Written by Adam Lichtenheld with reporting by Byron Moore
Thursday, 15 October 2009 14:09
KBR, a global engineering and construction firm, has become a poster child for war profiteering. Questions about the company’s dubious activities and astronomical profits have served as powerful ammunition for those warning of what President Dwight Eisenhower called “A Military Industrial Complex,”
created from a dangerous symbiosis between private corporations and the U.S. military.
The testimony from KBR employees comes from videotaped depositions taken during an arbitration lawsuit against the company in 2008
The origin of KBR’s role in Iraq has already shrouded the company—and its political patrons—in controversy. In 2004, reports surfaced that the contract under which KBR was working in Basra, Project Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO), was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers under a secret, no-bid agreement in coordination with the office of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney became a multi-millionaire in the 1990s as the head of Halliburton, KBR’s parent company. A further outcry followed an investigation last year by the Boston Globe, which found that KBR hired workers for project RIO through two shell companies in the Cayman Islands as part of a ploy to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes.
KBR has served as a U.S. government contractor since World War II, but it was during Vietnam that the company first made political inroads. Then known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, it developed cozy ties to the administration of Lyndon Johnson—a close friend of one of KBR’s founders—that helped it become a major infrastructure provider for the Defense Department. In 1991, KBR rekindled its relationship with the Pentagon under then-Defense Secretary Cheney, which awarded the company a contract to develop contingency plans during the first Gulf War.
Over the course of the next decade, Halliburton and KBR would receive billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to build overseas military bases and support American forces in Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Uzbekistan. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, with the support of Bush administration officials like Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld—who told his staff on September 10, 2001, that the military could save $3 billion a year by outsourcing non-combat duties to the private sector—KBR became the primary beneficiary of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2003, as part of project RIO, U.S. soldiers would accompany contractors into Iraq from Kuwait as they assessed southern oil sites, including Qarmat Ali. Their orders forbade them from leaving KBR personnel alone at any time. Even when they were working, soldiers had to remain an arm’s length away—which not only exposed them to whatever chemical elements the contractors uncovered during their work, it allowed KBR managers ample time to notify them of any potential health risks
“We spent a great deal of time with KBR employees,” said Oregon Staff Sgt. Rocky Bixby. “There were countless opportunities to communicate with us about environmental hazards.”
Company records, alongside sworn testimony from former employees, show that KBR identified the presence of sodium dichromate, a known poison, at Qarmat Ali months before it took action.
KBR has maintained that it was the military’s responsibility to assess the safety of Iraq’s oil facilities. But in March 2003, weeks before work began at Qarmat Ali, the Army issued KBR a task order under project RIO to establish a “health safety program, conduct environmental assessments, and provide daily status reports” for projects throughout Iraq. The Army had dispatched KBR to Qarmat Ali with a United Nations assessment of Iraq’s oil infrastructure from March 2000, which found that “issues of safety and environmental damage require urgent and immediate attention.”
A more ominous—and obvious—warning were the 1,000 tattered white bags labeled “sodium dichromate” scattered around the facility, leaking noxious orange dust. “It looked to me like someone had spread it all over the plant on purpose because it was everywhere,” former KBR technician Danny Langford told the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) last June. According to Sgt. Russell Powell, the bags were placed by doorways, forcing military and KBR personnel to walk through piles of powder. “We used them as security measures, as sand bags. We’d eat there.” Powell said.
The toxin had stained the walls and concrete around the facility, and turned the soil yellow—a clear indication, according to former Environmental Protection Agency official Herman Gibb, of significant sodium dichromate spillage. “They were ignoring the obvious,” Gibb told DCBureau.
Numerous signs of sickness developed as a result. “KBR, Halliburton, Iraqi Oil Company, U.S. Army National Guard, and British soldiers all were suffering identical symptoms,” former KBR safety manager Ed Blacke said in testimony before the DPC. Langford remembers spitting up blood and getting continuous nose bleeds.
Despite these red flags, KBR did not undertake measures to ensure that Qarmat Ali was clean.
