The thousand-plus blood results, obtained from Army bases through Freedom of Information Act requests, provide only a glimpse of the problem. A $10 finger-prick test can spot a child exposed to lead, yet millions of U.S. children are never screened. Just how many are tested across all military bases isn’t clear. But for those who are, the results often go unreported to state public health agencies that attend to poisoned kids.

Reuters found that Fort Benning in Georgia was not reporting lead results for small children tested at the base’s hospital. Nor was Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. Georgia and Texas, like most states, require the reporting of all these lead testing results to state health authorities.

The Army declined to comment on the lead hazards Reuters detected at base homes. Asked about the broader findings of this article, a spokeswoman said the Army conducts yearly visits to ensure housing is safe and follows the recommendations of the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics when responding to children with high lead tests. Housing managers classify resident complaints about lead paint as “urgent” and seek to respond within hours, she said.

“We are committed to providing a safe and secure environment on all of our installations,” Army spokeswoman Colonel Kathleen Turner said in a written statement, “and to providing the highest quality of care to our service members, their families, and all those entrusted to our care.”

The two contractors that operate Villages of Benning – Clark Realty Capital and Michaels Management Services – didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The military’s lapses in lead safeguards leave legions of kids at risk. Private contractors house some 700,000 Americans at more than 100 military installations nationwide, including an estimated 100,000 children ages 0 through 5.

Benning alone is home to some 2,000 small children. Of its 4,001 family homes, 2,274 “have lead-based paint present in them,” according to a Villages of Benning memo from November 2017. The mere presence of lead paint doesn’t make a home dangerous, but when the paint deteriorates, it is a “hazard and needs immediate attention,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says.

“These are families making sacrifices by serving,” said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a toxicity researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reviewed Reuters’ findings. “It appears that lead poisoning is sometimes the cost of their loyalty to the military.”

Reuters began examining lead poisoning at U.S. bases last year, and in April began seeking interviews with Army officials. The Army declined to talk at the time.

After Reuters informed the Army and families that reporters had found hazards on bases, Fort Benning’s garrison commander, Colonel Clinton W. Cox, wrote to residents that “unknown persons” were seeking to test homes for lead and advised them not to cooperate. In a June 30 “Resident Safety Alert,” Cox told families to call 911 or base security to report such “suspicious behavior.”

Cox said he was unaware of who had done lead testing in base homes when he sent the letter. “What we’re most concerned about is our residents’ security,” he said in a brief phone interview.

But behind the scenes, the Army also began quietly addressing some of the problems.

After reporters asked why it often wasn’t informing state health departments about poisoned children, the Army overhauled its practices to comply with state laws. When Reuters found unsafe conditions at Fort Knox, contractors announced a neighborhood-wide lead abatement program. After reporters found the neurotoxin in a child’s bedroom at Benning, base command approved the family’s move to another home.







A HISTORY OF NEGLECT

For most military families, living on base is an option, not a requirement, though it can be enticing. The gated enclaves are considered safe havens that build esprit de corps. They offer support for spouses of deployed troops, access to military schools, lodging for low-income families. About 30 percent of service families live on bases.

By the 1990s, the U.S. stock of military family housing – nearly 300,000 homes in all service branches – was decaying and starved of funding. “Continuing to neglect these issues runs the risk of collapsing the force,” the Department of Defense warned in a 1996 briefing document presented to a congressional sub-committee.

The same year, the military began privatizing its homes. The initiative was the largest-ever corporate takeover of federal housing. It was meant to rid bases of substandard accommodations and save taxpayers billions by having contractors foot the rebuilding bill. In return, contractors would enjoy a steady flow of rental income over 50-year leases.

The military knew hazards lurked in its housing. In 2005, the Army released an environmental study that said 75 percent of its 90,000 homes nationwide didn’t meet its own standards of quality or safety. Of Benning, it said: “As homes deteriorate, the risk of children’s being exposed to hazardous materials … would increase.”

Twenty years after privatization began, in 2016, a DOD Inspector General report found that poor maintenance and oversight left service families vulnerable to “pervasive” health and safety hazards.

