The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of destroying chemical munitions buried in Spring Valley in Northwest Washington, has not formulated a public safety plan in the event that an accident occurs when the agency destroys the weapons in April, Army Corps officials told a D.C. Council panel Monday.
The Spring Valley area was used as a weapons-testing site during World War I, and toxic chemical munitions are still being discovered there. The Army Corps recently found five munitions at Spring Valley, which they plan to dispose of on federal land. Local residents say the chemicals in the weapons have the potential to become hazardous if exposed to the public.
While the engineers testifying before the council’s Public Safety Committee detailed the precautions they will take during the disposal to make sure there is no public exposure, they admitted that they did not have a plan if their safeguards failed.
“If all that planning goes awry and there’s a mistake, what I conclude … is that you do not have a public safety plan,” said Councilman Phil Mendelson.
“That’s correct,” responded Todd Beckwith, a project manager with the Army Corps. “We were not planning on taking additional protection actions beyond the federal property.”
Beckwith said the safety measures that would be taken — such as sealing the ordnance and explosives in a stainless steel vessel, neutralizing any chemical reactions, and making sure that the weapons were destroyed at a safe distance from public property — made a public safety plan unnecessary.
But Millicent Williams, the director of the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, said a public safety plan does exist, coordinated among her agency, the Army Corps, fire department and emergency medical services.
“To say there is a formalized plan, I don’t know if we could say that necessarily,” she said.
Spring Valley residents testified that they were concerned about how the federal government was handling the disposal.
“It would be nice to know there is a plan in place that is more detailed than somebody saying ‘whoops,'” said Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Thomas Smith.
Army Corps engineers said the disposal method they are using is safe and common, the same procedure that was used to successfully destroy munitions in Spring Valley in 2003.