Areas of Qarmat Ali showed a distinct orange residue, a sign of sodium dichromate spillage. "They were ignoring the obvious," Dr. Herman Gibb said of KBR.
Photo courtesy of Michael Doyle/Doyle Raizner LLP.
“We were working all over the country,” said KBR site manager Doug Fletcher in a lawsuit deposition videotaped last year. “There were a lot of things happening.”
Chuck Adams, a KBR health and safety manager, said in his deposition that he was given a “verbal confirmation” that the site had been examined. Though KBR billed the Pentagon for conducting a full site analysis, Adams never received any written notes or documentation of it—a clear break from company protocol.
But an internal KBR memo, dated June 2003, shows that one of its industrial hygienists was notified of the presence of sodium dichromate at Qarmat Ali by Iraqi employees of the South Oil Company, a national Iraqi oil company based in Basra. Johnny Morney, another KBR health and safety manager, confirmed in his deposition that he was told earlier, in May—one month after American troops arrived in Basra—that sodium dichromate was concentrated “in a particular area” of the site. Morney said that there was no attempt to quantify the amount of the carcinogen found throughout the facility, or to notify the Army of the possible danger.
Sodium dichromate is generally used at facilities like Qarmat Ali as an anti-corrosive. Injected directly into the piping system, it can easily spread throughout the facility. Due to revelations of its toxicity, the chemical is no longer used at most industrial sites in the United States.
More bizarre than KBR’s reticence after identifying a known carcinogen is the fact that, when asked, the company claimed that the toxin was a “mild irritant,” according to former employees and soldiers. The Army had stocked a ready supply of chemical suits in case of a biological attack. According to Dr. Aaron Barchowsky, a toxicologist at the University of Pittsburgh, a “simple dust mask” would have been sufficient to prevent exposure.
But KBR managers, soldiers said, assured the military that protective equipment was unnecessary.
“If KBR had told us about the toxic nature of the chemical, we would not have been exposed,” Sgt. Bixby said.
Ed Blacke insists that he tried. Soon after arriving at Qarmat Ali in July 2003, Blacke said that he requested information on the “orange powder” and was advised that it was a “non-issue.” In testimony to the Democratic Policy Committee last June, he explained how, after his co-workers started to become ill, he raised his concerns in a meeting with a KBR detail and was chastised for being “insubordinate” and “disruptive.” When Blacke continued to question his superiors’ inaction, he was put on a plane back to Houston—and subsequently forced to resign.
Blacke was not the only one reprimanded, according to Danny Langford, who sat with Blacke in the meeting where he was dismissed by KBR management. Another of Langford’s colleagues, Tommy Bayless, asked his supervisors about chromium exposure several days later, only to have them avoid the question. “[He] said, ‘this is a bunch of BS,’” Langford recalled. “Within 24 hours, Tommy Bayless was on an airplane back to the States.”
It is clear that KBR knew, Blacke said, “that they were putting not only KBR workers, but our security details from the U.S. and British military in harm’s way.”
This became evident to Capt. Russell Kimberling during one routine escort of KBR employees to Qarmat Ali in August 2003. After stepping out of his humvee and approaching the water treatment plant, Kimberling noticed that the civilians were donning white protective suits. “They obviously knew something we didn’t,” Kimberling said. According to the Army captain, the KBR chain of command maintained upon questioning that sodium dichromate was a “mild irritant that one would have to literally bathe in for any toxicity to occur.” By then there were reports that Iraqi workers had developed ulcers on their chests and stomachs.
On August 7, KBR released a memo documenting “serious health problems at water treatment plant with a chemical called sodium dichromate,” a problem “that seems worse than initially indicated” having exposed those working at the facility “to something that may be very dangerous.” The chemical, the memo read, “could have been dumped on the ground for quite a long time.”
After KBR found that 60 percent of its workers were exhibiting symptoms, a medical team tested their blood and discovered elevated chromium levels four to 10 times higher than normal.
