Camp Lejeune water topic of meetings

Green Tree sessions to focus on decades-long contamination

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Tara Craver’s personal fight with the federal government over the water contamination at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina that led to her late husband, Karle’s, esophageal cancer, ended last year in her favor.

After nearly four years of battling over whether the contamination at the Marine Corps base led to his fatal disease, last fall she won her appeal. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs awarded her $1,287 a month in spousal benefits that have helped put her own financial life back on track.

But after driving to Pittsburgh from her home in Sebring, Fla., this week, there she was Thursday in front of the VA benefits office on Liberty Avenue, Downtown, protesting with a sign that read “CAMP LEJEUNE WIDOW.”

“Before I won my personal battle last September, I was fit to be tied because my husband’s death [in 2014] was so sudden,” she said. “And fighting the VA and losing our home was such a shock, I was determined to do all I can to help other families not have the same thing happen to them.”

She and three other protesters were in Pittsburgh in advance of two public meetings to be held Friday and Saturday in Green Tree concerning the ongoing investigation and benefits process over the almost 40-year water contamination at Camp Lejeune.

The contamination was discovered by Camp Lejeune officials in the early 1980s. But the contaminated groundwater wells that served the base were not shut off until 1987. It would take decades before the Marines and federal government formally acknowledged