DISASTER RELIEF: The legal race is on to aid those harmed by toxic exposure at North Carolina's famed Marine base.

• Author: Blythe, Anne
• Position: NC TREND: Legal

Jerry Ensminger was in his kitchen in Elizabethtown in June when he heard the first ad from lawyers soliciting potential victims of the toxic water disaster that flowed from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune taps and pipes for 34 years.

The former drill master was intrigued. "I said, 'What is this ?'" Ensminger recalls. Then he started noticing more ads with similar messages. "They're crazy," Ensminger says. "There was one with a woman promising wheelbarrows full of cash."

That's just a taste of the ad frenzy related to Camp Lejeune's toxic water that has created a field day for lawyers, TV stations and digital media outlets.

From March through mid-October, about $65 million was spent nationally on 97,000 television ads soliciting Camp Lejeune claims, according to X Ante, a Washington, D.C., company that tracks tort litigation. It's about 20% of the 513,000 mass tort TV ads that aired in 2021.

In North Carolina, $338,460 was spent in five TV markets from June 27 to Sept. 30, X Ante reports. Nearly two-thirds went to the Raleigh and Wilmington areas.

The ads have a common pitch: If you lived at Camp Lejeune between 1953 and 1987 and suffered from cancers, a miscarriage, Parkinson's disease, kidney problems and more, you might be eligible for significant financial compensation. Estimates of potential claimants range from 800,000 to as many as 1 million.

NO IDEA

Ensminger, a former drill master at the Onslow County base, has spent the past 25 years testifying numerous times before Congress and speaking to the media about personal tragedies that he attributes to contaminated water. He's become the face for government accountability at Lejeune, where Benzene and other chemicals used in a dry cleaning solvent and degreasers stewed in base waters.

The Bladen County resident, 70, saw his daughter Janey battle leukemia for nearly two and a half years as a child before dying at age 9 in September 1985. Janey was the only one of Ensminger s four children conceived, carried and born while the family lived on the base about 60 miles northeast of Wilmington.

They had no idea of the noxious chemicals flowing through contaminated water treatment plants into their home. He didn't find out until 1997, when he was eating a plate of spaghetti in his living room while watching the evening news. A segment described a link between Lejeune water and childhood cancer, based on an assessment by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

"The Navy and...