Research stalls on dangers of military burn pits

Timothy Lowery went to Iraq in 2007. He came home in 2010, and started showing symptoms of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Three years later, he was dead.

This is the extent of what his family knows for certain.

But they have strong suspicions that daily exposure to burn pits — the massive, open-air ditches where the military dumped its waste and lit it ablaze — contributed to his condition.

Lowery, a plumber with one of the U.S. military's largest contractors, KBR, walked by the pits daily as he installed piping, painted runways, and otherwise worked to help keep Al Asad Airbase running. Every day, he breathed in air filled with the smoke of burning metals, chemicals, and human waste.

Across the country, other families are worried, too. Thousands of returning veterans and civilians are now attributing myriad symptoms — respiratory problems, neurological disorders, cancers and ALS — to exposure to the burn pits, which were located at dozens of bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

"A lot of us got really sick from upper respiratory stuff," said Stacy Fogarty, a local Air Force veteran who came home from Iraq with asthma and other breathing problems. "They're doing the research right now, but my personal prediction is it's going to be like Agent Orange for this era. We just don't really know what the ramifications are yet."

Many are trying to get the military to cover their medical costs. Others are suing KBR, which operated some of the burn pits, accusing them of dumping into them all manner of unapproved items — tires, oil, chemicals and medical waste.

For the Lowerys, the controversy has brought a fresh edge to their pain. Now, they're not sure whether his death was bad luck, or whether he spent his years overseas being slowly, steadily poisoned.

Agonizing death

Contracting ALS is, quite simply, a horrible way to die.

Over the course of months or years, the body starts to shut down one piece at a time. Motor functions are impaired and then lost. Speech gets more challenging. And eventually, the lungs give out.

It's almost always fatal; most people die in the first few years, and greater than 90 percent die within 10 years.

But the cruelest part, said Timothy Lowery's son Dylan, is that the disease leaves the brain almost completely untouched.

"All the while, you're totally of sound mind," said Dylan Lowery, 20, of Rochester. "You know your surroundings. You know what's happening. You know that these people are having to squeegee you and wipe your ass. It's just degrading."

For Timothy Lowery, the first symptoms came when he returned to his home in Georgia in late 2010. His widow, Kate, noticed that he had tremors in his arm, and when he tried to go back to work as a plumber in July 2011, he came home saying that he was too weak, and that he wasn't capable of doing the job any more.

"I've never seen him cry before as the way he did then," said Kate Lowery, 49, of Hampton, Ga. "He was so upset that he couldn't do it."

Lowery, who had lived for much of his life in Dansville, Livingston County, came back to the Rochester area in January 2012, hoping to find a job that he could handle. Upon arriving, family members noticed him slurring his speech.

At first, they asked him if he'd been abusing alcohol.

"Tim had quit drinking for 20-plus years, but unfortunately we would accuse him of that," said Terry Wirth, Lowery's twin sister, a former Mendon resident who recently moved to Austin, Texas. "But as time went on, from January to April, it went from the speech to that we could actually see it in his wrists. He was using his wrists much less, and his leg."

Soon, Lowery started dragging his foot when he walked. He had trouble turning the ignition in his car. But he steadfastly refused to go to the doctor. Family members said that he feared the worst, and didn't want his suspicions confirmed. But in July 2012, his condition worsening, his sisters forced him into a car and drove him to Strong Memorial Hospital. His diagnosis came shortly afterward.

In his final months, his family started asking questions about his time overseas. The burn pits, which on Al Asad Airbase were operated by the military, were almost always active, he said. His work — 13 hours a day, every day, always outdoors — took him to every area of the base, and he walked by the burn pits regularly.

Windy days weren't a respite. If anything, they made things worse, as dust and sand from the surrounding climate would mix with the smoke from the pits. The mixture was in the air all the time, and Lowery often wore goggles to keep it out of his eyes. But there was no crevice on his body or clothing that didn't have some debris in it by day's end, he told family.

In October 2012, with his faculties starting to fail him completely, he moved back down to Georgia to be with Kate. They got married in February, just one month before his death. He was 51 years old.

"He wanted to do it before he passed," said Kate Lowery. "He was a Christian, he was a believer, and he felt like we should have done it a long time before."

'Anything and everything'

Only one study has ever been done on the long-term health effects of burn pits. But the study, conducted by the Institute of Medicine in 2011, could not draw any concrete conclusions about the adverse effects, and researchers noted a lack of information regarding degrees of exposure and follow-up visits to those affected.

Meanwhile, returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have continued to assert that burn pits were the cause of their problems.

Fogarty, 27, of Greece served in the Air Force at Joint Base Balad in Iraq, and was responsible for dumping hospital supplies into burn pits on the base. Fogarty said that material that was considered a biohazard was disposed of elsewhere, but that everything else went into the pits, which were burning constantly.

"We just threw garbage in it. Whatever we had to get rid of, we burned: beds and trash, used supplies," said Fogarty, who grew up in Chili. "Anything and everything: there were (airplane) parts in there."

Earlier this year, after an audit that blasted burn pit operations at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, lawmakers moved to establish a registry for service members and veterans who were exposed to potentially toxic fumes from the pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. The federal Department of Veterans Affairs is currently setting up the registry.

The lawsuits, meanwhile, have targeted KBR because the company was responsible for waste disposal and burn pit operation on about a third of the military's bases.

Fifty-seven of those suits — 44 class-actions and 13 individual suits, representing several hundred people and families — were combined into a single case in Maryland. In the suit, plaintiffs accuse KBR of negligent operation of the burn pits: using them to dispose of hazardous waste and items on "do not burn" lists, failing to take steps to minimize smoke from the pits, and using the pits instead of incinerators, among other allegations.

