Two young mothers are walking their infants in strollers up Glenbrook Road in D.C.’s Spring Valley neighborhood on Friday. One in shorts was pushing a double stroller; her friend in a black print summer shift was motoring a single.
“Are you aware that you just walked by a toxic waste site?” I asked.
“No,” said the one in the dress, “but it’s good to know.”
Not that many residents of Spring Valley know that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still digging up chemical weapons from World War I right in their elite streets. Spring Valley is the country’s only “formerly used defense site” in an urban area. Just last week the Army announced that it had found a new stash of jugs filled with chemical agents used to kill soldiers back in the 1914-18 war. Could be mustard gas, arsenic, Lewisite.
As the moms were strolling up toward American University on Glenbrook, a mile away behind Sibley Hospital the Army was destroying bombs it had unearthed in the past year. Patients could look out their windows and gaze over federal property where the Army was trying to neutralize local weapons of mass destruction.
Allow me to describe two surreal tableaus:
— On Glenbrook Road two houses sit side-by-side. To the left is the stately, stone home with eight white columns and fine landscaping where American University President Cornelius Kerwin hosts picnics with students; right next door is a brick house surrounded by a 10-foot chain link fence, topped by a single strand of barbed wire. Two structures encased in plastic tarps sit atop the most potentially lethal toxic waste site in any U.S. city.
A D.C. cop with the Special Operations Division is stationed out front to deter terrorists from walking off with toxic waste. Really.
— Behind Sibley Hospital, the Army is disposing bombs in the EDS, a mobile unit that’s designed to take the toxicity from the chemicals. The EDS is right next to Dale Carlia Reservoir, 50 yards away from a water treatment facility, and not far from an assisted living facility.
What happens if something goes amiss?
The wealthy citizens of Spring Valley have been trying to ignore this unfortunate mess since it was first discovered in 1993. Turns out Army chemists had been cooking up deadly concoctions on AU’s campus in 1917, experimenting with them in fields and forests that now make up Spring Valley and dumping them in pits.
“Most of the community isn’t aware,” says Kent Slewinski, a lifelong resident and thorn in the Army’s side. “If there’s a public safety plan in case something goes wrong with the EDS, no one has been informed.”
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton visited the site last week. “They’re doing it exactly right by destroying it right there,” she told me.
But Tom Smith, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, wrote to D.C. officials that it was “shameful” that the feds were allowed to dispose of WMD without informing neighbors about a public safety plan.
I’m sure the moms pushing their infants would have been interested.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
