For at least 35 years, people who lived and worked on Camp Lejeune were drinking dangerously contaminated water.
The chemicals came from leaking fuel tanks, an off-base dry cleaning business and quite possibly other sources as well.
Ingestion of those substances is dangerous and can produce a host of severe illnesses, including leukemia, aplastic anemias, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease.
And indeed, thousands of former service members and base civilians have developed those illnesses and others that may be related to the water contamination.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said last week that at least 4,400 claims totaling $963 billion have been filed.
That’s astonishing and deeply disappointing, although certainly without precedent.
But those are certainly not the only ones that medical research has connected with longterm ingestion of those chemicals —and civilian employees and service members’ families were exposed as well.
Spencer may be right that law limits federal liability for the illnesses.
A North Carolina law puts a 10-year statute of limitations on such cases, a federal law limits government liability unless actual negligence is found, and a Supreme Court decision rules that the federal government isn’t liable for injuries to military members hurt while on duty.
And Congress needs to act as well, providing relief for the thousands of Marines, civilians and families whose lives were tragically disrupted because the government failed to adequately test the water on Camp Lejeune for safety.