Word: islanders
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vieques residents - who, as Puerto Ricans, are all U.S. citizens - would agree with Marrero. In 2007, more than 7,000 of them filed a federal suit, Sanchez v. United States, claiming that in the nearly 60 years after World War II that the Navy used a portion of the island as a firing range and weapons-testing ground it negligently exposed Vieques' population of 10,000 to dangerous levels of toxins. The community, according to several independent medical studies, has a cancer rate 30 times higher than that of Puerto Rico's main island to the west. The U.S. Justice...
...Marrero, which the former Marine sergeant is scheduled to give next week (though Marrero is not actually party to the suit). Lawyers for the Vieques plaintiffs say his testimony lends credence to their assertions about the long-term effects of living on the 55-sq.-mi. (88 sq km) island during the last half of the 20th century - and about the federal health and environmental laws they allege the Navy violated. "His coming forward offers proof," says John Eaves Jr., a Mississippi lawyer representing the Vieques residents. "These are things the Navy has to answer for." The Pentagon refers questions...
...occasion, during a chemical-warfare drill in 1969 for a project called SHAD - for Shipboard Hazard & Defense, which was part of Project 112 - it had sprayed trioctyl phosphate, a chemical compound known to cause cancer in animals, as a simulant for nerve agents. When the Navy left, the island was declared a federal Superfund site for environmental cleanup. The Navy has cleared thousands of undetonated bombs and turned its area of the island into a fish and wildlife refuge...
...Still, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) said in 2003 it found no negative effect on health from the Navy's decades on Vieques. Much of the scientific community howled at that verdict, given that independent studies of hair, vegetation and other local specimens indicate island residents have been exposed to excessive levels of lead, mercury, cadmium and aluminum. "The [ATSDR] conclusion seemed borderline criminal," says former Vieques mayor Radames Tirado, a plaintiff in the Sanchez suit who says at least 13 of his relatives there today have cancer. Says Arturo Massol, a biologist at the University...
...result, Congress this summer sent the ATSDR back to Vieques to begin a review of its earlier findings. "If there is anything more we can do, it will be done," ATSDR director Howard Frumkin pledged on a visit to the island last month. The Navy itself had already realized it had more to do, setting aside an additional $200 million last year for seven more years of Vieques cleanup. Still, Viequenses complain the Navy is exacerbating the problem by detonating left-over bombs; the Navy insists it is the only safe way to dispose of them...