According to an NBC News report, over a 20-year period about 3,000 gallons of chemical waste leaked out of damaged storage drums and poisoned the groundwater.
For more than 20 years the US Navy has been aware of multiple environmental contaminants at one of their bases, the news agency said. One seemingly healthy veteran recently died last month after being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia which can be caused by radiation exposure, the National Cancer Institute said.
Gilbert Wyand, the veteran, had lived and worked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California in the 1980s. After Wyand’s cancer diagnosis, his son found a Navy report published in June of 2023 that shows the Navy has been aware of radiation at the shipyard for at least two decades.
Initial contamination at the shipyard occurred from the 1940s to the 1960s due to workers disposing of toxic waste, according to the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC) report that Wyand’s son found. Following that, between the 1960s and until 1980 about 3,000 gallons of chemical waste leaked out of damaged storage drums into the ground.
That chemical waste poisoned the groundwater with high levels of dichloroethene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride and benzene, according to a Navy report from 2000. In 2008, Navy officials confirmed that the levels of radium and strontium far exceeded the remediation goals set for public safety.
The Navy veteran could have been exposed to radium-226 and strontium-90, which are radionuclides that have been linked to leukemia and other cancers. But Wyand and other veterans were not alerted about the potential risk of exposure because there is no system in place to notify veterans of potential exposure after a base closes, Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Joe Keiley said.
The fact that there is no outreach system in place means that tens of thousands of veterans who worked at the shipyard could have been exposed to deadly radiation and are unaware, American news report adds.
“We encourage any veteran who believes they were exposed to toxins during their military service to coordinate with their local Veterans Affairs office,” the spokesperson highlighted.
