The island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, for decades had all the makings of a tropical paradise, save for one thing: The roar of bombs blasting into the picturesque landscape.
Zaida Torres still has that sound ringing in her head. She recalls buildings trembling as if there were constant earthquakes. “It felt like a war zone – and there was no war,” says Torres, 69, a lifelong resident of the island.
Tourists still flock to the Puerto Rican tropical haven, known for its white-sand beaches and glimmering cerulean waters less then 10 miles east of the main island. But many are unaware of its tainted history and legacy of suffering.
The U.S. Navy for 60 years used the eastern side of Vieques as a bombing range, dropping 5 million pounds of ordnance each year.
The Navy finally left in May 2003, four years after an off-target 500-pound bomb killed a security guard.
This summer marks 20 years since the Navy’s departure, and while it was a victory for locals, the U.S. left behind toxic heavy metals, chemicals, and other putrid industrial waste. The island is now a hotspot for cancer and kidney disease, with almost everyone on the island knowing someone who is seriously ill. Or already dead.
“It breaks your heart,” University of Puerto Rico chemist Jorge Colón says. “We just keep hearing that they have to bury their family and friends.”
Experts and locals alike say the illnesses are tied to contamination from the military onslaught, which include napalm, Agent Orange, arsenic, lead and depleted uranium. But health care resources are scarce, and there is no hospital.
Torres feels “rage and sadness,” she told USA TODAY through a translator. A retired nurse of three decades at what was the island’s only hospital, Torres is a leader in the Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses, or Vieques Women’s Alliance. She’s a survivor of breast cancer and her husband survived prostate cancer.
But they grieve for their daughter. In 1997, Liza, one of their three children, suffered an embolism during chemotherapy for leukemia and died. She was 17.
The family’s story echoes throughout the island of about 8,000 people, where half of the island’s residents live in poverty and many are uninsured. Torres believes the cancers her family suffered are linked to the contaminants and that the disparities and lack of resources speak to a neglect of “fundamental human rights.”
Patients must take the ferry to the main island, which also lacks stable health care infrastructure, for cancer treatments, dialysis and other medical therapies.
“The way we are being treated is like a genocide,” Torres said, “even though we are U.S. citizens.”
Six decades of US Navy activity
The Naval training range was used for exercises including amphibious landings and air-to-ground bombing.
When a security guard, David Sanes, was killed by the errant bomb in 1999, residents flooded the training area to protest, leading to the arrests of many for trespassing on federal property.
After the Navy left, it transferred ownership of 15,000 acres of Vieques land to the Department of the Interior, which turned it into a wildlife refuge. In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the bombing range a Superfund site, the term given to an abandoned hazardous waste area.
The area in Vieques is one of 26 such sites throughout the Puerto Rican archipelago, 19 of which remain on the agency’s National Priority List for clean-up. For comparison, the main island is a bit smaller than Connecticut, which has had about 18 Superfund sites designated by the EPA, and 13 remain on the national priority list as of April.
Federal cleanup efforts on Vieques have been slow-moving. As of 2021, crews had removed 32,000 bombs from Vieques. But many unexploded munitions remain both on land and in surrounding underwater sites. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that “substantial” work and cleanup remains and could continue into 2032.
Residents worry that the cleanup itself — consisting of Navy operatives disposing of the remaining bombs via detonation and open burning — is causing air pollution. But the Navy says air sampling it conducted between 2005 and 2013 show levels of particulate matter were insignificant.
In 2019, Sen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to include $10 million for closed detonation chambers. Two chambers were purchased, and the EPA said it would begin to use the chambers for munitions that can be “safely moved” and detonated last spring.
‘Highly toxic’ chemicals and metals endanger health
Along with cleanup, experts say federal efforts should focus on establishing health care resources and better data collection to track health problems in Vieques.
The EPA awarded a grant to a research team led by environmental health risk researcher Lorena Estrada-Martínez, a University of Boston assistant professor of environment and public health. She and her team are involving residents in the research, letting them lead tests for contaminants. The team is also testing whether plant-based remediation methods can decontaminate the soil. They’ve had to repeat that process after Hurricane Fiona flooded the area.
Estrada-Martínez said involving the community is key.
“We want to call it a commonwealth or territory, but the way it functions is in a colonial relationship,” she said. “After so much abuse, after so many years, they’re not very trustful of the federal government. They’re not very trustful of researchers in general. And so we have a completely different approach, in that instead of working on them, we’re working with them.”
Along with assessing environmental health risks, the team is looking to fill gaps in health data by interviewing residents to gauge health problems over their lifetimes.
