Facing an Aug. 10 deadline, hundreds of thousands of Marine Corps veterans, family members, and others have filed claims in one of the biggest toxic exposure cases in the nation’s history.
From 1953 to 1987, tainted water on Camp Lejeune, N.C. was laced with chemicals that have been linked to a host of illnesses, including several forms of cancer and Parkinson’s Disease.
Though some of the toxins were found in the water by the early 1980s, it took years of efforts by a handful of veterans and attorneys, then finally an act of Congress in 2022 to open the two-year window for claims.
Under the law, until that Aug. 10 deadline, those whose illnesses can be linked to the water can file a claim with the Navy seeking a settlement. If they are turned down, don’t get a response within six months, or don't agree with the government's settlement offer, they can file suit.
Days before the deadline, more than 320,000 claims had been filed. A Navy spokesman said some are duplicates that will be weeded out.
But more are coming in.
Ed Bell is among hundreds of plaintiffs attorneys in the case. He leads a small team of lawyers appointed by the court to help manage the case, and he was earlier involved in drafting the law that allowed the claims process and lawsuits.
He says despite heavy advertising by some attorneys – which has appeared on on television, radio, and online for more than a year — his firm has continued to field queries from potential claimants in the days before the deadline.
“We've had a flurry of calls lately," Bell said. “And there is a lot of unknown out there. And while some people complain about the lawyer advertising, sometimes that advertising itself is confusing. So I think there are a lot of people out there that don't fully appreciate the impact of Aug. 10.”
Claims can be filed online, and they don’t require a lawyer. The Navy can respond to claims with a settlement offer.
Filing a claim is a required step, even for people who end up suing later on.
So far, nearly 2,000 claimants have filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Eastern North Carolina, which is tasked with hearing the cases.
While the claims deadline is a major milestone in the case, there's also recently been another. The court has selected the first 25 plaintiffs who will get their day in court as test cases. Those so-called “bellwether trials” can be an important step toward bringing such huge legal battles to a close.
“In principle, it can mark the beginning of the end, because it's the moment where we start to figure out what these cases are genuinely worth,” said University of North Carolina law professor Mark Weidemaier.
The goal is to settle the vast majority of cases out of court. Last year, one of the four federal judges handling the cases said trying them all would take hundreds of years, and given the age and health issues of many plaintiffs, the process needed to move quickly.
“Everyone understands in a mass tort like this that there are so many cases that people just can't expect each and every one of them to be tried,” Weidemaier said. “So the idea behind bellwether trials is that if we pick a really representative subset of cases, we can produce some good information about what will happen if you take the others to trial, and then the parties and their lawyers can take that information, and they can use it to settle all the others.”
He said in choosing bellwether cases, both sides often angle for an advantage, with plaintiffs attorneys looking for strong cases that seem likely to result in large awards, and the defense picking weak ones it thinks may yield relatively low settlements.
The first bellwether plaintiffs have one of five specific illnesses. Bell said the goal of the plaintiffs attorneys is to get variation within each disease, from those who were treated and cured to those in advanced stages. The test case settlements can’t be too high for the government to accept, nor so low people decline to settle and demand a trial.
“If you can't get 80 to 90 percent of the people that accept the offers, then there's something wrong with the offer," he said.
Weidemaier says bellwether settlements can keep plaintiffs’ hopes realistic, so they listen to their attorneys and settle rather than demanding an award of an unlikely size. They also help ease the frustration some plaintiffs feel about not actually getting their own day in court to confront the people or institutions they believe wronged them.
And some of the Lejeune plaintiffs do want trials. But not Catherine Songer, one of Bell’s clients.
Singer, 70, has Parkinson’s disease, which among other symptoms is making it hard for her to control her muscles.
“There's hundreds of thousands of people affected by this water, and I think my story will be told by somebody," she said. “It might not necessarily be me, and I'm one of this large group, and so I don't feel the need to go in front of a judge.”
Songer still lives near Camp Lejeune with her husband, who retired as a colonel after nearly 30 years in the service.
She was head of the natural science division at Coastal Carolina Community College until her last day on the job ten years ago, when her symptoms put her in an ambulance.
“I can't teach anymore. I was an editor for a magazine. I can't do that anymore. I love to kayak. I love being with students. I can't do that anymore," she said.
The disease causes problems with parts of the body controlled by the nervous system, including muscle movement. For many it leads to dementia.
Several times, Songer repeated that she’s "not a quitter." Two years ago, she took the bold step of walking into a boxing studio and taking up the sport, in part to help manage her symptoms. She boxes now twice a week.
“And I work in the yard," she said. “I try to do things to keep me robust and the progression of the disease not to go as fast.”
Songer said she, her husband, and their son and daughter lived on base in the mid-1980s, arriving a few years after tests started finding contaminants in the water.
“I felt betrayed, because at that point, when we moved in, they knew the water was toxic," she said. "I have pictures of the kids and I playing on the driveway with like a sprinkler party, using the water to play in on the driveway.”
“We watered our garden with the water and ate those crops, so to speak, out of the backyard. We drank a lot of water."
The government has begun settling at least some claims outside the courts..
At the beginning of August, it had made offers in 109 cases, and 64 were accepted, with settlements averaging about $250,000. The size of the settlements varied, based on the illness, the amount of exposure, and whether the claim was filed on behalf of someone who had died. The highest possible was $550,000.
Songer says she's not interested in a settlement. If she met the criteria, she would be eligible for a $200,000 payment.
“My life is worth more than that,” she said.
The point isn’t to score a huge settlement that makes her wealthy, she said.
Her disease isn’t curable. And she’s resigned herself to not having the kind of active retirement she had envisioned, with lots of travel and hiking and kayaking. No settlement will fix that, she said. But it’s important because she’s also worried about what could happen if one of her children gets sick from the water, too.
“My son has some esophagus problems, and my daughter has thyroid problems. So I'm not out to get rich," she said. "I was just trying to save my family.”
Bell calls the number of claimants who have accepted the Navy’s offers low and a sign the government isn’t offering amounts that can be considered serious.
“We have people who have, for example, kidney cancer, who have spent decades on dialysis machines because they've lost both kidneys, and for them to sit there and offer $300,000, that's just such an insult these people,” he said.
“Most of the clients are military families, and they were willing to give their lives for their country, to risk their lives, and now all of a sudden, the same government is saying … we don't care about you. We're going to try to get away with what we did by paying so little,” Bell said.
The bellwether cases are expected to go to trial late this year or early next year. But the clock is ticking. Many of those affected have illnesses that could shorten their lives, and many are elderly. Bell’s law firm has clients as old as 90.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
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