Seems everywhere the military sets up shop, it often leaves a mess, sometimes a toxic one. Since the Washington region is home to many forts and bases, airfields and Navy yards, we are also the home to a few toxic waste sites.
With great irony, the most toxic site is also in one of the capital city’s most elite neighborhoods: Spring Valley. The Northwest community, by the Maryland line, has been home to presidents and generals and senators for decades.
And since the U.S. Army used the farms and forests around Ward Circle to develop chemical weapons for World War I, it has been the resting place for bombs filled with mustard gas and arsenic and poison gases such as arsine.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been in charge of cleaning up Spring Valley, since the chemical weapons were first discovered in 1993. It says the job is done. It has dug deep pits and collected unexploded bombs and it’s ready to explode them — right in Spring Valley.
Not so fast, says Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. At a hearing this week before her subcommittee, she said: “The Corps had no right to announce its exit without more, especially considering the many errors and missteps so far and an absence of transparency over the years that borders on suppression on information.”
As for “suppression of information,” the Corps in Spring Valley has few rivals. But the federal government at large is responsible for a massive cover-up.
Back in 1918, military scientists sent out a request for poisons. A chemist across town at Catholic University concentrated arsenic to create Lewisite, known as the “dew of death,” because one drop could kill. The Army tied goats and dogs to trees in Spring Valley, dropped bombs of chemicals and watched the animals die.
For more than 70 years, the experiments and the chemicals left in the ground remained secret. A contractor uncovered a stash of bombs in 1993, and the Corps investigated. In 1996, it declared the job done. It took watchdog D.C. health officials and journalists to uncover more toxic waste and force the Corps back to work.
On Friday, I visited one of the worst toxic pits, at 4825 Glenbrook. The brick mansion and its stately stone neighbor are still fenced off. Traffic is still diverted. There’s heavy equipment in the driveway, and Army trailers sit in the American University campus on the hill above.
Reporting on the story in 1998, I found that landscape workers had been burned by toxic agents in the stone mansion’s yard, and residents of 4825 had come down with cancers that could have been related to the chemicals.
Neighborhood activists such as Kent Slowinski testified at Norton’s hearing that letting the Corps explode the bombs on its current site, near Sibley Memorial Hospital, is unsafe, at best.
Given the government’s general lack of honesty and willingness to cover up information for the last 70 years, we are fortunate to have Norton in the position to make sure Spring Valley residents are safe. She could perform the same duty for residents across the region.