An increase in Pentagon housing funds – $133 million – was earmarked this fiscal year, largely for overseas bases, where the military still owns its housing. Meanwhile, in recent years the Defense Department has reduced the housing subsidies that fund upkeep of privatized homes on U.S. bases, leading to fewer maintenance staff, the Army has noted.

The age and condition of base homes vary, and lead hazards are hardly exclusive to military housing. A two-year Reuters investigation identified more than 3,800 neighborhoods nationwide – mostly in civilian settings – with alarming levels of poisoning.

Military families can face special difficulties if they complain about hazards in their homes, however. They are taking on landlords who are in business with their employer. Among the 60 interviewed for this story, more than half expressed fear that being identified could hurt a military member’s career.

But in private, some trade stories about unsafe homes. Darlena Brown helped create a private Facebook group with nearly 700 members. Many have shared photos of peeling paint, mold or other toxins at home and tales of unresponsive base landlords.

Reuters devised a plan to test for hazards in the homes and yards of some of these concerned families. Working with Columbia University scientists, reporters provided home lead testing to 11 families on seven bases. Eight homes had blatant hazards in children’s play areas – visibly peeling patches of lead-based paint.

Deteriorating paint from these houses – in Georgia, Texas, New York and Kentucky – had “very high” or “extremely high” lead content that puts children at immediate risk, said Alexander van Geen, a research professor of geochemistry who oversaw the lab analysis at Columbia’s Lamont Earth Observatory.

The true number of children exposed on bases is hidden by factors including the military’s spotty blood-testing and lapses in reporting to civilian authorities.

To prevent further exposure, most state health departments track lead-poisoned children and mandate inspections in their homes.

Yet when Georgia health officials repeatedly sought test results from Benning, the base refused to share them, alluding to exemptions for federal facilities, state email records show. No such exemptions exist.

“They do not report to us,” the head of Georgia’s lead-poisoning prevention program, Christy Kuriatnyk, vented about Fort Benning in an internal email to colleagues last year. “I’ve tried to get them to voluntarily report but that went nowhere.”

In April, Reuters presented the Army with evidence of its reporting lapses. In late July, the Army said it had “instituted new procedures to ensure that all reporting requirements are properly observed” nationwide.







’NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT’

At Benning, private contractors took over the base’s family housing in 2006. They pledged to demolish thousands of dilapidated homes and build almost 3,200 new ones within 10 years. Estimated cost: $602 million. At the time, 99 percent of Benning homes predated the 1978 U.S. ban on lead paint.

The contractors were also required to maintain nearly 500 historic Benning homes, and agreed to control lead, asbestos, mold, basement flooding and other risks.

In 2011, a Villages of Benning agent took the Browns on a home walk-through before they moved in. Darlena expressed concern about lead paint.

“You have nothing to worry about, Mrs. Brown,” she recalled being told. “We’ve never had any problem with lead.”

The same year, Benning Martin Army Community Hospital recorded seven high lead results for small children, hospital records show. The hospital says it doesn’t know whether children tested there lived on or off base.

After moving in, Darlena asked maintenance to fix paint chipping around windows, but was told by a supervisor that the crew couldn’t work on historic windows, she said.

In 2012, JC and as many as five other children had high lead tests at Benning’s hospital.

After JC was poisoned, Cale Brown pleaded with base leaders to enforce regular home inspections, test more kids and scrutinize contractors. “A few small changes could mean the difference between a child having life-altering developmental problems or being completely healthy,” he wrote Benning’s garrison command in December 2012.

“Bottom line, we will do everything necessary to make sure this is addressed thoroughly and quickly,” Colonel Jeffrey Fletcher, the garrison commander at the time, responded in an email. Fletcher declined to comment.

The next year, 2013, Benning’s hospital recorded seven more high lead-test results for children. One child had lead levels more than double JC’s, hospital records show.

Villages of Benning began replacing some old leaded windows and garage doors around the base that year, but left others in place, state and Army records show.







STALKED BY LEAD, GOING TO COURT

Even after the Browns moved to another Benning home, JC wasn’t safe.

