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.
No news for Norton; the District’s delegate to Congress has toured the toxic sites and helped keep funds flowing to clean up the capital city’s FUDS — formerly used defense sites.
What caught Norton’s eye was the flier’s call for a health study to determine if toxic chemicals have made residents ill, as many locals suspect. The District has set aside $250,000 for such a study, but the project could use another $500,000. Hengst’s flier suggested people call Norton.
“First I heard about it,” she tells me. “I thought — why not put an amendment for $1 million into the defense appropriations bill that’s coming up?”
So on Thursday Norton took to the House floor and offered her amendment. For the Army, $1 million represents a comma in its budget, but no one’s adding funds to anything; her amendment got voted down. But after the vote, Washington’s Norm Dicks, top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said he could help direct funds for the health study.
“I lost the amendment,” Holmes says, “but I might have won the issue.”
It would be a win for Hengst, a librarian at AU’s law school, and Kent Slewinski, the two activists who have been pushing for answers to Spring Valley’s toxic problem. Slewinski was pushing a “float” in the parade that consisted of a wheelbarrow and a sign that said “Spring Valley Cover Up.”
That’s extreme. For 18 years the Army has been uncovering jugs of mustard gas, stacked munitions, and bottles of Lewisite, an arsenic potion known back then as “the dew of death.” The health effects have yet to be determined.
The Spring Valley community is divided: Some want to ignore the chemical problem to protect real estate values; others want to clean it up and get answers to lingering questions. The Army has spent more than $200 million to clean up the neighborhood, but a health effect study has never been completed. Johns Hopkins University has started to investigate whether the buried chemicals can be connected to cancers. And if Norton is able to carve out the $1 million, JHU might give Spring Valley answers.
“You get your best ideas from the street,” she says.
In this case, literally.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
