Questions Raised over Extent of Planned Glenbrook Road Cleanup

A late-February final approval is expected for plans to clear buried World War I-era poisonous waste from the property at 4825 Glenbrook Road. The recommended plan, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released in December, calls for tearing down the Spring Valley home and digging up to 12 feet beneath it to remove any buried munitions and chemicals ... The Army Corps has spent more than $200 million on munitions cleanup in the Spring Valley neighborhood since 2003. During World War I, the Army used American University as a testing site, firing weapons into then-undeveloped woods around the campus. In 1918, 4825 Glenbrook Road was a dumpsite for chemical and explosive munitions and related debris; officials believe a pit was disturbed there when a home was built in 1992 ...

4825/4835 Glenbrook Road Test Pit Investigation

Kent Slowinski, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in the area and former member of the Restoration Advisory Board, has expressed concerns that the current plan doesn’t account for possible poisonous residue left beneath the adjacent property, 4835 Glenbrook Road. According to Slowinski, bulldozers ran over bottles of a blistering agent at the border of the properties when the two houses were first constructed. In addition, he said, contractors planting a tree at 4835 Glenbrook in 1996 suffered from chemical burns when they sliced through a bucket of chemical-filled bottles.
Northwest Current
January 25, 2012 (pg. 2)