The water contamination at Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, was caused by a combination of on-base industrial activities and an off-base dry cleaning business that allowed toxic chemicals to seep into the groundwater feeding the base’s drinking water wells. The contamination began in the early 1950s and continued for roughly three decades, exposing as many as a million military personnel, their families, and civilian workers to water laced with volatile organic compounds far above safe levels.
Four chemicals drove the crisis: trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), vinyl chloride, and benzene. Each entered the water supply through a different path, and the story of how they got there reveals both routine industrial carelessness and a painfully slow institutional response.
Two Water Systems, Two Sources of Contamination
Camp Lejeune’s drinking water came from two main treatment plants, each drawing from its own set of groundwater wells. The contamination at each plant had a distinct cause.
The Tarawa Terrace water treatment plant served family housing on the base. Its primary contaminant was PCE, a solvent widely used in dry cleaning. The source was ABC One-Hour Cleaners, an off-base dry cleaning business located near the base boundary. For years, the shop’s waste disposal practices allowed PCE to drain into the soil, where it migrated through the ground and into the aquifer that fed Tarawa Terrace’s wells. From November 1957 through February 1987, residents of Tarawa Terrace housing received PCE-contaminated drinking water above the EPA’s maximum contaminant level.
The Hadnot Point water treatment plant had a messier contamination profile. It served a large portion of the base, including barracks, workplaces, and schools. Groundwater in the Hadnot Point area was contaminated primarily with TCE, along with PCE and a group of petroleum-based chemicals including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene. The TCE came from multiple on-base industrial operations. Researchers identified at least six distinct source locations tied to buildings where Marines used TCE as a degreasing solvent for cleaning metal parts and equipment. The benzene came from the Hadnot Point fuel farm, where underground storage tanks leaked an estimated 0.9 to 1.6 million gallons of fuel into the subsurface over a roughly 40-year period.
How the Chemicals Reached Drinking Water
All four contaminants are volatile organic compounds, meaning they evaporate easily but also dissolve into groundwater when spilled or dumped on the ground. At Camp Lejeune, the geology made things worse. The sandy coastal soils of eastern North Carolina allowed chemicals to travel relatively quickly from the surface down into the aquifer.
TCE and PCE are both heavier than water. Once they seeped below the surface, they sank through the groundwater rather than floating on top of it, making them especially difficult to detect and contain. Benzene from leaked fuel behaved differently, floating on the water table as a lighter-than-water liquid, but it still dissolved into groundwater at concentrations that exceeded safe limits during the early 1980s.
The contaminated groundwater was then pumped up through the base’s drinking water wells, processed through the treatment plants (which were not designed to remove these chemicals), and distributed directly to taps in homes, barracks, mess halls, and other facilities.
Why It Took So Long to Stop
The contamination likely began in the early 1950s, but it wasn’t identified until 1982, and the most contaminated wells weren’t shut down until 1985. That three-year gap between discovery and action is one of the most scrutinized parts of the story.
In August 1982, a chemist named Bruce Babson at Grainger Laboratories, which had been contracted by the Marine Corps to test the base’s water, wrote to Camp Lejeune’s commanding general. He reported that chlorinated hydrocarbons were showing up at high levels in the water and were “more important from a health standpoint” than the routine compounds they’d been hired to measure. Nine days later, a supervisory chemist in Camp Lejeune’s own quality control lab confirmed the findings: tetrachloroethylene in the Tarawa Terrace system, trichloroethylene and low levels of tetrachloroethylene in the Hadnot Point system.
Despite these warnings, the contaminated wells remained in service. It took more than two additional years, and the discovery of benzene (a known carcinogen with no safe level of exposure), before the Navy or Marine Corps moved to close the wells. Between November 1984 and February 1985, ten drinking water wells were finally shut down, more than four years after base officials first learned about the toxic contamination. The last contaminated wells in the Tarawa Terrace system weren’t closed until February 1987.
What People Were Exposed To
The four chemicals found in Camp Lejeune’s water are all linked to serious health problems. TCE and PCE are industrial solvents associated with kidney cancer, liver cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, among other conditions. Benzene is one of the most well-established causes of leukemia and other blood cancers. Vinyl chloride, which can form when TCE breaks down in groundwater, is linked to liver cancer and other diseases.
What made Camp Lejeune especially damaging was the duration of exposure. This wasn’t a single spill that contaminated the water for days or weeks. People living and working on the base drank, cooked with, and bathed in contaminated water for years, in some cases for their entire time stationed there. Pregnant women and young children were among those exposed, and studies have since connected the contamination to birth defects and childhood cancers in addition to adult diseases.
Who Was Responsible
No single actor caused the entire disaster. The off-base dry cleaner was responsible for the PCE in the Tarawa Terrace system. On-base military operations, including maintenance shops and the fuel farm, were responsible for the TCE, benzene, and related chemicals in the Hadnot Point system. But the broader failure was institutional. Industrial solvents and fuel were handled with the casual disposal practices common across the military and private industry in the 1950s through 1970s, when the health risks of groundwater contamination were poorly understood or ignored.
The more pointed criticism centers on the response after 1982. Once the contamination was identified, the decision to keep the wells operating for years exposed tens of thousands of additional people to chemicals that the base’s own chemists had flagged as a health concern. Congressional investigators later characterized this delay as a failure of leadership rather than a failure of science. The data was there. The action wasn’t.