Marine who dumped toxins felt illness was payback

Marine who dumped toxins felt illness was payback
May 18, 2013
USA Today

Ron Poirier, marine who dumped toxins onto the ground, felt cancer was payback for contributing to the worst drinking water contamination in the country's history.

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (AP) — Ron Poirier couldn't escape the feeling that his cancer was somehow a punishment.

As a young Marine electronics technician at Camp Lejeune in the mid-1970s, the Massachusetts man figured he'd dumped hundreds of gallons of toxic solvents onto the ground. It would be decades before he realized that he had unknowingly contributed to the worst drinking water contamination in the country's history — and, perhaps, to his own premature death.

"It's just a terrible thing," the 58-year-old veteran told the Associated Press shortly before succumbing to esophageal cancer at a Cape Cod nursing facility on May 3.

"Once I found out, it's like, 'God! I added to the contamination.'"

The cancer that killed Poirier is one of more than a dozen diseases and conditions with recognized links to a toxic soup brewing beneath the sprawling coastal base between the 1950s and mid-1980s, when officials finally ordered tainted drinking-water wells closed. As many as a million Marines, family members and civilian employees are believed to have been exposed to several cancer-causing chemicals.
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