Between 1953 and 1987, hundreds of thousands of United States Marines and their families stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina were exposed to contaminated drinking water.
Those people — who now live all over the country, including in Northeast Ohio — have a final chance to be compensated before the window to file a claim closes in August.
Kristin Diaz has a closet at her home in Akron. Inside, there’s a picture of her husband, George Diaz, with his fists up in a fighter’s pose. There's also a milk crate with seven binders in it.
“Those are all his medical records and his VA records. So these go into there, and this is where I carry him around whenever I have to go someplace to represent him," she said.
George Diaz, a Marine and truck driver, died 13 years ago of acute myeloid leukemia after developing myelodysplastic syndrome, a condition in which red blood cells are improperly formed.
In the hospital, Diaz got a call from a family member who told him about the contamination at Camp Lejeune.
“George automatically was like, 'Kristin, this is it.' And I honestly didn't believe him. I was a Marine myself. We were trained that you took care of your mates. You never left anyone behind," Diaz said.
In the early 1980s, the U.S. Marine Corps discovered a dry cleaner had improperly disposed of industrial chemicals, which leached into the water supply where George Diaz and many other Marines and their family members lived.
Federal officials estimated more than a million people could have been affected in the 30-plus years the water had been contaminated.
Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist at University Hospitals, says long-term exposure to the chemicals found in the water supply, trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), vinyl chloride (VC) and benzene, has been shown to cause liver damage and cancer.
“At Camp Lejeune, there was a very high incidence of breast cancer in men, which is a very low incidence in the general population. These kind of things show that, or suggest that there is probably some sort of link there," Marino said.
“I just think that it sounds so grandiose, but the world should know. So that we advocate for things that need to be advocated for, for our own protection.”Kristin Diaz
'Drinking it all the time'
In 2022, Congress passed a law which allowed Camp Lejeune victims two years to sue for damages in federal court, as long as they had spent at least 30 days on the base and had a qualifying medical condition.
People who lived on the Camp Lejeune base and who now have health conditions have until Aug. 10, 2024, to file their claim.
So far, at least 160,000 people have already filed claims. Diaz has filed a claim on behalf of her late husband. So has Cleveland resident Geoff Funk.
Funk was stationed at Camp Lejeune for over a year in the early 1970s and developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He remembered making drinks from the tap water during handball games he and his buddies would play.
“So you give a guy five bucks and he'd bring back three Cokes or whatever, and the Cokes were made with water, too. It was just syrup with the water, so you were drinking it all the time," Funk recalled.
The chemotherapy treatments damaged the nerves outside his brain and spinal cord, which made his feet so sore that he had to quit his job. He now relies on a rolling office chair to move around the kitchen while he cooks.
Retirement has not been what Funk expected. Because of his conditions, he can’t take his six grandchildren to the zoo and he’s been battling depression. He said compensation would help, but he doesn’t expect it will improve his life much.
“I got my grandkids. I just look at it like I'd pay for some other college with it. I can't do anything with it anymore. You know, I'm stuck here. I can’t move much," he said.
Feeling stuck is also something Kristin Diaz has been dealing with, as she’s fought Veterans Affairs for a decade to receive compensation after her husband’s death.
Diaz hopes she'll finally be able to put away her husband’s binders, but she worries about the thousands of people who stayed at the base who are seniors now, and may not bother with a lawsuit, instead shouldering their pain.
“I just think that it sounds so grandiose, but the world should know," she said. "So that we advocate for things that need to be advocated for, for our own protection.”
