The Navy is settling with Marines and families exposed to toxins at Camp LeJeune

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Saturday is the deadline to file claims in one of the biggest toxic exposure cases in history. So far, Marine Corps veterans and family members have filed more than 385,000 claims against the government. They believe tainted water on Camp Lejeune made them sick. Jay Price of member station WUNC reports.

JAY PRICE, BYLINE: The Navy has begun offering out-of-court cash settlements to some claimants, but people can file lawsuits if their claim is denied or they don't like the Navy's offer or the Navy doesn't respond within six months. So far, more than 2,000 have filed suit. Ed Bell is among hundreds of plaintiffs' attorneys in the case. He leads a small team of them appointed by the court to represent the whole group. He says despite heavy advertising by some lawyers, his firm is still fielding questions from potential claimants.

ED BELL: We've had a flurry of calls lately - things like, you mean I can file a claim, too? And sometimes that advertising itself is confusing. So I think there are a lot of people out there that don't fully appreciate the impact of August 10.

PRICE: That deadline is one new milestone that's been reached in the case. Another is the first 25 plaintiffs have been chosen to serve as test cases. University of North Carolina law professor Mark Weidemaier says those so-called bellwether trials are an important step.

MARK WEIDEMAIER: It can mark the beginning of the end because it's the moment where we start to figure out what these cases are genuinely worth.

PRICE: The goal is for the majority of cases to be settled out of court. One of the federal judges handling the cases has said trying them all in a courtroom would take hundreds of years.

WEIDEMAIER: So the idea behind bellwether trials is that if we pick a really representative subset of cases, we can produce some good information about what will happen if you take the others to trial, and then the parties and their lawyers can use it to settle all the others.

PRICE: Weidemaier says bellwether cases can also help ease the frustration some plaintiffs feel about not getting their own day in court. And some of the Lejeune plaintiffs do want their own trials but not Catherine Songer.

CATHERINE SONGER: There's hundreds of thousands of people affected by this water. And I think my story will be told by somebody. And so I don't feel the need to go in front of a judge.

PRICE: Songer, now 70, still lives near Camp Lejeune with her husband, a retired colonel. She taught science at a local community college until her last day on the job 10 years ago, when Parkinson's disease symptoms put her in an ambulance.

SONGER: I can't teach anymore. I was an editor for a magazine. I can't do that anymore. I love to kayak. I can't do that anymore. I'm a fighter. I'm not a quitter. You know, I try to do things to keep me robust and progression of the disease not to go as fast.

PRICE: She says she, her husband and their son and daughter lived on the base in the mid-1980s, arriving a few years after tests started to find contaminants in the water.

SONGER: So I felt betrayed because at that point, when we moved in, they knew the water was toxic. You know, I had pictures of the kids and I playing on the driveway with, like, a sprinkler party. We watered our garden with the water and ate those crops, so to speak, out of the backyard. We drank a lot of water.

PRICE: She says she's resigned herself to not having the active retirement she'd envisioned, and she expects to have more expenses because of her condition and may need to pass money onto her children in case they eventually get sick from the water, too. The bellwether cases are expected to go to trial late this year or early next year, but the clock is ticking. Many of those affected have illnesses that could shorten their lives, and many are elderly. Bell's law firm has clients as old as 90. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, N.C.

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