The Fort McClellan Veterans patient
group has been notified by the
Oversight and Investigations
Subcommittee, of the House Veterans
Affairs Committee that an
official investigation has
begun into the Fort McClellan
contamination zone and the
treatment of the base Veterans
in sharp comparison to the
Camp Lejeune, NC base contamination
which apparently drew assistance
from the Center For Disease
Control.

We have been told that the official
report, when completed, will be
posted as a press release on
the Committee's website. The
time estimate given to us for the
completion was somewhere between
end of summer and end of year.

Since receiving this news from
them, our members have yielded
new environmental reports on
the base which had explained
a few mysteries we had been
chasing and also opened our
eyes to the other chemical
exposure possibilities there.

For those Veterans who are
concerned, we recommend that
you go to Google.com and
type in the following report
title for retrieval:
"Final Environmental Baseline
Survey Fort McClellan, Alabama"
This is not the only report
that we found as an earlier
one had been ordered by
the Army (BRAC) prior to the
base closing which was equally
as good.

Aside from open air chemical
testing using small amounts
of VX and Sarin gas on the
base ordered by Edgewood Research
Center at Aberdeen, MD, we
also were stunned to find that
old and poorly documented landfills
on the base were never capped over
properly and had leeched pcb's
and DDT pesticide products into
specific areas. In one scenario
described by the reports, there
had been such groundwater leeching
that the nearby wells of the
Weaver neighborhood had also
been contaminated.


We also found that the storage of
VX and Sarin was incredibly close
to gathering areas on the base such
as an amphitheater, a swimming pool,
a golf course, and a drive-in
movie theater.

We also found that the base
had a practice of mixing defoliants
and pesticides together and
then spraying the combination
throughout the base. We have
located a couple of former
pilot sources who insist that
the mixture included Agent
Orange.

In a third other report, we
were stunned to learn that the
former WAC HQ building and museum,
as well as the former WAC Chapel
among other places, had all
been contaminated with asbestos
and lead paint as well as pcb's.

While any one of these by itself
may not have solely been an
exposure significant enough to
say that it cause our disease
cluster. But in the backdrop
of secretive Monsanto with a
3-way disaster in full tilt
near the base consuming air,
water, and soil quality, there
is no question in our patient
Vet-minds that the double-whammy
is at play and we are all
service connected cases.

We don't know where this will
all end just yet, but we are
grateful to the Oversight subcommittee
that they have finally heard our
patient outcry and have begun
to address our issues.