Panel: Some munitions remain unseen

Media Credit: KELLY BARRETT / THE EAGLE DIG IN - Charlie Bermpohl talks about the munitions dig at the discussion Tuesday night. More work is needed to remove a large burial site of unexploded World War I-era chemical weapons in the area.

The greatest risk AU students currently face is the potential existence of a large burial site of unexploded World War I-era munitions in the area, Buzz Bailey, a local attorney, said during a panel discussion in Mary Graydon Center Tuesday night.

Panelists focused on the U.S. military's use of the university's property as a chemical weapons testing site between 1917 and 1918.

"We have found pure lewisite, pure mustard and pure arsine gas right next to AU on Glenbrook Road," said Ken Shuster of the Environmental Protection Agency. "We know that some [chemical munitions] were buried here - but the big mother load we still have not yet found."

Approximately $11.3 million-worth of chemical ordinates from the Army's on-campus experimental station are still unaccounted for. That figure reflects the weapons' inflation-adjusted value, Bailey said.

After the United States began to take part in World War I in 1917, the AU board of trustees wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson offering the campus and its buildings to the U.S. government to aid the war effort, according to Charlie Bermpohl, a writer for The Northwest Current who has followed the Army Corps of Engineers investigation of Spring Valley for several years.

The land the military used included 90 acres of university property and 500 acres of privately owned farmland adjacent to AU, Bermpohl said.

The AU area site represents only one of 2,700 Formerly Used Defense Sites - or military training sites - that are known to have unexploded munitions on them, according to Shuster.

More than 250 sites are suspected to have chemical munitions; the AU Experimental Station is one of these sites, he said.

"Unfortunately, when the military turned these lands over, they did not clean them up," Shuster said. "They did not even investigate them to determine what contaminants may exist."

Between 1917 and 1918, the Bureau of Mines and the Army's Chemical Warfare Service developed and tested approximately 600 gases at AU they intended to use overseas, he said. These included mustard and arsine gases, phosgene and a new mustard agent called lewisite.

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