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Articles
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| Army dig begins in Spring Valley |
VOICE writes, "Army dig begins in Spring Valley
WWII remains: Initial work under way at two AU homes
BY CHARLES BERMPOHL
Preliminary work began on Monday to find and remove potentially explosive munitions and lethal chemicals from two Spring Valley homes owned by American University. The Army Corps of Engineers said it will issue sheltering instructions to neighbors in a 49-house area around the site — those identified as most vulnerable to an accidental explosion and release of poison gas.
The start-up work could remove $160,000 worth of trees and shrubs on an elaborately landscaped multimillion-dollar house at 4835 Glenbrook Road that the school has designated as the home of its president, but which is currently vacant.
Once the greenery is gone, the Army plans to dig 77 test pits on the property in a search for deadly ordnance buried in the area when it was the site of the nation's first chemical warfare testing program in World War I."
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The house next door, at 4825 Glenbrook, sits on property that is also scheduled to be extensively tested for chemical munitions. Beside the house is a large, temporary, aluminum-plated structure, built to withstand the explosive force of an artillery shell, which the Army said cost $795,000 to build. Workers sifting through unearthed materials will do their work in the structure.
High concentrations of arsenic and the chemical by-products of mustard gas have been found on the property. Mustard gas was the most deadly of the poisonous compounds used on the battlefields of Europe during the 1914 to 1918 war
Additionally, the Army Corps, in an earlier dig, said it excavated 427 ordnance items and 106 glassware items from the 4825 Glenbrook Road site. A 55-gallon drum containing an unidentified white powder remains in a pit beneath the house, as is shown in a photograph.
The Army had originally scheduled July as the start-up date for the work. But the university objected to the metal plating on the temporary building, complaining it was not strong enough to protect workers and neighbors in the case of an accidental explosion.
The Army, while insisting that the structure was sufficient for the task, nevertheless spent another $135,000 on additional aluminum siding to beef it up, according to figures supplied by the Army.
In comments faxed to The Current on Tuesday, Dan Noble, a Spring Valley project manager for the Army, said the structure designed by the Army prior to the university's objections "was full and adequate, but adding the metal did increase the strength of the box." The Army describes the possibility of an accident as remote.
David Taylor, assistant to the university's president, said the school wanted the structure redesigned after talking to its scientific adviser, who, he said, recommended that it "could have been made a wee bit better."
A dispute involving the reimbursement costs of the landscaping at 4835 Glenbrook was resolved shortly after an Army spokesperson said the school had delayed the project after it objected to the Army's estimates.
At a meeting of the Spring Valley Restoration Advisory Board last week, Noble said neighbors in a 49-house area surrounding the two Glenbrook Road homes would be mailed sheltering instructions before the digging begins on Oct. 29.
In addition, the Army outlined an elaborate safety system involving video and air monitoring, a chemical agent filtration system and a siren to warn of an on-the-job accident.
The project comes with an $8.7 million price tag covered by a special fund from the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Environmental Safety and Occupational Health. That is in addition to the $11 million annual cost of the Spring Valley cleanup.
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Posted on Sep 20, 2007 16:35pm.
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