Cruz Maria Nazario, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, said that Vieques’ legacy of medical problems is tough to quantify. That’s because patients go to the main island for diagnosis, so cases are often not recorded and tied to Vieques.
“It’s frustrating for us that try to get some help for the people of Vieques. We cannot access very good data,” said Nazario. “What is needed is a comprehensive epidemiologic health needs study in Vieques.”
The Navy has admitted use of toxic substances but denies that its activities have affected Viequenses’ health. It cites a 2011 report by the Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that dismissed any connection of Navy activity to the island’s health disparities. The report was widely criticized by Puerto Rican officials, residents and local scientists.
But while official data is scarce and poorly reported, research has shown higher cancer and toxin rates compared to residents on the main island. After the Navy’s departure, the Puerto Rico Department of Health released an analysis finding Viequenses were 27% more likely to have cancer.
In another study, researchers found almost 27% of Vieques women had high mercury levels in hair samples compared to roughly 6% of women residing in a neighboring, highly industrialized area in the northeast part of the main island. Mercury is known to be dangerous to a developing fetus, and the women were of reproductive age.
Similarly, a 2017 analysis found Vieques women had 280% higher lung or bronchus cancer rates compared to other Puerto Rican women, and men had a 200% higher rate, according to the paper published in Global Security: Health, Science and Policy. Heavy metals such as aluminum, lead and arsenic were higher in Viequenses’ urine samples compared to main islanders, another study published in 2020 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found.
“Those are chemicals of high concern, highly toxic. They can be very persistent in the environment, but it’s difficult to remediate,” said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, a physician and professor of environmental health sciences at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
Navas-Acien studies the effects of toxic exposures to human health and said elements like depleted uranium can remain in soil for decades. The studies confirm concerning levels of exposure, she said: Air, water and food become contaminated with toxic chemicals, people become exposed, and its presence in the body is measured.
Along with cancer, evidence also shows exposures to toxins like these contribute cardiovascular and kidney diseases, she said.
‘Completely abandoned’
Lawmakers in the U.S. have proposed legislation to aid families hit hard over the decades.
Amid lawsuits filed by groups and families against the U.S. government over the health issues, Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) have proposed The Vieques Recovery and Redevelopment Act, a $1 billion bipartisan package that would fund compensation for residents of the island, a cancer center and kidney dialysis clinic. It also would test for toxins in the soil, water, vegetation and food sources.
In past years, similar bills failed to pass. Advocates say reparations are long overdue. And amid President Joe Biden’s interagency environmental justice initiatives like Justice 40, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council recommended the administration include decontamination of Vieques in its national agenda.
Myrna Pagán, 88, survived uterine cancer. But she lost her husband as well as her son, who died at 32, to liver cancer.
Pagán, founder of the environmental justice group Vidas Viequenses Valen and Radio Vieques, said all her family members who were tested had high levels of heavy metals.
“I can’t think of a family in Vieques that hasn’t . . . suffered the death of one or two members on this island because of this toxic situation,” she said.
University of Puerto Rico professor Carmen Velez Vega, an expert in social policy and environmental health, studies Superfund sites and childhood exposures. Her team also offers families education on environmental toxins.
She said the compensation couldn’t be more urgent.
“If you don’t have the money, you don’t go (to doctor’s appointments). You don’t follow up on these health care situations,” she said. “It’s a social justice to be able to compensate people that have been harmed for such a long time.”
To fill those gaps, Sandra Melendez, a retired treasury department worker, started Vieques En Rescate. It’s a nonprofit that pays for cancer patients’ transportation to appointments on the main island. It also helps with copayments, supplies and other assistance.
Melendez’s father died in 2021 of tonsil cancer.
She said she hopes the proposed law for compensation, introduced to the Senate in May, passes. But she says health services, schools and a hospital on the island should be the priority. The island’s only hospital was destroyed by Hurricane Maria.
“We hope the U.S. government responds, because we’ve done our part for the U.S. nation for 60 years. So, now – we deserve something for that,” said Melendez, 56. “We are completely abandoned.”
Her five sisters left Vieques for the U.S. mainland, but she stayed to advocate. She thinks of children like her 8-year-old granddaughter, who has asthma, and wonders about their future there.
“I want for them a peaceful, healthful, beautiful place for them to live,” she said.
Torres said she hopes the island will one day be safe and better resourced for her two grandchildren.
For them, she said, she’ll continue advocating.
“I have to keep in the struggle,” she said. “I’ve got to continue trying.”
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Reach Nada Hassanein at nhassanein@usatoday.com or on Twitter @nhassanein.
