Groundwater Contamination in Frederick, Maryland?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Silver Spring, Maryland, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) September 8, 2010 --

There are many military bases in the greater Washington, D.C. area. The biggest one that we can think of would be the Pentagon, which is technically a building rather than a base. But aside from that there are Fort Meyer and Henderson Hall in Arlington, as well as Fort Belvoir down in Fairfax. There is Andrews Air Force Base, as well as Bolling, both of which are located in Prince Georges County. Navy Yard is right on the Potomac River, and Bethesda Naval Hospital is right near the National Institute of Health. But the difference between all of these military facilities and Fort Detrick, which is in Frederick County, Maryland, none of the other military bases were on the EPA’s Superfund toxic waste cleanup list.
Fort Detrick has on its grounds a section known as Area B, which was used for decades as a landfill. But this landfill wasn’t loaded with every day, run of the mill garbage. It contained a few decades worth of detritus from the United States biological weapons program, and once that sort of thing was officially outlawed it became the headquarters of the Army’s medical research division. And while medical research is perfectly legal, the sort of waste that accumulates from such research is often not the sort that you can just toss into a hefty bag and have hauled away.

Apparently quite a few barrels of some of this medical waste and other hazardous materials were punctured over the years, and the end result was the discovery of contamination of some of the local groundwater wells in 1992. The “cleanup” of all this actually took about eighteen years and the final capping of the landfills were done in July of this year.
While nobody can say that cleaning up one of the most toxic sites in the country isn’t a good thing, there is a profound sense of “too little, too late” when it comes to Fort Detrick. This one relatively small area in Frederick County, Maryland has an incredibly high cancer rate, and it is absurd to think that the cancer rate and the damage done to the environment by the toxic waste in Area B are not related.

Randy White is a longtime Frederick resident who has felt the effects of this area in about the worst way possible. One of his daughters died of a brain tumor at the age of 30, while his other daughter had three stomach tumors removed, while his wife was recently diagnosed with stage 4 renal cancer. And Mr. White’s family is not the only one in the area who has been affected. Some reports state that about 500 families who live near the base have gotten cancer of one form or another. Some are even stating that it might have something to do with the biological weapons experiments that went on as late as the 1950’s:
Farmer Bill Krantz, who has worked the fields around Fort Detrick for more than 50 years, says several family members have gotten cancer and he wonders if they were contaminated from aerial experiments he remembers seeing in the late 1950s.
Krantz remembers seeing what looked like confetti coming from planes, helicopters and small blimps over Fort Detrick. The debris, said Krantz, came down both inside and outside the boundaries of the military post.
"That stuff was spread high and it came down all over us,” according to Krantz.

Even if the biological weapons experiments were too far in the past to be harmful, the fact remains that the groundwater around the area was contaminated for years by toxic and medical waste. Tests have shown that the dioxin levels in the air, soil and water are higher than normal in that area. And if this isn’t the result of this contamination of the groundwater, we can’t imagine what else it could possibly be.
The questions that need to be answered is this: Will the U.S. Army and the EPA cooperate with any inquiries into the cleanup? Will they do any inquiries themselves? Will they make any effort to help the families who have been affected by over fifty years of environmental damage and neglect? If they take no action whatsoever, or if they take action that is insufficient to cover the damage, the victims in Frederick County will have to take the next step.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been sickened or injured due to the contamination of their groundwater or surrounding environment. If you or a loved one has been hospitalized or suffers from a chronic medical condition due to environmental pollutants in Washington, D.C, Maryland or Virginia, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

More information can be found online at http://www.gblawyers.com/

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