In 2013, he began special education preschool classes at Benning’s Dexter Elementary School. Months later, Darlena received a frightening note on Defense Department letterhead: Drinking water taps in JC’s classroom had tested high for lead.

One had 2,200 parts per billion lead – 147 times an EPA safety threshold and higher than all but a few of the worst taps found during the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It isn’t clear how many students may have been exposed. Benning didn’t require or recommend they get screened.

The Army said the contamination was limited to individual taps around the base and didn’t affect the underlying water system. The tainted taps were shut, and parents who wanted testing for their children were given the option, the Army said.

In 2014, the Browns filed suit in Georgia federal court against Benning’s housing contractors, alleging their negligence caused JC’s poisoning and seeking compensation for his disability. The contractors denied any wrongdoing and contested the suit.

Cale deployed to Afghanistan the same year. There, he pushed for housing repairs at U.S. bases in a meeting that November with Katherine Hammack, the Army’s top official in charge of military installations.

She seemed to favor bold action, Cale said: preventing small children from living in older base homes altogether. Cale said his follow-ups went unanswered.

Hammack, who left the Army last year, told Reuters she explored such a plan, but Army lawyers said it could be discriminatory against families with children. “It is up to the soldier to make a choice,” she said.

Families who rent pre-1978 housing on bases are given lead disclosure forms before signing a lease, as required of all U.S. landlords by federal law, and can opt to live elsewhere, the Army said.

Two days before Christmas 2014, Darlena learned that JC’s lead levels, which had declined over time, were rising again. Her younger son’s levels were up, too, though below the CDC’s elevated threshold. The agency says there is no safe level of lead in children’s blood.

She removed the boys from their second Benning home that night. Nine time zones away, Cale boarded a chopper out of Forward Operating Base Gamberi in eastern Afghanistan. He was granted emergency home leave to help his family resettle.

The next year, in 2015, the Defense Department’s Inspector General found that a Clark and Michaels partnership had failed to correct lead paint hazards in homes at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. The Army pledged to address the issue with contractors, IG records show.

At Benning, meanwhile, children had 14 more high lead tests.







DANGER ON RAINBOW AVENUE

Fort Benning’s Rainbow Avenue seems a perfect spot for families, the yards of its 1920s homes filled with toys, American flags fluttering from front porches.

Behind this idyll, children face poisoning risks.

Since 2015, state lead inspectors have visited at least three of the 33 houses on the street in response to calls from worried residents, state environmental records show. “The homes all have high levels of lead,” inspectors wrote in an internal memo last year.

In one Rainbow home, they found leaded dust at 93 times the EPA’s hazard level.

In another, inspector William Spain of the state Environmental Protection Department visited a mother of three in 2016. He found paint chips throughout the home and later emailed colleagues: “Her youngest will be 5 in July and did not appear normal.”

The mother had grown concerned after the mysterious deaths of family pets. But she hesitated when the state offered additional help, pleading with Spain not to conduct lead testing in the home or to speak with neighbors.

Spain, who has since retired, said in an interview that Benning families expressed concern that notifying outsiders might anger commanders and harm careers.

“Something became obvious to me as I worked there,” he said. “You and your family cannot make trouble for base command.”

State environmental records show that Jana Martin, another mother on the block, had a four-year-old son who suffered for months from severe vomiting and belly pain – common symptoms of lead exposure. She and the doctors were mystified. “I couldn’t even get a job because my kid was so sick,” Martin said. She had put in two maintenance requests to fix chipping paint, but Villages of Benning didn’t respond for months, Martin said.

When Martin’s husband met Cale Brown, the colonel urged the family to act. The Martins bought testing swabs online. They lit up bright red, indicating exposed lead paint.

Finally, in October 2016, housing managers moved the Martins out temporarily and replaced their windows. State inspectors only learned about the case when Martin called seeking assistance.

By the time Rainbow resident Dana Sackett left a voicemail on a state lead hotline last year, inspectors knew the street well.

“Another Rainbow row site at Ft. Benning,” one wrote.

