Marine Corps Records on Camp Lejeune Site Missing

Marine Corps Records on Camp Lejeune Site Missing
By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES

Published: Saturday, May 21, 2011
Some soil at Camp Lejeune, N.C., was so saturated with fuel and chemicals by the late 1980s, the Marine Corps knew it was critical to test the air in nearby buildings for carcinogens.

"We want to be sure that there are no compounds present inside the work spaces in these buildings — which could have a long-term chronic adverse health effect on occupants," base environmental engineer Bob Alexander told the public in 1988.

Testing, he said, would begin "in the very near future."

But nothing in the vast collection of public records detailing one of the nation's worst contamination sites shows the Marine Corps kept that promise.

The only indoor air quality testing reflected in records occurred a decade or more later. And by then, fuel odors were so bad that five buildings would be demolished.

After weeks of searching their files, Corps officials acknowledged to the St. Petersburg Times that they could find no documentation that testing was completed before the late 1990s.
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Marine Corps Records on Camp Lejeune Site Missing