Soldiers Sue KBR-Halliburton For Toxic Exposure From "Burn-Pits"

A trickle of lawsuits by US soldiers against KBR-Halliburton for toxic exposure from enormous open "burn-pits' at US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan is turning into a deluge as the number of suits more than doubled in the last few weeks.

Dozens of US military personnel have filed 34 lawsuits against US defense contractor KBR for allegedly incinerating toxic waste and releasing it into the atmosphere in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Susan Burke, one of the lawyers bringing the suits, said they have been filed over the past year, 18 of them in recent days.

"All the cases are being put together before a federal judge in Greenbelt, Maryland," she told AFP Tuesday.

"Every type of waste imaginable was and is burned on these pits, including trucks, tires, lithium battery, Styrofoam, paper, rubber, petroleum-oil-lubricant products, metals, hydraulic fluids, munitions boxes, medical waste, biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles," the lawsuit claims.

This slow-breaking story includes wrongful-death suits from massive exposure to "thick, noxious smoke - coming off of flames sometimes colored blue or green by burning chemicals - to hang over U.S. bases and camps across Iraq and Afghanistan since 2004."

According to the complaints, "U.S. soldiers and other residents of themilitary bases and camps have become seriously ill, been diagnosed withserious and potentially fatal diseases and in some cases have died from the physical injuries and diseases caused by the exposure to hazardous smoke and fumes."

The burn pits are so large that tractors are used to push waste onto them and the flames shoot hundreds of feet into the sky, according to the lawsuits.

We're talking about a lot of waste! For example...

(Joint Base) Balad's average daily output of almost 250 tons of waste is three times higher than the average of 83 tons per day generated by the city of Juneau, Alaska, which has a comparable population.

And of course the US military is fulfilling its primary responsibility to make the world safe for Halliburton, by denying the danger of even (relatively) short-term exposure to toxins like asbestos.

The U.S. military has acknowledged the concerns, but says its own testing of the most notorious facility, the Balad Air Force Base burn pit, concluded that there was no significant or prolonged health risk for those who were exposed less than a year.

None of the three main agencies charged with determining, preventing or evaluating asbestos exposures - OSHA, the CDC, and the American Cancer Society - would agree. In their published opinions, no safe level for asbestos exposure has ever been established, and exposures ranging from a day to a lifetime have equal potential to trigger mesothelioma.

KBR is also being sued for toxic exposure by its civilian employees at US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the natural expectation has been that KBR would win this battle, like so many others, because it's protected from most private lawsuits under the Defense Base Act...

Settlements are voluntary and no one side can force the other to settle. Like most other workers' compensation systems, there are no damages such as pain and suffering. The amount of the settlement depends on what the employer/insurer could expect to pay if the case is not settled. Also, while there is a program where an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) will mediate a case for the parties, there is no provision in the Act that allows an injured worker or employer/insurer to present the case before an ALJ to determine its value.

But ironically KBR may have undermined its own protection under the DBA with a scheme to avoid paying taxes on its humongous profits from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To avoid payroll taxes for its American employees, KBR hired the workers through two subsidiaries registered in the Cayman Islands, part of a strategy that has allowed KBR to dodge hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes.

That gives the workers' lawyer, Mike Doyle of Houston, a chance to argue to an arbitration board that KBR is not an employer protected by federal law, but a third-party that can be sued.

I guess you could call it "poetic justice," except that KBR-Halliburton is vanishingly unlikely to pay out more than a very small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes which it successfully dodged.

Meanwhile even our weathervane of a President has felt the wind shift against KBR, and on October 28, 2009...

President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2647), which includes important provisions authored by Congressman Tim Bishop (NY-1) to protect the thousands of troops exposed to toxic, open burn pits used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For months, Congressman Bishop has led the fight, along with other Members and national military and veterans organizations, to prohibit the use of these dangerous burn pits and to provide medical support to the thousands of troops who have been exposed to them.

But this bold legislative initiative was only enacted five months after a landmark $12.1 million judicial decision in favor of of US Navy machinist who was exposed to asbestos way back in the Sixties...

The good news for plaintiffs is that a recent case, filed by former U.S. Navy machinist Charles H. Cundiff against two manufacturing firms that used asbestos in their products, has been decided in favor of Cundiff.

The manufacturers, John Crane, Inc. and Lone Star Industries, have been ordered to pay Cundiff and his spouse $12.1 million for asbestos exposure he incurred while handling asbestos-laden products (Insulag and insulating cement) when working on a naval ship in the 1960s. The exposure resulted in mesothelioma, which has so weakened Cundiff that he did not appear at a May 11 hearing and his deposition was used in testimony instead.

This case was the handwriting on the wall for KBR and its open-air incineration of asbestos and other toxic wastes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the last word belongs almost irretrievably to an obituary in the Booneville (Arkansas) Democrat, an obituary which has now disappeared from their website and only exists online as the fragmentary result of a Google search for Charles H. Cundiff.