Sackett, a mother of two, is a PhD toxicologist. Her husband is a lawyer with the Army Rangers. After moving to the street, she spotted paint hazards and complained.

Villages of Benning initially declined to fix them, state files say. Then mold spread in an upstairs closet, and repairs for that problem went ahead while Sackett and her girls temporarily relocated. She demanded the workers address paint hazards, too.

The landlords hired workers to scrape lead paint off the home. They lacked the required safety certifications and protective gear to conduct lead abatement, Army records show.

The Army says it has since taken steps to ensure all Benning workers dealing with lead paint are properly certified.

Last fall, Villages of Benning told Sackett the work was done and her family could move back. She found paint scrapings and dust, the records show, and refused to return unless housing managers could show the home wouldn’t poison her girls.

Days later, Villages of Benning declared the property a “contamination area” and had Sackett sign papers promising not to enter. “It was one of the most stressful things I’ve been through,” she said.

Six months later, 103 Rainbow Avenue stood vacant. At another Rainbow Avenue home, paint was peeling from doors and a window by a child’s bed. A bathroom faucet leaked brown goop. A pizza-sized black mold bloom covered a ceiling. Outside, old paint crumbled from window frames, steps and a garage.

Lab testing at Columbia showed four of six paint samples from the home exceeded lead safety standards, including one from beside the child’s bed. The family reported the findings to Benning officials and is now moving.







‘SILENCED VERSION’

About a mile from Rainbow Avenue lies Perkins Village, a cluster of drab mid-century homes that isn’t supposed to exist.

Benning’s development plans called for all 180 Perkins houses to be razed years ago and replaced with 228 new Mission-style homes. Just a handful of the old homes were torn down, and none of the new ones have been built. Reuters tested two homes in Perkins Village. Both had visibly deteriorating paint with lead above federal safety standards.

The Benning contractors wound up building just over half of the 3,185 new homes that were promised back when the housing was privatized. As a result, records show, nearly three out of five Benning homes still contain lead.

The Army said it’s satisfied with the results of the building project. It said it doesn’t know whether any children living in Benning’s older homes have tested high for lead in recent years. The base’s data system can’t track where children with elevated lead levels were living when they were tested.

Darlena Brown said Villages of Benning wasn’t aware of JC’s poisoning, either, until she spoke up.

Court records show the Browns’ lawsuit was settled earlier this year. As a precondition of settlement talks, the Benning contractors demanded the Browns stop communicating with Reuters and stop mentioning the dispute publicly.

This January, on the private Facebook page where military families share their worries, Darlena Brown revised an earlier post. It still recounts her son’s poisoning but omits any mention of the landlords.

She changed the title, too. It’s now called “Darlena’s Story (The silenced version).”

Reuters’ testing triggers lead cleanup at Fort Knox base FORT KNOX, Ky. – Fort Knox is famed for its ultra-secure bullion depository that holds $100 billion in U.S. gold reserves. But some families at the Kentucky Army base have concerns about another heavy metal: lead. When Reuters offered lead testing to military families at several bases, the highest result came from a peeling paint sample one Knox family collected from their covered back porch. It contained 50 percent lead, or 100 times the federal hazard level. In April, a reporter visited the home, where Karla Hughes lives with her husband, an Army captain, and 4-year-old daughter, who doesn’t have elevated lead levels. In a grassy area where children play nearby, paint chipping from an abandoned electric switch house contained 16 percent lead.



