Kentucky Woman Sues Over Exposure to Tainted Water
By BRETT BARROUQUERE | March 16, 2012
Janetta Johnson spent four-plus decades dealing with a double mastectomy, skin lesions, tooth loss, a complete hysterectomy and chronic severe headaches.
Johnson traces the ailments to the mid-1960s, when, as a young wife and mother, she moved into the Tawara Terrace housing complex at Camp Lejeune, N.C., with her husband, then an active-duty Marine.
[snip]
?I?ve lost just about all my body parts,? Johnson, 71, told The Associated Press.
The U.S. Marine Corps in 2008 notified thousands of people that they may have been exposed to toxic chemicals that contaminated the water supply on the base from the mid-1950s through the 1980s.
?When you start having thousands of people that have the same story, you?ve got to go, ?What?s going on here??? said Johnson?s attorney, Bill Noelker, a former Navy fighter pilot in Danville.
[snip]
For decades, the Marines denied any connection between the chemically laced water and the illnesses. Eventually, the Marines started notifying some former Camp Lejeune residents about possible exposure to contaminated water.
Johnson got her notification in 2008, stating that she and her family may have been contaminated by multiple cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene and trichloroethylene, from roughly 1957 to 1987. Some of the contamination came from an off-base dry cleaner, while the rest came from drums of industrial solvents being buried around the base.
[snip]
Jerry Ensminger, a retired Marine master sergeant who served about 25 years and spent part of that time on the base, said former Camp Lejeune residents have ?a horrendous level? of kidney cancer, non-Hodgkin?s lymphoma and liver cancers. Ensminger, who helped found the group ?The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten? to help other former Camp Lejeune residents, said the Marines have been ?minimizing? to the public the exposure to chemicals for 50 years.
?Why did you place the drinking water supply wells ? near known potential contamination sources?? asked Ensminger, whose 9-year-old daughter, Janey, died of cancer in 1985...
