Corps Hopes to Complete Spring Valley Site-Wide Cleanup by 2020

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it will return to Spring Valley every five years after completing its cleanup in 2020, to check that the area is verifiably free of contamination.  The Army has been working for over two decades — and has spent over $200 million — to rid the neighborhood of munitions and chemical contamination left there during World War I, when American University hosted a munitions testing site.  While the plan is to finish remediating the site within the next five years, the Army Corps will “check in perpetuity,” Dan Noble, who  manages the cleanup effort, told the community at a recent meeting of the Restoration Advisory Board ...  

This new pledge to stay involved is a significant and welcome shift from the past: About a decade and a half ago, the Army declared the neighborhood clean.  Luckily, the D.C. Health Department raised doubts.  When the cleanup resumed, workers soon found elevated arsenic levels in the soil near American University’s child development center and intramural fields, as well as buried munitions on Glenbrook Road.  This time, we look forward to both an accurate bill of health and continuing checkups to ensure that status is maintained.
Editorial
Northwest Current
March 25, 2015

Dan Noble:  CERCLA is the environmental regulation that guides our efforts here at the site ... The remedial investigation phase that we are reporting on in tonight's presentation, is right here at the yellow star ... The report looks at all the effort that we've done and all the data that we've gathered and is basically intended to boil it down to what really matters ... We've thought about the tentative schedule to get through the process and to get to the point where we're actually taking action to address these cleanups.  We want to finalize the RI Report by early summer, complete the Feasibility Study by the end of the year, by next spring we want to bring you a Proposed Plan and by the end of summer [2016] have the Decision Document signed.  So we hope by the start of calendar year 2017 that we can start undertaking some of these actions.
Dan Noble, Project Manager
Spring Valley RAB Meeting
March 10, 2015

Army Report Identifies Areas with 'Unacceptable Risks and Hazards'

The Spring Valley Formerly Used Defense Site (FUDS) consists of approximately 661 acres in Northwest Washington, D.C.  During the World War I-era, the site was known as the American University Experiment Station (AUES) and Camp Leach.  It was used by the U.S. government for engineer troop training, research and testing of chemical agents, equipment, and munitions ... The Site-Wide Remedial Investigation Report summarizes the results of completed field activities performed to characterize the nature and extent of any potential contamination resulting from past DoD activities in the Spring Valley FUDS ... 

Human health risk assessments, as well as an ecological risk assessment, were developed to evaluate possible chemical contaminants.  Munitions hazard assessments are documented in the report to evaluate potential munitions hazards at different areas throughout the Spring Valley FUDS.  Finally, the report describes areas identified through the risk and hazard assessment processes, where the Army Corps of Engineers recommends a Feasibility Study (FS) to address potential remaining concerns ... The FS will outline how the Corps of Engineers plans to address any potential unacceptable risks and hazards.  After the FS the Corps of Engineers will prepare a Proposed Plan, which will identify a preferred clean-up action to address remaining risks and hazards. 
Spring Valley FUDS
Site-Wide Remedial Investigation Fact Sheet
February 2015

Areas to be evaluated in Feasibility Study