KBR may have poisoned 100,000 people in Iraq: lawsuit

Defense contractor KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air "burn pits."

According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in Nashville, KBR burned "tires, lithium batteries ... 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."

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Originally posted by loam
reply to post by rainfall

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I'm not sure I understand your post.

'There's No Such Thing as the EPA Here'

On some days, Russell Keith could simply look up at the sky to gauge how busy his day would be as a paramedic at the largest U.S. base in Iraq.

Dark green smoke meant the contractor could count on a 30 to 40 percent spike in his patient load, he told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee last week during a hearing on contractor oversight.

Keith never knew which substance -- medical waste, body fluids, batteries, plastic or tires -- that would sometimes be set alight with jet fuel and cause the dark, acrid smoke pouring from the sprawling, 10-acre burn pit to turn green. But he did know that patients complaining of burning throats, eyes and painful breathing would fill the infirmary on those days.

"There is no such thing as the EPA here, folks," Keith said he told new hires at Joint Base Balad. Then, he would tell them, half-joking: "The burns pits are nasty. Try not to breathe." Now he says that if he had known what was being burned, he would have advised the recruits to never to get off the bus.

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"From as close as 10 feet away, I saw nuclear, biological and medical waste, including bloody cotton gauze, plastics, tires, petroleum cans, oils and lubricants thrown into burn pits"