Thursday, June 23, 2022 - The Camp Lejeune Justice Act is included in the Honoring Our Pact Act that was approved last week by the US Senate. The CLJA allows for a two-year window for military veterans, civilian-military employees, and their family members to file PFAS cancer lawsuits holding the Department of Defense and the Federal government accountable for negligence. If you lived, worked, or played on or near Camp Lejeune North Caroling you may be eligible to file a claim by contacting a Camp Lejeune cancer attorney. Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT), an author of the CLJA told JDNews.com that the bill will force the military to deal with "an outrageous state of affairs where nearly one million people were exposed to a whole slew of chemicals in the drinking water at Camp Lejeune from the 1950s to 1980s," according to the News. The military is blaming a local dry cleaning business for improperly disposing of a dry cleaning solution that contained toxic PFAS forever chemicals called tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, but experts think that the water contamination was due to using firefighting foam to douse petroleum and jet fuel fires. The CLJA is expected to cost the government and inevitably the taxpayer about 7-8 billion dollars, but the cost could be orders of magnitude higher. People who have developed cancer or who have died from the disease and drank PFAS tap water for at least 30-days starting in 1953 will be able to file a Camp Lejeune cancer lawsuit. Millions of people lived and worked on or near the base during that time and thousands of cancer deaths may be attributed to the area's water contamination. Marines that served in wars from Korea to Iraq have survived those conflicts only to return home and develop life-threatening illnesses from drinking the local tap water. One marine veteran told WNEP.com a story that is typical of what the soldiers went through thinking that once they returned to the States they were in the clear. "It's disappointing. I recovered from the wounds from combat in Vietnam. I'm doing well with those. What I'm suffering from is my time at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Something that is quite the irony when you think about it," the veteran said. Another Marine told his local news how his six-year-old daughter died from leukemia after her mother drank toxic Camp Lejeune drinking water for the duration of her pregnancy. Camp Lejeune marine base was labeled a "major polluter" by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early 1970s based on its toxic waste disposal practices. According to St. Petersburg Times reporter William Levesque, "Records show the Marines dumped oil and industrial wastewater in storm drains. Potentially radioactive materials were buried, including carcasses of dogs used in testing. The camp even located daycare in a former malaria control shop where pesticides were mixed and stored." With all that has occurred at the base for more than three decades, it is hard to imaging the cost to the government will be limited to a few billion dollars.
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