In response, the contractor dispatched environmental specialists to test the air and ground around Qarmat Ali for sodium dichromate. In the soil, they found “extremely high levels” of up to 16,000 parts per million—nearly three times the amount that is considered “actionable” under the Military Exposure Guidelines. Dr. Max Costa, the medial expert from New York University, told Congress that he has “never seen such high concentrations” of the chemical.
But KBR tried to hide behind the results of its air test, which found only small traces of sodium dichromate. According to company records, however, the air test was only collected for one hour because rioting in Basra—coincidentally, backlash from KBR’s refusal to hire Iraqis for work at Qarmat Ali—forced the health team to evacuate prematurely. By comparison, concentrations used by the U.S. Department of Labor to assess airborne hazards are based on an eight-hour sample.
Moreover, KBR’s test was performed on a non-windy day, past Iraq’s summer windstorm season that had made working at Qarmat Ali like operating “in a blow dryer,” according to Indiana Sgt. David Rancourt.
Indiana Capt. Russell Kimberling remembers seeing KBR workers wearing chemical suits at Qarmat Ali, where stacks of torn white bags leaked sodium dichromate around the facility.
Photo courtesy of MIke Doyle / Doyle Raizner LLP
“More air testing monitoring with winds present should have been conducted to get a more accurate diagnosis,” said Dr. Costa. Even KBR’s own industrial hygienist, Dr. Sudhir Desai, said in a taped deposition that it was “obvious” the company should have collected an air sample during a dust storm to simulate working conditions.
In 2004, the Army released a report acknowledging the flaws in KBR’s environmental testing, saying that its sample data was “limited in scope” and “did not provide enough information to assess past exposures.”
The contractor’s lackluster response can be traced back to the inertia and denial of some of its managers back in Houston. In an e-mail dated September 3, 2003, Bruce Keyston, an employee in KBR’s Health, Safety and Environmental Department, wrote:
"We must be careful from a litigation standpoint how we address the chemicals. My basic premise that we cannot say sodium dichromate is a known human carcinogen still stands."
Company attorney William Bedford, who counseled KBR personnel in the field on how to proceed at Qarmat Ali, also played down the chemical’s toxicity. “It appeared not to be something that was…an obvious carcinogen or something that had an acute exposure problem to it,” he said in his deposition.
On August 30, 2003, two weeks after KBR conducted environmental tests—and three months after the company was first alerted to the presence of sodium dichromate—the contractor completed a remediation of Qarmat Ali, covering contaminated areas with asphalt and gravel. Several weeks later, the British Army’s Environmental Monitoring Team (BRITFOR) determined in a soil analysis that “the degree of risk” associated with the treatment plant was “high,” with the level of contamination prior to KBR’s remedial efforts likely being “considerably worse.”
Yet KBR did not caution Kimberling and his soldiers, who did not leave Qarmat Ali until October, to wear chemical suits. Some contractors continued to report that they lacked protective equipment.
KBR has denied any wrongdoing, claiming that its response was prudent and thorough. “When KBR discovered the sodium dichromate [at Qarmat Ali], the company immediately notified the Army and took steps to remediate the site,” read a statement from KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne.
Browne did not respond to questions about the three-month window between when KBR personnel were first notified of the chemical and when the company decided to stop work and remediate the site. On its website, the company’s mission includes an “uncompromising commitment to health, safety, and environment.”
Supervisors like Johnny Morney maintain that responsibility lay with KBR workers. “If it [sodium dichromate] was in the water injection system and workers encountered it, they should’ve reported it,” he said in a videotaped deposition. He points a special finger at Ed Blacke. “Mr. Blacke should have observed this himself, long before [the meetings where he was reprimanded]. As a safety professional, that’s what we had him there for.”
But Blacke did not arrive in Iraq until early July, over a month after Morney was first notified that sodium dichromate had been found at Qarmat Ali.
KBR is facing dozens of lawsuits from Army National Guard veterans accusing the contractor of criminal negligence and concealing the dangers of a known toxin. 46 Indiana soldiers filed suit last December, and in June, seven Guardsmen from West Virginia and five from Oregon joined them. At least 48, and perhaps up to 181, military personnel from Oregon alone may have suffered exposure to sodium dichromate, according to The Oregonian.
