 1996, found that toxins in the soil and aquifers below Fort Ord likely pose no past, present, or future threat to those who live there.
But that conclusion was based on limited data provided by the military and before medical science understood the link between some of the chemical exposures and cancer, particularly TBI. Four years after ATSDR’s evaluation, in 2000, the Department of Health and Human Services added TCE to its list of chemicals that cause cancer.
It’s unclear how long and at what concentrations TCE may have been in the water before 1985, when hundreds of thousands of people lived on the base. And TCE was not the only problem. The EPA has identified more than 40 “chemicals of concern” in soil and groundwater.
The Department of Veterans Affairs told the AP earlier this year that contamination was “within the allowable safe range” in areas that provided drinking water.
Veterans who lived in Fort Ord and have since tried to obtain medical care or disability benefits through the VA based on their cancers have been repeatedly denied. Akey and others hope the new study will find a link between their cancers and their time at Fort Ord, allowing them to receive care and benefits.
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Contact the AP Global Investigative Team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.
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