Camp Lejeune is a major Marine Corps base in North Carolina, but it’s best known today for one of the worst drinking water contamination disasters in U.S. history. For roughly 34 years, from August 1953 through December 1987, toxic chemicals laced the base’s water supply, exposing as many as a million military personnel, their families, and civilian workers to cancer-causing compounds. That contamination, the health consequences that followed, and the long legal fight for justice are what most people associate with the name Camp Lejeune.
The Base Itself
Camp Lejeune sits along the coast of Jacksonville, North Carolina, and has served as one of the Marine Corps’ primary installations for decades. Its location near the Atlantic coastline makes it a natural fit for amphibious training, which remains a core part of Marine Corps operations. The base has housed tens of thousands of active-duty Marines and their families at any given time, with eight separate water distribution systems supplying drinking water to housing units, barracks, schools, and other facilities across the installation.
What Contaminated the Water
Three of those water systems, serving the majority of family housing on base, were contaminated with volatile organic compounds. Each system had a different source of pollution.
The Hadnot Point water treatment plant was the most broadly contaminated. Its main pollutant was trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial degreaser. The contamination came from multiple sources on base: leaking underground fuel storage tanks and various waste disposal sites. The Tarawa Terrace system had a different problem entirely. Its primary contaminant was tetrachloroethylene (PCE), a dry cleaning solvent, and the source was traced to ABC One-Hour Cleaners, a privately owned dry cleaning business operating just off base. The Holcomb Boulevard system was also affected.
These aren’t trace chemicals with uncertain effects. TCE and PCE are established carcinogens. People on base were drinking, cooking with, and bathing in this water for years. Many residents reported that the water sometimes had an unusual taste or smell, but no action was taken until well testing in the 1980s revealed the scope of the problem.
Who Was Exposed
The official contamination window runs from August 1, 1953, to December 31, 1987. During those 34 years, service members rotated through the base on deployments typically lasting two to three years. Their spouses and children lived on base with them. Civilian employees worked there daily. Pregnant women drank the water. Infants were bathed in it and mixed it into formula.
The Department of Veterans Affairs considers anyone who lived, worked, or served at Camp Lejeune or the nearby Marine Corps Air Station New River for at least 30 cumulative days during that period to have been exposed. That threshold also covers children who were in utero while their mothers lived on base.
Health Consequences Linked to the Water
The VA recognizes eight conditions as “presumptive,” meaning veterans don’t need to individually prove their illness was caused by the water. Those conditions are: adult leukemia, aplastic anemia and other bone marrow disorders, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and Parkinson’s disease.
The Parkinson’s connection is particularly striking. A study published in JAMA Neurology found that veterans stationed at Camp Lejeune had a 70% higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease compared to veterans stationed elsewhere. That elevated risk held up even after researchers controlled for other factors.
The effects extended to children born on the base. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) studied birth defects among children whose mothers were exposed to the contaminated water during pregnancy. The results suggested associations between TCE and benzene exposure and neural tube defects, which include spina bifida and anencephaly. The risk of neural tube defects increased with higher levels of TCE exposure during the first trimester. The study did not find an increased risk of oral clefts like cleft lip or cleft palate.
Beyond the official presumptive list, former residents have reported elevated rates of other cancers, autoimmune disorders, infertility, and miscarriages. Many of these associations are still being studied, but the pattern across such a large exposed population has been difficult to dismiss.
The Legal Fight for Compensation
For decades, affected veterans and families had almost no legal recourse. North Carolina’s statute of limitations and federal sovereign immunity laws effectively blocked lawsuits against the government. That changed on August 10, 2022, when the Camp Lejeune Justice Act was signed into law. The act allowed individuals exposed to the contaminated water between August 1953 and December 1987 to file claims for damages directly with the U.S. government.
The law set a two-year filing deadline of August 10, 2024. Hundreds of thousands of claims were submitted before that cutoff. Processing those claims has been slow, and many claimants are still waiting for resolution. The sheer volume of cases and the difficulty of connecting specific diagnoses to exposures that occurred decades ago have made the process contentious.
Cleanup and Current Status
Camp Lejeune is listed as a federal Superfund site, and environmental remediation has been underway for years. As of recent reporting, 40 separate areas on base are being investigated or actively cleaned up. The former base dry cleaning facility, designated Site 88, had a formal cleanup plan issued in 2019, with treatment systems installed in 2020 that are expected to operate through at least 2026. Those systems use a combination of techniques to break down or contain the chemical plumes in groundwater.
A newer concern has also emerged. A base-wide assessment completed in 2020 identified potential sources of PFAS, sometimes called “forever chemicals,” on the installation. A 2022 inspection recommended that 51 additional areas undergo further PFAS investigation. Twelve sites are currently being tested to determine how far PFAS contamination extends in soil and groundwater. So far, data indicate that PFAS-contaminated groundwater has not migrated off base, but investigations are ongoing.
The Navy employs contractors to conduct sampling and monitoring across the base, with all work plans reviewed and approved by both the EPA and North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality. The drinking water supplied to current residents is treated and monitored under modern standards, but the environmental legacy of decades of contamination continues to require active management.