Camp Lejeune’s drinking water was contaminated by a combination of off-base dry cleaning chemicals, on-base industrial solvents, and massive fuel leaks that seeped into the groundwater feeding the base’s wells. The contamination lasted roughly three decades, from the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, exposing as many as a million Marines, family members, and civilian workers to toxic chemicals at levels hundreds of times above what is now considered safe.
Two Water Systems, Two Sources
Camp Lejeune is a sprawling Marine Corps base in North Carolina, and during the contamination period it relied on multiple water treatment plants drawing from underground wells. The two systems at the center of the crisis were Tarawa Terrace, which served a housing community for non-commissioned officers and their families, and Hadnot Point, which served the main base area including barracks, hospitals, and schools. Each system was poisoned by different sources.
The Tarawa Terrace system was contaminated primarily by an off-base dry cleaning business called ABC One-Hour Cleaners. From 1964 onward, the shop used a solvent called PCE (tetrachloroethylene, a standard dry cleaning chemical) and improperly disposed of it through a septic tank system. PCE was also buried in the soil outside one of the buildings. These disposal practices created a plume of contamination that migrated through the soil and into the groundwater supplying Tarawa Terrace’s wells. Modeling by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that PCE levels in the Tarawa Terrace system exceeded safe limits starting in November 1957 and stayed dangerously high until the wells were closed in 1985.
The Hadnot Point system had a different and more complex contamination profile. It was polluted with TCE (trichloroethylene, a degreasing solvent widely used in industrial and maintenance operations on the base), along with PCE and refined petroleum products from fuel storage areas.
The Fuel Farm Disaster
One of the largest contamination sources at Hadnot Point was the base’s fuel farm. The first documented fuel leak occurred in 1979, when an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of fuel escaped from an underground valve. But the problem was far worse than anyone initially realized. Navy documents later revealed that between 1988 and 1991, as much as 1.1 million gallons of gasoline was floating on top of the groundwater table at Camp Lejeune. Fuel components like benzene, a known carcinogen, were detected in the finished drinking water at Hadnot Point in late 1985.
The fuel contamination mixed with the industrial solvents already in the groundwater. When chemicals like TCE and PCE break down underground, they can produce other toxic byproducts, including vinyl chloride, another carcinogen. So the cocktail of chemicals people were drinking was not limited to what was originally dumped or spilled.
How Bad the Contamination Got
The numbers are stark. The maximum PCE level found in Tarawa Terrace’s drinking water was 215 micrograms per liter, which is 43 times higher than the current EPA safe drinking water limit of 5 micrograms per liter. At Hadnot Point, TCE reached 1,400 micrograms per liter, a concentration 280 times the current safe limit. Another breakdown product, DCE, was detected at 407 micrograms per liter in January 1985.
Qualitative evidence suggests the contamination at Hadnot Point was significantly worse than at Tarawa Terrace, in part because so many different sources were contributing: fuel leaks, industrial operations, and solvent disposal all fed into the same groundwater that supplied the drinking wells.
Warning Signs That Were Ignored
The contamination was not a sudden discovery. Warning signs appeared years before the most polluted wells were finally shut down. In 1982, Grainger Laboratories, a private lab contracted by the Marine Corps to test the water, flagged serious problems. Chemist Bruce Babson wrote directly to the base’s leadership, warning that chlorinated hydrocarbons were present “at high levels and hence more important from a health standpoint” than the substances they had originally been hired to test for. Babson identified the contaminants as PCE and TCE and traced them back to the well fields supplying the water treatment plants.
The base chemist, Elizabeth Betz, also raised alarms. In an August 1982 letter, she outlined the health effects of exposure to chlorinated solvents in the drinking water, while noting that these pollutants were unregulated at the time. Despite these warnings, the most contaminated wells did not get shut down until February 1985, nearly three years later. Ten potable water wells, including Hadnot Point’s well #602, were taken out of service between November 1984 and February 1985. The Tarawa Terrace system itself was not fully shut down until March 1987.
There was also a cross-contamination incident. During a roughly two-week period from January 27 to February 7, 1985, the Holcomb Boulevard water system (which served another housing area) received contaminated water piped in from Hadnot Point while the Holcomb Boulevard plant was shut down. This meant families who thought they were on a clean water system were temporarily exposed as well.
Health Effects Linked to the Water
Decades of research have connected the contaminated water to a range of serious health problems. The VA now recognizes eight conditions on a presumptive basis for veterans who served at Camp Lejeune or the nearby MCAS New River for at least 30 cumulative days between August 1, 1953, and December 31, 1987. These include adult leukemia, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Parkinson’s disease, and aplastic anemia and other myelodysplastic syndromes.
A broader list of 15 conditions is covered under Camp Lejeune health care benefits, adding breast cancer, esophageal cancer, lung cancer, female infertility, miscarriage, liver disease (hepatic steatosis), kidney damage (renal toxicity), scleroderma (an autoimmune condition that hardens the skin and connective tissue), and neurobehavioral effects such as problems with memory, mood, and concentration. The contamination affected not just service members but their spouses, children, and even babies exposed in utero.
Why It Lasted So Long
Several factors allowed the contamination to persist for roughly 30 years. The chemicals involved, particularly TCE and PCE, are dense liquids that sink through soil and dissolve slowly into groundwater. Once they reach an aquifer, they can remain for decades. The fuel farm leaks added petroleum compounds that spread across the water table in a separate layer. Because federal drinking water standards for these specific chemicals did not exist until 1985 and later, there was no regulatory trigger forcing the base to test for them in the first place.
Even after testing confirmed the contamination in 1982, the response was slow. Congressional testimony from affected families and independent experts later painted a picture of institutional delay, with warnings from laboratory chemists and base personnel failing to produce urgent action. By the time the worst wells were shut down in early 1985, hundreds of thousands of people had spent years drinking, cooking with, and bathing in water laced with industrial solvents and fuel byproducts at concentrations that would be considered extremely dangerous by any modern standard.