At Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton's March 25 virtual Town Hall meeting with the National Park Service, officials from your agency were asked about the Fort Circle/Fort Totten pedestrian trail, which has been closed since last summer after heavy rains exposed a World War I-era 75mm artillery shell. In the response (pgs. 4 - 5) we finally received from your agency on July 9, NPS stated that during trail construction "a specialized contractor will test the soil for any evidence of unexploded ordnance." I'm writing to you (hopefully) following that investigation to ascertain the precise extent of the testing and to ensure that all soil contaminated with munition debris and laboratory waste will be recovered from this heavily used Park Service land ... Consider this letter to be my formal request for any and all results, reports or other documentation produced by the National Park Service and/or its contractors regarding that investigation. I want to know what type and how much soil contamination was discovered, whether any munitions debris or laboratory waste was found and, most importantly, the precise extent of the area that was examined ...
There can be no doubt that the shell discovered at Ft. Totten in July 2020 came from the Glenbrook Road munitions burial pit in Spring Valley, Washington, DC. The most recent explanation for how this transfer happened was documented on page 13 of the March 10, 2020, RAB meeting minutes by Dan Noble: "It is known that the [munitions] debris [from Glenbrook Road] was sent to the Ft. Totten area when the nearby Ft. Totten metro station was being built [in the 1990s]. Soil was needed at the new metro station to level out an equipment yard for the metro contractor. Some soil was sent to that area and the contractor began to spread the contaminated soil out.” After speaking to an official from your agency who was present at Ft. Totten at the time of the dumping, Dr. Albright said that the NPS confirmed the contaminated soil was ultimately moved elsewhere ...
At the March 9, 2021, RAB meeting I asked [program director Dan] Noble (pg. 13) whether he thought the tons of contaminated soil that were moved from Spring Valley could have been “contained in the one-quarter acre where the foot trail is [now located]?” If the NPS “only surveys the foot trail,” I suggested, "they’re going to miss [contaminated] soil to the east and west.” Instead of responding to my understandable concern, the FUDS program director deferred to your agency ... As more than one RAB member opined at our July meeting, whether or not the Army Corps cleanup team considers this issue to be within the official scope of their responsibilities, environmental justice concerns are appropriately raised when one of the wealthier residential areas in our nation’s capital secretly dumps its toxic waste in a working class neighborhood east of Rock Creek Park.
