Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton was midway through the Palisades July 4 parade route on Monday when a fellow in fatigues and a World War I doughboy helmet approached her. He looked a tad batty, but this was Palisades’ day for marching on the edge. Allen Hengst handed Norton a flier about the search for World War I weapons in Spring Valley, a neighborhood over the hill about a mile east of Palisades. It described the basics: that the Army had used what is now American University to experiment with chemical weapons in 1917. It had dumped toxic waste in what were then forests and fields; since 1993 the Army Corps of Engineers has been digging up bombs and bottles of arsenic under what are now some of the most valuable homes in the District.

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