LOVELAND, Ohio — It doesn’t take long before Julie Akey starts crying.
“Every day I get messages from sick people,” Akey said.
She shakes her head, wipes her eyes and grabs a tissue. She’s scrolling through the Facebook group she moderates when another message pops up.
“He passed away suddenly in December from multiple types of cancer,” Akey said.
That’s what most of these messages are like. From veterans. From widows. From friends. And Akey's been reading them since 2019, a few years after she was diagnosed with her own cancer.
“It's ridiculous,” Akey said. “I shouldn't be crying, but it's tough because everyone is sick.”
When Akey got sick and was forced to retire from her job as a linguist with the State Department, she started looking through obituaries. In them, she searched for a few phrases. One was “multiple myeloma,” the rare cancer she didn’t really fit the medical profile for.
The other was “Fort Ord.”
Hear more about Akey's efforts to help others below:
That’s the former military base in California where she lived in the 90s. For eight hours a day for almost two years, government officials taught her Arabic there. Akey loved it. It became her dream job, traveling the world and working as a diplomat for the State Department.
Then, she started sleeping. A lot. And soon, she slept more than she was awake.
“I was diagnosed 22 years younger than the average age,” Akey said. “It makes no sense. And that's why I started to question it.”
The first time she searched obituaries, Akey said she found 20 people. Then, she began searching for other blood cancers.
She found hundreds more.
On the kitchen counter in her Loveland home, there’s a large manila folder. It’s overflowing with documents, held together with a dozen binder clips and full of crumbled-up Post-it Notes.
“These are the water tests,” Akey said, pointing to EPA data that shows toxins in the water at Ford Ord when she was there. “All of these are higher — much higher — than they should be.”
Through years of research, Akey found she wasn’t the only one who got sick. And she wasn’t the only one who blamed her time at the base, which operated as a training center for almost 80 years before it closed.
“I have kidney amyloidosis, and I have Waldenström's Macroglobulinemia,” said Gary Sauer, a 22-year Army veteran who lives in Virginia. “It's not curable.”
Sauer used to clean vehicles at Fort Ord, using chemicals now known to cause cancer.
“There was always this odor,” Sauer told WCPO 9 News. “This caustic odor that was in the air.”
Like Akey, Sauer drank water the EPA says was contaminated by leaky oil tanks buried underground. Those chemicals seeped into the aquifer that supplied drinking water to the base.
“People drank it,” Sauer said. “People showered with it and food was prepared with it.”
For decades.
It’s not a question of whether the water was contaminated or not. Before Akey moved to Fort Ord, the EPA put the base on its list of most contaminated places in the country. The federal agency found issues with groundwater contamination, soil contamination and burn pits.
However, it's often difficult to directly connect toxic exposure to a specific medical condition.
And in 1996, the CDC concluded there were no health risks related to exposure at Fort Ord. But now, after years of Akey’s work and a better understanding of the chemicals that were there, agency officials are taking another look at their own data to see if drinking the water can cause cancer.
A conclusion is expected this spring.
Akey has no doubts.
Because after her diagnosis, she took matters into her own hands. Akey created a database of veterans who served at Fort Ord — to track if they were sick and to see if there was a connection to their time at the base.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Akey said. “I have zero qualifications to run a registry. And 1,626 people have trusted me with their personal information.”
Her database shows more cases of multiple myeloma, like hers, than breast and prostate cancer, more common types of the disease.
“It’s unfathomable,” said John Haecker, a Vietnam veteran. “And it's just viewed as collateral damage.”
Haecker used to test drinking water at Fort Ord as an environmental science officer. He's still appealing his own benefit claim from 1982.
For Akey, it took years before the VA approved her claim for benefits. A claim that links her illness to her military service. She was denied multiple times before that, and she says most of the people in her database also have been denied.
“I don't think it should be that hard,” Akey said. “Veterans shouldn't have to work so hard to prove that the military caused them to be sick.”
At a YMCA in Warren County, Akey works out with other veterans. They joke about the Gulf of America and whichever military branch they weren’t a part of. At a cancer support group, Akey does yoga. She spends the better part of an hour breathing and letting go of her tension.
She has a lot — because she also undergoes chemotherapy treatments three times a month.
Those treatments often leave her wiped out, and she’s been doing them for so long doctors worry they will lose their effectiveness. Akey's considering another type of treatment, one that would require 24/7 care afterward.
“It always comes back,” Akey said of her cancer. “And that means I’ll be doing treatment the rest of my life.”
That's why she’s spending the time she has advocating for other veterans. Even if it makes her angry. And even if it makes her cry. Because after she gathers herself, putting down her tissues, another message pops up on her phone.
It’s a notification from the Fort Ord group.
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Want more resources?
Akey’s website has resources for veterans, families and others who might have been impacted by their service, including information about how to file a claim with the VA.