One piece of litigation, an arbitration suit filed by several ex-KBR workers, including Ed Blacke and Danny Langford, recently ruled in favor of the company—because of KBR’s immunity from litigation under the Defense Base Act.
For the embattled contractor, Qarmat Ali is the latest controversy in a string of scandals by which KBR has gained unprecedented infamy. Over 100 civil suits have been leveled at KBR and Halliburton in the past four years alone, alleging a litany of transgressions that include overbilling, accepting kickbacks, human trafficking, sexual assault, wrongful death, and serving unpurified water and spoiled food at military mess halls.
In May, the Defense Department’s top auditor revealed that KBR is connected to a “vast majority” of war contracting fraud cases, months after its former chairman, Jack Stanley, pleaded guilty to participating in an elaborate bribery scheme. And in July, the Pentagon Inspector General claimed that faulty electrical wiring installed by the contractor led to the electrocution of several servicemen in Iraq. According to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) eighteen U.S. soldiers have died overseas as a result of KBR’s “shoddy work.”
The company has also come under fire for its domestic work, reportedly overcharging the Navy for a construction contract to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
By 2007, KBR’s image had become so tarnished that its parent company, Halliburton, spun it off as an independent corporation.
Qarmat Ali is not the first time that KBR has exposed U.S. troops to environmental hazards. Earlier this spring, civilian and military personnel stationed at Joint Base Balad in Iraq accused KBR of endangering their health by burning massive heaps of garbage in toxic, open-air burn pits.
Despite these allegations, KBR has collected over $34 billion from the United States government in military and reconstruction contracts since 2001. It received $5.7 billion in taxpayer funds in 2008, up from $4.8 billion in 2007.
Written by Adam Lichtenheld with reporting by Byron Moore
Thursday, 15 October 2009 13:49
No Contractor Left Behind is a series chronicling how a toxic time bomb followed three Army National Guard units home from Iraq. It reveals how a notorious military contractor exposed American soldiers to a cancer-causing carcinogen on the battlefield and how the Pentagon tried to downplay the consequences. And it describes how Congress has relegated its investigation to a toothless forum that lacks the political clout and oversight powers to ensure effective accountability.
In the chaos following the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, U.S. Army Captain Russell Kimberling and his Indiana National Guard unit scoured the country’s scorched southern deserts. The soldiers of Charlie Company were escorting civilian contractors tasked with initiating the next—and most ambitious—phase of the war: reviving Iraq’s oil production, which policymakers back in Washington hoped would give rise to a moderate Middle Eastern democracy.
Among the oil facilities scattered across the thin stretch of land nestled between Iran and Kuwait was the Qarmat Ali water treatment plant, located on the outskirts of Basra, Iraq’s main port city. The plant had been ransacked, stripped down to a marred skeleton of wires, pipes and heavy machinery. A thick orange dust littered its floors and peppered the ground around the buildings, enveloping Qarmat Ali in a distinct, rust-colored hue. Capt. Kimberling and his men were never told, even as they suffered severe nose bleeds, painful nasal infections and lurid skin abrasions, that the mysterious powder was a deadly carcinogen.
The Indiana Guardsmen from Charlie Company.
Photo courtesy of Russell Kimberling.
Between April and September of 2003, the Indiana Guardsmen and their comrades from West Virginia and Oregon were subjected to a deadly health threat that would not be tolerated in any workplace in America.
Six years later, these once-vigorous soldiers now find themselves feeble and fraught with worry. Two have died from cancer. Another is in end-of-life hospice care. Dozens more suffer from frequent respiratory problems and chronic illnesses. “Every Charlie Company soldier who was at Qarmat Ali that I have spoken to has experienced health problems,” said Kimberling, 38.
But only in the past year have most of these soldiers learned of their exposure to sodium dichromate—a poisonous chemical that has been shown to cause long-term health problems, including cancer. Their plight offers a scathing indictment of the United States Army and its largest private contractor, KBR Inc.