Several historic homes on the Hughes’ street had old paint peeling from exterior trim, porch or window areas. Knox Hills, the landlord for more than 2,300 homes on base, removed exterior lead paint from many older homes in recent years, but left others untouched. When Hughes complained about paint conditions in April, the company sent a maintenance worker, who repainted a porch beam but conducted no testing. Later, Hughes pointed out the copious black paint peeling from a porch handrail to a housing supervisor from Knox Hills. “That’s not lead paint,” she said he assured her. Knox Hills declined to comment on the episode. A reporter was a block away, and later watched as Hughes collected paint falling from the handrail. Lab testing showed its lead content was 28 times a federal threshold that would require abatement. When Reuters sent Hughes lead testing results from the paint samples gathered at and around her Fort Knox home, she took them to the base’s garrison commander. In response, Knox Hills announced a neighborhood-wide lead paint abatement project focused on porch banisters, several home exteriors and the old switch house. Residents said the project involves around 40 homes; it included “complete removal of paint and repainting” of the porch handrails. Without Reuters’ testing data, Hughes said, “this danger may have been left undiscovered and ignored.” “Knox Hills is taking the proper steps,” said Army spokeswoman Colonel Kathleen Turner. No child living on base has tested high for lead in years, she said. Knox Hills is a partnership between the Army and private contractors including Lendlease, a property developer headquartered in Sydney, Australia, that operates military housing at several U.S. bases. “Our response to these concerns, as in all resident issues, are our highest priority,” said Lendlease spokeswoman Meryl Exley.

How Reuters investigated lead risks in military housing Since 2016, Reuters has investigated childhood lead poisoning across the United States, creating a first-ever nationwide map pinpointing exposure hot spots down to the zip code and Census Tract level. Early last year, military families whose children were poisoned in base housing contacted reporters. Reuters began examining the issue, and found that results from children’s blood lead tests were often unavailable from military areas. Many bases weren’t even sharing them with state health departments as required. Reuters sought childhood blood lead level testing data from the Department of Defense across all U.S. military hospitals and clinics. The DOD hasn’t provided the data. Several Army bases did share blood lead level testing data, but said they didn’t accurately track where children lived when tested, including on base or off. Their responses, covering a fraction of lead tests conducted at military clinics, still showed at least 1,050 children ages 0-5 with high lead results between 2011-2016. To further investigate base housing conditions, Reuters examined thousands of documents – from internal Army correspondence to housing inspection reports and health data – obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and state open records laws. And, the news agency teamed with researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to offer home lead testing kits to interested military families. This wasn’t a randomized survey; Reuters offered the tests to families who had expressed concern about the possible lead contamination in their homes. Eleven families participated. Reuters sent each a shoebox-sized sampling kit or visited them in person to help collect samples – household paint chips, soil and water – for laboratory analysis later. A smartphone app was used to record data including GPS location and photos of the sample collection process. Reporters agreed not to publish families’ names, addresses or photos without permission, and none of these details were shared with Columbia scientists. The testing was provided at no cost to families. Reuters informed the Army it had detected hazards in base housing; the military declined to comment on any results of home testing. Researchers led by PhD geochemist Alexander van Geen analyzed the samples at Lamont’s labs in New York. Paint and soil were tested with X-ray fluorescence devices to determine lead levels. Lab reports, shared with families, highlighted any lead hazards found at their homes. The paint samples were collected from surfaces where paint was visibly deteriorating and potentially accessible to children – such as window areas, doors, walls, bannisters or covered porches. Such paint is a hazard under Environmental Protection Agency guidelines when it contains at least 0.5 percent lead. Today, the sale of household paint containing more than 0.009 percent lead is outlawed. All five homes tested at Fort Benning contained one or more paint hazards, and garden soil from one exceeded EPA safety recommendations for areas where children play. Paint hazards were also found in housing at West Point, Fort Knox and Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, a base where the military recently found water taps with high lead levels. Testing at two homes on U.S. Marine Corps bases in California did not detect lead hazards. None of the tap water samples from different bases showed unsafe lead levels. The DOD would not answer questions about how many people live in privatized family housing units on U.S. bases. Reuters estimates these units house 700,000 Americans, including around 100,000 children ages 0-5, based on the number of homes (206,000), occupancy rate (93 percent), and a study of military family demographics. David R. Segal, the paper co-author and a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, reviewed Reuters’ calculations and deemed them reasonable estimates.

Additional reporting by M.B. Pell in New York and Deborah Nelson in Washington

Ambushed at Home By Joshua Schneyer and Andrea Januta Visual editing: Sarah Slobin Photo editing: Steve McKinley Video: Tamara Lindstrom, Mike Wood and Craig Hettich Design: Catherine Tai Edited by Ronnie Greene