Huge Open-Air Burn Pits Causes Many U S Troops Death

Long before Lauren Price death, Lauren knew that her health issues were directly related to her service for her country, after facing prolonged exposure to burn pits during her tour of Iraq.

According to report, while stationed in Baghdad, soldiers nicknamed it “the Iraqi crud”. For many, over-the-counter medication helped ease their breathing difficulties while on tour before they recovered on their return to the US but for Lauren Price, the crud never went away.

Within a few short months of returning from her 13-month deployment to Iraq in 2008, she could no longer manage the three-mile jogs she used to run every day.

In 2011, she was diagnosed with terminal constrictive bronchiolitis – a rare form of lung cancer caused by breathing in toxins – and she was medically retired from the Navy two years later.

Within a few short years she couldn’t even walk to her mailbox without losing her breath and needing to take a break.

Her lung capacity fell to around 30 per cent, functioning at less than a third of that of a typically healthy person.

On 30 March 2021, Lauren passed away from complications related to cancer. She was 56.

“It was really hard to see her deterioration but it was so much harder for her as she had always been so independent,” Lauren’s husband Jim Price tells The Independent.

“She was a single mother for many years and so it was difficult for her to acknowledge that she needed help or couldn’t do as much as she used to.”

Lauren had testified before Congress how she was particularly exposed to the toxic fumes as she became a lead convoy driver and drove trucks laden with vehicle parts to and from the pits.

During America’s post-September 11 wars, huge open-air burn pits were used to dispose of the mountains of trash on US military bases.

Everything from food packaging to human waste to military equipment, chemicals, paints, petrol, plastics and tyres were dumped into the huge pits and set alight with jet fuel.

Many of the pits covered acres of land and burned all year round without going out, all within close proximity to where US troops were sleeping, eating and working.

One of the biggest pits spanned 10 acres, burning around the clock at Balad Air Base, just north of Baghdad.

It’s a waste disposal practice that was banned on US soil back in the 1970s because of the health risks from the release of toxic fumes but which, five decades later, is still practiced by the US army on deployment to foreign countries, leaving American servicemen and women exposed to these toxins every single day.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was simply common practice as troops were required to leave nothing behind.

“Everything had to be burned everywhere we went – we couldn’t just leave trash behind and it was also a security risk,” explains Tom Porter, executive vice president of government affairs at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and a Navy veteran of Afghanistan. 

Mr Porter tells The Independent that there are other pollutants on the bases, but people typically refer to everything altogether as burn pits.

“Wherever Nato forces were in Afghanistan, facilities were powered with diesel generators that would be three metres tall and wide and they were just pumping out black smoke that you breathed in all of the time,” he says.

“And probably even worse than that was the portable toilets on the bases as there was no sewage works so you would take out the waste and pour jet fuel on it. That happened every day where Nato forces were.”

On one large base in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan a vast lake of raw sewage earned the nickname the “Poo Pond”, as the waste from portable toilets used by 30,000-plus troops was dumped into one gigantic cesspit.