U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind., in a letter March 4, 2010, to the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs has asked the VA to step up care for the men currently suffering from debilitating illnesses as a result of exposure to the carcinogenic chemical hexavalent chromium during their service in the Iraq war.  Doyle Raizner LLP welcomes this and other efforts, including those by Sen. Bayh, to ensure that these men’s current needs are not ignored.

by Melissa Swan of WHAS-ABC 11 (Louisville, KY)

(WHAS11) – Indiana National Guard troops gathered to say goodbye to one of their commanding officers on Tuesday, Lt. Colonel Jim Gentry. Gentry believed his terminal cancer was directly related to his service in Iraq and even after death the 52-year-old Indiana National Guard commander is continuing a fight for his troops through a lawsuit.

Veterans from several wars held the stars and stripes as members of Jim Gentry’s family, both by blood and by military arrived for a final, formal goodbye.

“He was the type of person that loved the challenge, loved soldiers, loved to work with soldiers,” said Major General Dan Colglazier, a retired member of the Indiana National Guard.

Inside the chapel, were many of Jim Gentry’s soldiers, their patches for the infantry and for Indiana worn proudly on their sleeves.

Gentry entered the Army in 1981 as an infantry man and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was among the first National Guard troops in the country to be deployed to Iraq. There he commanded soldiers throughout the country.

“We always talked about how to take care of the troops and how to fulfill his mission..Never about how he was doing, what kind of condition he was in..It was always his soldiers and the unit and the mission,” added Maj. General Colglazier.

It was during Gentry’s first tour of duty, in 2003, he and other Indiana National Guard soldiers first noticed a yellow substance in the sand near Basra.

They were guarding American contractors restoring the Iraqi oil fields. That yellow substance was later confirmed to be a cancer causing chemical, sodium dichromate.

Gentry would later come to believe that the sodium dichromate led to his terminal cancer.

Before his death, Gentry joined in a federal lawsuit against KBR, the American military contractor restoring the Iraqi oil fields.

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Doyle Raizner LLP is proud to represent over 75 National Guardsmen from Indiana, Oregon, and West Virginia fighting to uncover the important truth of what KBR knew about the dangerous risk from exposure to the chemicals at Qarmat Ali and what its managers failed to share with dedicated American and British servicemen serving in Iraq.

Our soldiers, including the commander of the Indiana Guardsmen, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Gentry, understood and accepted the risks of enemy action when serving in harm’s way for their nation, but they had no way to anticipate that KBR’s managers, charged with safely completing the Qarmat Ali project, would not fully share all they knew with the men on ground directly exposed to dangerous toxins spread across the plant. 

At Doyle Raizner LLP, we are proud of the fighting spirit of all our clients, and we are especially proud of the men of the United States Army and Army National Guard who are still carrying on the fight for full exposure of what happened at Qarmat Ali.

The Oregon National Guard soldiers deployed to Iraq, and members of the Guard were assigned to duty at the Qarmat Ali facility. Each plaintiff was on site at the Qarmat Ali facility in 2003 and each was exposed to sodium dichromate.

The Qarmat Ali plant was contaminated with sodium dichromate, a toxic chemical used at the site as an anti-corrosive. Sodium dichromate is almost pure hexavalent chromium, a highly toxic  and long-identified carcinogen.

KBR managers knew about both the site contamination and the extreme danger of hexavalent chromium.

Oregon National Guard soldiers providing security for the actual work at Qarmat Ali, along with the British troops and the American civilians actually carrying on the work at Qarmat Ali, were exposed to hexavalent chromium for months, without warning or protection.

When the Oregon National Guard soldiers and American civilians actually working at Qarmat Ali began experiencing the most characteristic symptom of acute hexavalent chromium poisoning, nasal excoriation (bleeding from the nose) known to toxicologists as “chrome nose,” KBR managers told soldiers on site that it was simply an effect of the “dry desert air” and they must be “allergic to sand.”

The Oregon National Guard soldiers were repeatedly told that there was no danger on site, even after KBR managers knew that blood testing of American civilians exposed onsite confirmed elevated chromium levels.  What was not revealed until Congressional Hearings in June 2008 was the extent of knowledge of KBR managers about the danger on-site and the ongoing concealment of the exposures to the Oregon National Guard soldiers and others.

KBR is apparently still withholding from the United States Army the full extent of KBR managers’ knowledge of the dangers to the soldiers and others onsite, dangers directly impacting the current and future health evaluations of the soldiers exposed at Qarmat Ali.

Attached below contains the Original PDF of:
DPC press release of Senatro Byron Dorgan, the Chairman of the Senate DPC
and Letter to the Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of Army, Preston M. Geren, III

Senate DPC Sodium Dichromate Exposure Investigation Press Release

Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Chairmn of theDemocratic Policy Committee New Release

SENATORS CHALLENGE ARMY STUDY’S CONCLUSIONS ON U.S. TROOP EXPOSURE TO DEADLY CARCINOGEN IN IRAQ

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — Two U.S. Senators are taking issue with the conclusions of an Army investigation into the exposure in Iraq of hundreds of U.S. soldiers to sodium dichromate, a deadly carcinogen.

Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) released a letter Thursday they sent to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Pete Geren, Secretary of the Army, saying briefings their offices have received on a study they requested have raised additional questions.

Dorgan chaired a hearing in the Senate Democratic Policy Committee in June 2008 on the exposure at the Qarmat Ali water injection facility in Iraq. Bayh represents many of the soldiers, members of the Indiana National Guard, who were exposed.  Soldiers from Oregon, South Carolina and West Virginia were also exposed.

Dorgan and Bayh said the Army’s evidence and their own investigations indicate that exposure of the troops appears to be more severe than the Army and contractor KBR have acknowledged.

They also asked Gates and Geren to explain how the Army could pronounce itself “satisfied” with its oversight of KBR, and the response by KBR and the Army to the exposure, given the following:

• Some soldiers, exposed to the deadly chemical in the spring and summer of 2003, still have not been informed by either the Army or KBR that they were exposed.
• For months, KBR failed to identify the presence of the chemical, even though it was required to conduct an “environmental risk assessment;” and even though it received a United Nations report in the spring of 2003 that stated there was sodium dichromate at the site.
• For months, KBR failed to identify the presence of the chemical, even though it was required to conduct an “environmental risk assessment;” and even though it received a United Nations report in the spring of 2003 that stated there was sodium dichromate at the site.
• Indiana National Guard personnel were not told of the exposure until they saw KBR employees using PPE (personal protective equipment) at the site.

“It looks like conclusions were made, without regard to the facts,” Dorgan said. “We owe our
soldiers much more than that. Given the well documented and serious failures at the site, I don’t understand how the Army can claim KBR acted appropriately.

Senator Evan Bayh said, “I am still unsatisfied with the information provided by the Army about their response to the exposure of U.S. service members to sodium dichromate at the Qarmat Ali water injection facility in Iraq. We are asking again for a complete account of how our service members were exposed to these conditions and what went wrong.  If there’s criminal negligence, people must be held accountable. If there was a lack of oversight by Army Corps of Engineers, people ought to be fired.  I also have many unanswered questions about KBR’s role in the original exposure and contamination and believe the company needs to be held to account for its behavior in this incident. We have a moral obligation to the men and women who were put in harm’s way. We need to make sure to never find ourselves in this situation again.  Most importantly, we have to identify those service members who were exposed to sodium dichromate and other lethal chemicals and make sure they get the kind of long-term care and treatment they deserve.”

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