WASHINGTON – One of Washington’s most exclusive neighborhoods will get a health check up if D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton gets her way.
Norton is calling on the Defense Department for another health study of Spring Valley in Northwest D.C. near American University and all communities that were formerly used as defense sites.
Spring Valley is a neighborhood that grew atop one of the nation’s largest testing sites for chemical weapons during World War I.
A 2007 community health study gave Spring Valley a clean bill of health, but experts at Johns Hopkins University recommended further study.
In a news release, Norton is quoted as saying she has spent 18 years ensuring “the health and safety of residents living near the Spring Valley (Formerly Used Defense Site), a community that developed around the American University campus without any knowledge that their original neighborhoods had been among America’s largest development and testing sites for chemical and other weapons during World War I.”
In 2009, Norton got the Army Corps of Engineers to release the full list of munitions and toxins found in Spring Valley.
Buried munitions were first found in the neighborhood by a resident in 1993.
Homes in the Spring Valley neighborhood sell from upwards of $1 million.
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