Proposed Army Cleanup Would Demolish Glenbrook Road House

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is recommending tearing down a Spring Valley home to identify and remove World War I-era munitions and chemicals feared to be buried beneath it. Since 2000, the Army Corps has removed more than 500 munitions items, 400 pounds of laboratory glassware and more than 100 tons of soil contaminated with arsenic and other hazardous substances from 4825 Glenbrook Road, officials said.

4825 Glenbrook Road Remedial Investigation Report

... In 1918, 4825 Glenbrook Road was a dumpsite for chemical and explosive munitions and related debris; officials believe a pit was disturbed when the home was built, scattering that material throughout the property. The Army is now proposing to clean up whatever it finds beneath the home to a depth of 12 feet, spending an estimated $12.5 million to restore the site to residential standards.
Brady Holt
Northwest Current
August 10, 2011 (pg. 1)

Campus Groundwater Sampled in Ongoing Perchlorate Investigation

No Entry: Source Area Investigation

The installation of sixteen temporary wells at American University in the vicinity of Kreeger Hall was completed in an effort to identify the source of elevated perchlorate levels in the groundwater in this area. The wells were installed, sampled and closed during a three-week period in July ... Also this month, data generated from the first quarterly sampling effort in May at existing groundwater monitoring wells and surface water locations, such as creeks and streams, was reviewed.

Drilling for Groundwater at Source Area #2

The field team plans to conduct the second quarterly sampling effort the first week of August to assess whether seasonal fluctuations affect contaminant levels in groundwater within the Spring Valley project area. Three new deep groundwater monitoring wells are expected to be installed later this year to determine if perchlorate has migrated into the deeper groundwater flow areas.

Spring Valley FUDS
Project Update
July 2011

Preparing to Sample Source Area #1 Groundwater

Norton Seeks $1 Million to Study Spring Valley FUDS Health Effects

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton [D-DC] today will offer an amendment on the House floor to the Defense Appropriations bill to provide the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with $1 million to study the health effects of the Spring Valley Formerly Used Defense Site (FUDS) located in upper Northwest Washington, DC ... Under House Rules, Members may no longer earmark funds to a specific jurisdiction or project. However, Norton's amendment would require the study or studies to be done of FUDSs in cities with more than 500,000 residents where chemical agents were tested. Spring Valley appears to be the only FUDS that meets that definition.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton
Press Release (July 6, 2011)
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," Norton says, "but I might have won the issue."
Harry Jaffe

The Examiner

July 7, 2011

Kent Slowinski & Ginny Durrin after the Palisades July 4th parade

District Government Soliciting $250,000 Follow-Up Health Study

To provide a follow-up analysis of the initial health study completed by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health approximately four years ago, the study will consist of: documenting community concerns about health impacts possibly related to the Spring Valley FUDS, conducting open communication on project methods and findings in conjunction with the previous work completed, following-up on issues raised in the initial 2007 Scoping Study, and providing specific resources and education as needed to community members, groups and other interested parties.
Solicitation for Follow-up on Spring Valley Health Study
DC Office of Contracting & Procurement
June 21, 2011

Amendment No. 1
June 27, 2011

Spring Valley residents are hoping a proposed health study will be able to offer more information about the health effects of World War I-era contamination in their community. If the District and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health successfully hammer out a contract, the school’s researchers will immediately begin an update on a 2007 study that found an elevated incidence of arsenic-related cancers and other illnesses in Spring Valley, according to Mary Fox, a lead researcher in the study ... The contamination occurred during World War I, when the U.S. Army used the American University campus to test chemical weapons, which it fired into the then-undeveloped woods that later became the Spring Valley community.
Brady Holt
Northwest Current
July 13, 2011 (pg. 1)

Army Drilling 15 Wells to Pinpoint Perchlorate Source Near Kreeger

Perchlorate source area characterization and deep well installation will tentatively begin in June 2011. The 15 new temporary wells on AU‟s campus will be installed between the location where the highest perchlorate levels in Spring Valley were detected, and an existing up gradient well with low perchlorate levels ... The groundwater sampling results taken from the new temporary wells and the geophysical survey results from the area around Kreeger Hall will be evaluated to identify potential perchlorate source areas.

Well #5 will be 15 feet north of highest perchlorate detections

Prior to installing temporary wells, each borehole location will be cleared to a depth of 10 feet using an air spade to ensure that utilities are not impacted by drilling activities ... Split-spoon samples (extending the length of the temporary well) will be collected and analyzed, along with one groundwater sample and one soil sample, approximately 10 to 15 feet below ground surface, from the borehole locations.

Well #9 will be 30 feet east of highest perchlorate detections

The perchlorate source area investigation is a separate effort where temporary wells will be drilled, installed, sampled, and abandoned in the same day.
Todd Beckwith, USACE
Restoration Advisory Board Meeting
May 10, 2011

Norton Asks US House to Ensure Spring Valley Cleanup Funding

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) will ... speak against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, that would cut $197 million for Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) and reallocate those funds to the disposal of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The amendment ... could affect the cleanup of munitions and toxins found at thousands of FUDS around the nation, including the site in Northwest D.C.'s Spring Valley neighborhood.

Said Norton: "Many FUDS are located far away from densely populated areas. The D.C. site is in one of the city's residential neighborhoods and almost certainly would not have been selected as a primary site for testing World War I munitions if the District had the right to govern itself and equal representation in the Congress."
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton
Press Release (May 25, 2011)

RAB Skeptics Try to Torpedo Spring Valley Follow-Up Health Study

RAB Purpose & Member Selection Process

At the April Restoration Advisory Board meeting, skeptics derailed efforts to lobby D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray in favor of granting budget authority to the Dept. of the Environment to spend the $250,000 already appropriated for the Spring Valley follow-up health study recommended by Johns Hopkins University.

L. Monsein: In order to get a one in ten thousand risk increase in death by cancer because of arsenic, we calculated you'd have to eat a bucket of dirt every day for thirty years (14:15) ... There's just this hysterical: "We gotta study this, we gotta study this! People are dying!" People have psychological problems and other health problems and so forth. And people won't rest until it's proven that their problems are due to environmental agents in this community (15:32).

M. Pritzker: I have not heard yet any outside person who has studied it or is knowledgeable or is an expert who can conclude that anything that has occurred starting in World War I has physically harmed members of the Spring Valley community (26:56).
RAB Meeting (audio recording)
April 12, 2011

A yearlong survey of health problems in a 345-house section of Spring Valley has turned up 160 cases of chronic, often life-threatening and rare diseases — roughly one in every six homes — in the epicenter of the U.S. Army’s World War I chemical warfare testing grounds. The survey, coordinated through The Current, showed 131 individuals afflicted with 56 separate diseases of which more than half — 30 — can be linked to arsenic and other lethal agents that were developed, tested and then buried in the neighborhood during and after the war that ended in 1918.
Charlie Bermpohl
Northwest Current
November 10, 2004 (pg. B-1)