Court documents filed by the plaintiffs' lawyers state that numerous eyewitnesses were ready to corroborate such allegations. One potential witness, Rick Lamberth, a former KBR employee, testified to Congress in 2009 that he personally witnessed KBR employees dump chemical decontamination materials, biomedical waste, plastics, oil, and tires into burn pits in violation of military regulations.

Lamberth, who served 31 years in the Army Reserve and spent time in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq in military and civilian capacities, testified that he had suffered from shortness of breath and skin rashes, and had spit up bloody mucus since returning from Iraq.

He also alleged that KBR knew that the pits were dangerous, and that management attempted to cover up such information.

"When I tried to report violations, I was told by the head of KBR's Health Safety and Environment division to shut up and keep it to myself," said Lamberth in 2009. "At one point, KBR management threatened to sue me for slander if I spoke out about these violations."

In response to the allegations that unapproved material was disposed of in the KBR-operated burn pits, a spokesman for the company said those reports are anecdotal in nature and cannot be supported by evidence.

"We've looked extensively at our records and we clearly don't have records that would substantiate that," said Mark Lowes, vice president of litigation for KBR Inc.

In a phone interview earlier this week, Lowes said that the military decided what was supposed to be disposed of in the burn pits, and was regularly monitoring KBR's operations.

"They would come in and evaluate our performance," said Lowes. "If we were causing a huge problem, inconsistent with what they want, they'd be chewing on us and giving us poor evaluations for what we'd done."

Temporary solution

In 2008, the Department of Defense said that exposure to burn pits was not harmful. But in 2010 — seven years after the first U.S. troops entered Iraq — the military ruled that burn pit exposure had caused medical problems for a veteran.

The longer-than-expected occupation of Iraq played a large role as to why the burn pits — ostensibly a short-term solution for waste disposal — were employed by the military at all. Early on, lawmakers assured voters that U.S. troops would be in and out of Iraq in short order, and planned accordingly: KBR's first military contract was for just six months in length, said Lowes.

"The government was caught unprepared for the length and the scope of the conflict," said Lowes. "If you knew you were going to be there for five years, then you could plan to order and have incinerators at the main bases."

The military has not established any blanket policies on the issue — it currently assesses burn pit claims on a case-by-case basis — but use of the pits has diminished significantly over the past few years. Currently, Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan is the only base that still employs them, and a July correspondence between the Secretary of Defense's office and lawmakers said that pit will be "strictly controlled" until the base closes in December 2013.

The class-action lawsuit against KBR, however, was dismissed earlier this year. The dismissal was not due to a lack of evidence, but because the judge ruled that KBR should be afforded the same legal protection as the military. (Soldiers cannot sue the armed forces for injuries sustained while on active duty.)

"The critical interests of the United States could be compromised if military contractors were left 'holding the bag' for claims made by military and other personnel that could not be made against the military itself," wrote U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus, in dismissing the case. "The ability of the military to recruit contractors and their willingness to assist the military in time of war could be called into serious question if they did not enjoy the same protections as does the United States for combat activities."

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have appealed the decision, writing that based on the logic and precedent of the court's decision, "every negligent government contractor would be immune from suit simply by virtue of being a government contractor in a war zone."

Oral arguments for the appeal will be heard on Oct. 30.

Reaping in wartime

Since Lowery was a contractor, not a soldier, his death didn't entitle his family to any military benefits. And right now, his family isn't part of the lawsuit against KBR, either. Kate Lowery filled out the paperwork, but so far, she hasn't been able to bring herself to send it in, she said.

"Every time I pick up any of his stuff. … I can't even take his clothes out of the closet yet," she said, her voice cracking. "So to even think about fighting that kind of fight, I don't know."

The notion that burn pits were ever considered safe — which persisted for many years throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns — baffles Dylan Lowery.

"It wasn't that we don't know burning these hazards are harmful to us. We do know," he said. "That's why we don't burn our garbage in our backyard."

For Wirth, the ordeal has opened her eyes to the concept of fighting a war at the lowest possible cost, where military support services are doled out to the lowest bidder.

"My real goal with all this is that contractors don't run wars. Soldiers run wars," she said. "Why should the poor people or the people who want to make a difference pay with disease, and their lives? Why don't all Americans pay? That means we pay more (tax) money, and we don't use contractors, we use soldiers."

Dylan Lowery wants people to remember that the hardships of war extend far beyond the reported military casualties, and believes that those hardships come while corporate partners reap the benefits. KBR received a reported $39.5 billion in contracts for the Iraq war alone.

"I want people to keep that in mind next time our government tells us we need to go to war," he said. "And I think the point also has to be made that the idea of a corporation making money off of our soldiers fighting for freedom — whether they are or not — I think there's something really corrupt in that mentality: that money has to be made, that war has to be a moneymaker."

In his three years with KBR, Timothy Lowery made some money, too: $80,000 a year. As his health deteriorated, he spent much of it on medical equipment.

More about KBR, Inc.

An engineering and construction company, KBR, Inc. was the military's largest contractor for the war in Iraq, receiving a reported $39.5 billion in contracts from the U.S. government over the war's duration. KBR is a former subsidiary of oil giant Halliburton, and was spun off as its own entity in 2007.

CEO: William P. Utt

Headquarters: Houston, Texas

Employees: 27,000

Revenue (2012): $7.9 billion

SDOBBIN@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/Sean_Dobbin