(NewsNation) — The Navy has received 546,000 claims from people seeking compensation for exposure to toxic water at the North Carolina military base Camp Lejeune.
Several thousand claims are duplicates, which the Navy is working to resolve, according to an update filed Tuesday in a North Carolina federal court. The United States has conducted at least 395 depositions with witnesses including doctors. Two additional depositions are scheduled for the next few weeks, according to the filing.
The Camp Lejeune injury case is one of the largest of all time. The contamination — detected in the early 1980s — was blamed on a poorly maintained fuel depot and indiscriminate dumping on the base, as well as from an off-base dry cleaner.
Federal health officials called a government study released earlier this year of the largest ever done in the U.S. to assess cancer risk. It found that personnel at the base faced a 20% higher risk for some types of leukemia and lymphoma and cancers of the lung, breast, throat, esophagus and thyroid. Civilians who worked at the base also were at a higher risk for a shorter list of cancers.
Military personnel who were stationed at the U.S. Marine Corps base camp from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s had at least a 20% higher risk for several cancers than those stationed elsewhere, according to a recent study.
The contamination also increased the risk of birth defects, certain childhood cancers, lifelong health conditions, miscarriages and stillbirths, according to the Camp Lejeune Claims Center.
President Joe Biden signed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act into law in 2022. It allowed people exposed to the military base’s water to file a new claim with the Navy. The law came after years of state and federal court dismissals of lawsuits based on North Carolina state law.
With the Camp Lejeune Justice Act in place, those affected were granted a two-year window to file their claims. Anyone seeking compensation for their injuries was required to file an administrative claim with the U.S. Navy before they could file a federal lawsuit. Exposure must have happened between Aug. 1, 1953, and Dec. 31, 1971, to qualify for a claim by the Aug. 10 deadline.
About 2,037 Camp Lejeune Justice Act complaints were filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina since Feb. 1. Of those, 50 cases were dismissed, according to Tuesday’s court filing. Those cases will go to a single federal court in North Carolina, where the first trials aren’t expected until 2025.
The process of resolving administrative claims has been slow, with about 150 completed cases as of earlier this month.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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