The U.S. Senate has approved a measure that would require the Marines to notify thousands of former workers at Camp Lejeune Marine Base about toxins in its drinking water.
Sen. Elizabeth Dole, a Salisbury Republican, sponsored the amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill. It would require the Secretary of the Navy to notify all Marines, dependents and civilian employees assigned to the base between 1958 and 1987 about contaminated drinking wells, Barb Barrett reports.
Recipients would be told they were exposed to toxic drinking water, and asked to fill out a voluntary health survey, the amendment says.
The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has found that babies exposed in utero to the drinking water developed leukemia and other cancers, as well as birth defects, such as spina bifida and cleft palate.
Government estimates show that over three decades, as many as one million people living and working at Camp Lejeune may have been exposed to drinking water contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), dichloroethylene (DCE) tetrachloroethylence (PCE), and in their degraded forms, benzene, methyl chloride and vinyl chloride, according to Dole's office.
These chemicals are found primarily in industrial degreasing solvents, dry cleaning solvents and fuels.
The amendment was co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican. The Senate version of the defense authorization bill must be reconciled with the House version.
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