In 2003, having quickly disposed of Saddam Hussein, U.S. forces hurriedly scrambled to rebuild Iraq. The Pentagon faced high expectations from impatient members of the Bush administration, who had promised the American people a swift and easy war.
“It was a hectic time,” said one former high-ranking Army official. “We were trying to get the whole country back on its feet as quickly as possible, especially the oil sector.”
That responsibility fell to Houston-based KBR, the construction giant with close ties to former Vice PresidentDick Cheney. KBR was given just two months to rebuild Qarmat Ali as part of a $2.5 billion contract with the Army Corps of Engineers, which promised—and eventually delivered—lucrative award payments once the project was completed.
But in what has become the hallmark of the Iraq War, the burden of a hastily planned invasion was inevitably borne by the troops.
“My nose would bleed for 5 to 10 minutes,” said West Virginia Staff Sgt. Russell Powell, a beefy 34-year-old medic with a thick southern twang. Last month, Powell joined Kimberling and two other Guardsmen at a hearing in front of the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC).
Like the Indiana unit, Powell and his fellow soldiers from the 1092nd Engineering Battalion out of Parkersburg, W.Va., provided security for KBR employees tasked with restoring Qarmat Ali. The plant treated water that was injected into oil wells to help maintain pressure flow, a critical process in oil production.
Despite suspicions by Pentagon officials that Qarmat Ali, like many sites around the country, had been sabotaged by Saddam Hussein’s fleeing army, U.S. military personnel were not told to take precautions.
The orange chemical was “almost impossible to avoid,” Powell said, covering some areas in drifts four feet deep. Fierce and frequent windstorms sent it swirling into the desert air and raining down on soldiers’ clothes, equipment, vehicles—even their food. “It constantly got on our skin, our eyes, in our mouths and noses,” Oregon Sgt. Rocky Bixby told the DPC.
And in sweltering summer temperatures that climbed to 120 degrees, remnants of the noxious powder would stick to soldiers’ sweat-soaked fatigues and be carried back to base, exposing other members of their battalions.
The powder would prove to be sodium dichromate, a rust-fighting industrial chemical and highly-concentrated hexavalent chromium compound. Hexavalent chromium gained notoriety for poisoning over 600 people in Hinkley, California, a case dramatized in the 2000 motion picture, Erin Brockovich.
“Hexavalent chromium is one of the most potent carcinogens known to man,” Max Costa, a professor at the New York University School of Medicine and an expert witness in the Brockovich case, told the Democratic Policy Committee last June.
At Qarmat Ali, up to 600 soldiers might have been exposed. Some began displaying symptoms—with alarming uniformity—just days after arriving at the treatment plant.
Russell Kimbering (center).
Photo courtesy of Russell Kimberling
“Within the first two months of my assignment, the irritation had progressed to a nasal infection that caused a perforation in my nose from inside out,” said Kimberling in his Congressional testimony. “You could shine a light into my nasal cavity through a hole that had eaten through to the outside of my nose.”
“My lips and face were burning, blistered and oozing pus…as though I had been burned by a hot iron,” said Powell.
For Powell, a certified medic, the shortness of breath, searing headaches and colorful rashes indicated more than simple sand irritation. "We might have thought that it was just the dry air, but when all KBR members, Iraqis and soldiers started getting bloody noses, then we knew that something was wrong,” Powell said.
But as soldiers’ health slowly deteriorated, neither KBR nor the Army conducted any tests or showed any concern over Qarmat Ali’s potential toxicity.
“Ordinarily, the Army would perform an environmental assessment of a site prior to deployment of service members or contractors to that site,” Army Secretary Pete Geren wrote in a March 2009 letter to Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). “In this case, however, the number of sites (approximately 4,000) over the geographic area of Iraq potentially needing occupational health assessments…combined with the need to restore critical infrastructure as soon as possible, made this impracticable.”
