‘Burn pit’ lawsuits land in Greenbelt
BRENDAN KEARNEY
Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer
October 20, 2009 7:53 PM
A raft of lawsuits filed across the country by soldiers and contractors who say they were sickened by “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan have been transferred to a federal judge in Maryland.
The suits against Halliburton Co. and its former subsidiary, KBR Inc., allege a variety of waste — from batteries to medical detritus, including human remains — was tossed and torched in huge, uncovered holes near army bases.
The plaintiffs, who hope to become a class of thousands, say the hazardous smoke from these sites caused ailments from rashes to upper respiratory problems to cancer.
Some of the 22 suits also allege the defendants did not properly treat water or provided substandard food.
“It was their obligation to do this in a safe manner, and they didn’t do so,” plaintiffs’ attorney William T. O’Neil said in an interview Tuesday.
His Washington, D.C.-based firm, Burke O’Neil LLC, filed all 22 of the cases and did not object when KBR sought to have them transferred to U.S. District Court in Greenbelt for pretrial management.
The Texas-based defendants acted “egregiously merely to make more money for themselves,” O’Neil wrote in the suit originally filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court in January.
In an e-mail, a KBR spokeswoman said the “general assertion that KBR knowingly harmed troops is unfounded.”
She added that KBR did not operate the most infamous burn pit at Balad, the largest American base in Iraq, and that the others are operated at the direction of the military.
Messages left with the U.S. Defense Department were not returned Tuesday, but the department has previously denied that the pits pose a health threat to service men and women.
KBR, which broke from Halliburton in April 2007, requested consolidated pretrial proceedings to eliminate duplication by lawyers and judges and prevent inconsistent pretrial rulings.
The Greenbelt court makes sense because it is near federal government facilities and the defendants’ offices in Northern Virginia, according to the Oct. 16 transfer order signed by John G. Heyburn II, chairman of the Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.
Judge Roger W. Titus has not yet scheduled hearings in the cases, which, if they survive pretrial motions by the defense, will return to the courts where they originated for trial.
Concern about the burn pits, which exist at many large military installations in the two combat theaters, has been “kind of been percolating around for a while,” said O’Neil. “A lot of people came back from serving overseas and had lung problems that they had never had before.”
He pointed to a 2008 study by Vanderbilt University researchers that showed higher incidences of respiratory diseases among returning soldiers.
Among the first news reports of the potential health problems associated with them came almost a year ago in the Army Times, an independently owned newspaper that covers the military.
Since then, soldiers have told stories of chemicals, materiel and other known toxins being dumped and burned together throughout the campaigns.
And the smoke isn’t the only thing affecting the plaintiffs’ health, according to the Maryland suit, filed on behalf of a soldier from Silver Spring and a KBR employee from Edgewood, among others.
“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the suit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”
The Maryland suit also alleges troops were exposed to contaminated water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and that unchlorinated water filled their swimming pools.
The plaintiffs seek damages “in an amount sufficient to strip Defendants of all the revenue and profits earned from their pattern of constant misconduct,” according to the Maryland suit.
Congress also has taken up the cause. According to an Oct. 11 report in The Hill newspaper, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 doesn’t ban the use of burn pits outright but restricts their use and adds oversight. Senators have asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate further.
Asked about the burn pits in August, President Barack Obama promised the health worries would not go unaddressed like those surrounding Agent Orange, the defoliant used in Vietnam that caused widespread medical issues but whose deleterious effects were denied by the military for many years. (click HERE for original article)
