Camp Lejeune Labeled The Worst Chemical Contamination In US History

Thousands of people may have been poisoned over the span of several decades from contaminated water at a military base. Mike Papantonio is joined by attorney Sara Papantonio to explain what happened.

Find out more about the Camp Lejeune lawsuit at

Subscribe to our podcast

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Find our merchandise at Teespring

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Thousands of people may have been poisoned over the span of several decades from contaminated water at a military base. Joining me to talk about this is attorney Sara Papantonio. This is a huge case. Might be the biggest case in the country right now that, why, why don't you lay it out for us a little bit? Okay.

Well, it absolutely is huge. And, and it hasn't been brought to light really until the last, let's say 10 years. So what happens is there's a camp in North Carolina called Camp Lejeune. It's primarily a Marine base.

Mm-hmm.

From the fifties to the eighties, the base's water supply and everyone who's drinking the water, was contaminated with very, very toxic chemicals, things that we call benzene, TCEs, PCEs. That went on for 30 years. For, so for 30 years, Marines, veterans and their families were ingesting these toxic chemicals without knowing about it.

Yeah.

So just today, 20 years, you know, 50 years later we're really learning just how bad and just what kind of an effect these toxic chemicals are having on those veterans and those families that were stationed there.

What, what's interesting about this, Sara, is every one of the chemicals you just mentioned if you go buy it in, however you go about getting it, it has a skull and crossbones on it. This is what people were drinking. Entire families were coming down with illnesses. Now, first of all, there's 9 million service, 9 million service individuals that were exposed to this, right?

Right. We're, we're talking about the span of 30 years that these people had no idea what they were ingesting. And, and when you're talking about a military base, people are coming and going, so up to 9 million people have been exposed to these dangerous toxins.

Yeah. Vinyl chloride, as you pointed out, benzene, tetrachloroethylene, which is, I mean, all of these things are, this is the type of stuff that they use to kill rats basically. And this is what these folks were drinking. It was detected in 1982. Is that right?

That's correct.

And what did they do in 1982? Did it, did anything activity wise take place after that?

So they became aware of the issue in 1982, and they really didn't do much about it until the late 1980s. And that's when we had a group of scientists come in and actually measured the levels and measure the, the rate or quantity of exposure.

Mm-hmm.

That these people had. And, and I, I hate to say this, but really when you talk about these chemicals and you talk about the, the rate at which they were exposed, it is shocking.

Well, I see one, for example, TCE, which you ever, which you, what you would agree is actually one of the worst that there was the, the, the accepted threshold. In other words, the, the, the number that the EPA gives, which to me is meaningless, because they're a bunch of dopes, but even they say you should not have more than five parts per billion in that water. TCE was 1,400 parts per billion that, that families were drinking. They're bathing in it. They're swimming in it. They're watering their gar, their garden with it. And so entire families have come down with these, these terrible diseases. Right?

Right. And when we talk about the diseases, it's, it's everything in between, you know, a few and far between. So we've got all kinds of cancers. We have all kinds of birth defects, Parkinson's disease, miscarriages. I mean, just terrible, terrible injuries.

Sara, this was, this has been characterized and I wanted, I mean, I know you've been working on this case and it's been characterized in, in two or three articles I've read as the worst chemical contamination in, in US history. And as you look at this, do you, you kind of buy into that?

It absolutely is. I mean, we had a.

#rof #trofire #theringoffire #progressivenews