As a result, “no one from KBR or the Army ever told us about hazardous materials,” said Sgt. Bixby, a former Marine and squad leader in the 162nd Infantry Battalion of the Oregon National Guard. Some soldiers began to report their symptoms and ask questions about the thousands of torn white bags bearing the label “sodium dichromate” scattered around Qarmat Ali. They were told that the substance was merely a “mild irritant.” At daily security briefings, the troops were only warned of roadside bombs and ambushes by insurgent groups.
“Anyone who has served in the military realizes that an infantryman does not complain to the chain of command about bloody noses, or coughs, or what are seemingly minor ailments,” said Capt. Kimberling. “You assume that if you are really in danger that you will be told or it will make it down the chain of command."
For many soldiers, it never did. Glen Bootay, a former combat engineer with the 3rd Infantry Division, just recently discovered that he might have been exposed to sodium dichromate—after a friend read about it in the newspaper.
“I remember that the air tasted like metal, like I had a mouth full of pennies,” said Bootay, 30, who enlisted in the Army on September 12, 2001. Shortly after returning from Iraq, he started vomiting up to twenty times a day. He recently began undergoing chemotherapy.
Capt. Kimberling, who had to be medically evacuated to Germany during his deployment, continues to suffer from chronic sinus problems. His general malaise has made it difficult to obtain life insurance, and he fears that he might face the same fate as his commander, Lt. Col. James Gentry, who checked into hospice care last Christmas with a rare form of small cell lung cancer. He and his men suspect sodium dichromate.
After returning from Iraq, Powell began suffering from daily bouts of nausea; today, he struggles to take a full breath. “I can no longer coach my sons in Little League,” he said.
Bixby’s persistent coughing fits make it difficult for him to carry on a conversation. A lifetime non-smoker, he has trouble walking from his house to his car without wheezing.
“I simply run out of breath,” he said.
An investigation into what transpired at Qarmat Ali uncovers a convoluted web of negligence and incompetence, and the dual culpability of a highly profitable contractor and a complicit military.
Internal company memos, coupled with the testimony of several whistleblowers, reveal that KBR ignored repeated warnings of the presence of sodium dichromate and, even after identifying the known carcinogen, failed to promptly warn U.S soldiers.
The Army, meanwhile, relied on an inadequate medical test and failed to take extra precaution to shield its troops from exposure—even in the midst of a war waged under the auspices of removing a regime wielding chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. had acquired information about Iraq’s industrial chemical imports since 1984, when State Department officials warned that companies in Russia, France and West Germany were supplying large amounts of toxins to Iraq for military use.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has used the findings from a controversial report by the U.S. Army, which tested a segment of soldiers back in 2003 for chemical exposure, to deny health coverage to sick veterans. While many Guardsmen continue to require ongoing, expensive care, the VA has refused to classify their health problems as service-related.
“By all standards, the response by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans [Affairs] to this issue has been unsatisfactory,” said Sen. Bayh before the Democratic Policy Committee. The DPC, chaired by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) has hosted a pair of hearings on Qarmat Ali.
But the decision by Senate Democrats to relegate the case to the DPC, which has traditionally served as a partisan support forum, raises stark questions over whether policymakers are capable of holding KBR and the Pentagon accountable for their wrongdoing.
(Left to right): Russell Powell, Rocky Bixby, and Russell Kimberling testify at a Democratic Policy Committee hearing in Washington DC, August 3, 2009.
Photo provided by the Army Times
The DPC lacks both the full oversight powers and the bipartisan legitimacy of a standing Congressional committee. The implications of its shortcomings are impossible to ignore: without subpoena powers, the committee has failed to obtain at least one key piece of information—an informal site assessment allegedly performed by KBR personnel one month after the U.S. invaded Iraq—that could answer how much the company really knew about possible toxins at Qarmat Ali, and when.
Instead, veterans suffering from the most unlikely of war injuries remain under a dark cloud of uncertainty. Their wounds go unrecognized and are often disputed.
“We were placed in harm’s way as a result of war,” Kimberling told Congress. “To put us in further, unnecessary jeopardy was unconscionable.”
