Funny how the Army Corps of Engineers keeps unearthing more poisons in Spring Valley. Only it’s not so funny. It’s downright alarming and scary.
Last week engineers hired to clean up a pit where the Army buried chemical weapons from World War I dug up a small flask encrusted with mustard gas. In the trench warfare during the 1914-1918 war, armies hurled mustard gas bombs across the killing fields to annihilate troops.
The corps said the vial posed no risk to the public. The corps has been telling us for 16 years that the bombs and chemical residue are harmless.
“Mustard gas in open containers is just as toxic now as it was 90 years ago,” says Kent Slewinski, a Spring Valley resident, activist and thorn in the Army’s side. “How can the corps say there’s no risk?”
That’s the question D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton posed to corps project manager Daniel Noble on Thursday afternoon. When she heard about the mustard gas, she hauled Noble into her office. Norton has been relentless in keeping the corps on the case and prying information from the Army.
“We want them to keep digging,” she told me after the meeting. “They are not leaving until we say so.”
Since 1993, when homebuilders in Spring Valley first stumbled upon bombs, the Army Corps of Engineers has been downplaying the danger and trying to weasel out of the cleanup operation. Journalists and D.C. health officials learned that the Army set up labs around Ward Circle in 1917 on what is now American University. Chemists cooked up toxic agents. The Army packed arsenic and other poisons into bombs and dropped them on dogs to see how well they killed.
The firing ranges that were then forests and fields are now the elite streets of Spring Valley. Politicians, diplomats and lawyers populate the posh addresses.
The Army Corps took over in 1993 and said the cleanup was complete in 1996. It was not. More weapons and poisons came from the ground, especially under 4825 Glennbrook Road, on the edge of American University’s campus. Slewinski and other activists say there are more burial sites and more bombs. Spring Valley is now the Army’s biggest urban toxic cleanup operation in the country.
Residents of Spring Valley are conflicted by the news. On one hand, they worry about their health; on the other, they fear their homes will lose value. That’s understandable, but there are larger health issues at stake.
Geophysicists with the Naval Research Lab have begun to search for World War I shells north of Dalecarlia Parkway, in the fields and forests around the reservoir. Preliminary tests indicate that there could be hundreds of bombs under the soil.
“We’ve begun to talk about that,” Norton tells me. “There’s some evidence of contamination in the underground water.”
The corps has declared the reservoir safe.
Says Norton: “Assurances from the corps don’t matter.”
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
