Due to a temporary shortage of funds, the Army Corps of Engineers stopped excavating at Lot 18, an area on the South Side of campus encompassing land around the Public Safety and the Financial Aid buildings. Total shut down of the dig site occurred by Aug. 25, according to the Corps' daily reports online.
The Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimore District, began the current dig on June 24 after a sealed bottle of the chemical warfare agent lewisite was found. They will restart excavations in the new fiscal year.
The Corps has an $11 million annual budget for the Spring Valley projects, which the Corps spreads out to cover various activities, including the excavation of Lot 18, according to Army Corps of Engineers Project Manager Gary Schilling.
"We scheduled work at Lot 18 for this year and because of the safety measures in place it's a very expensive operation. We expended the funds that we had," Schilling said. "Our new fiscal year starts in October so we'll get another $11 million and our team is gearing up and looking at ways to get more efficient."
Part of the reason the operation was so expensive, according to Schilling, was due to the implementation of an air-tight tent with multiple filters that filter and re-filter the air. These precautions were set in place for safety reasons.
"The lewisite, if it's exposed to the atmosphere, would start to become a vapor ... say our crews break a bottle while they're digging, the tents and filters are there [to contain it]," Schilling said. "The filters are specially designed to filter out chemical warfare material and they're much larger than they have to be ... Our No. 1 goal there is to make sure that if something happens we do not have an emergency."
Besides the initial lewisite in question, no other chemical warfare items or related items were found. The Army Corps
The Corps recovered 474 55-gallon drums of soil and 890 items since the dig began in June, according to an Army Corps press release.
The Army used to test chemical warfare materials at AU during World War I.
"We're still finding the types of items we expect to find. It's a debris field [of items] that are clearly related to the 1918 World War I AU experiment - station work, laboratory items, scraps of munitions, not things that would present a safety hazard to the community, but the types of items we're responsible for," Schilling said. "Also milk bottles, pieces of china, metal debris - this was a dump site."
While the recovered materials have been tested and discovered that their not chemical weapons, the identity of some materials, though not chemical warfare material, is still in question. Schilling said he expects to hear the results soon.
"We'll probably at some time or another make that public ... if there's a situation where these would pose a risk we would let the public know right away," Schilling said.
Communication to the public regarding Lot 18 was discussed in a Restoration Advisory Board meeting in late May.
According to the meeting's minutes, Bethany Bridgham of AU's Counsel, said that AU has the right to request that the data about Lot 18 not be on the project Web site.
"One of the things that this involves is, just like all the neighbors [around Lot 18], is [that] our private property rights ... be observed because that allows us to just review what the partners have to say about whatever it is that the Army Corps has found," said AU Media Relations Director Todd Sedmak. "Our goal is to be able to look at this information, see if it's accurate, ask questions and get into the details of this thing within the sense of our own privacy. We're not against the Army Corps sharing information. ... we just want to be treated like all the private property owners in Spring Valley."
Sedmak said he expects the issue of communication to come up in the Nov. 2 advisory meeting.
Schilling said that if there were a public health concern, the Army Corps would announce it because it would override AU's right to privacy. However, he said, he doesn't expect problems.
"My experience with this process is that AU has been very open to the public and they've been a good partner to the public," Schilling said.
Immediate effects of lewisite exposure would include skin irritation and blisters, eye irritation, cough and sinus problems, diarrhea and vomiting and low blood pressure, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Arsenic was first discovered on AU's campus in 2001. It was found in the soil in the intramural fields, adjacent to the Watkins Arts building. Student athletes who played intramural sports on the fields noticed that whenever it rained, blisters appeared on their bodies. A test done by the Army Corps revealed that arsenic levels were 498 parts per million in some soil patches; the highest legal amount is 43 ppm.
"There have been several exposure studies ... done by a branch of the CDC and done by the D.C. Department of Health and they tested the children at [AU's] Child Development Center. They also tested some maintenance workers at AU ... and we haven't found any evidence of increased exposure to the chemicals we're concerned with - exposure above what toxicologists feel is normal," Schilling
said. "So I don't think anyone's had adverse affects from what's out there. I think there's a lot of anecdotal info out there, and it's very difficult to tell about events that've happened in the past, and I try to comment on things that are factual, so I comment on the exposure studies we know about."
Though the Army Corps stated in an Aug. 19 press release that it would resume digging in mid-October, Schilling gave a later date.
"[It will probably start] within the first couple months of the fiscal year," he said. "There are a number of factors. Our nation is at war, a number of guys who are ordnance experts ... are in demand all over the world."
The Army Corps will continue to guard the site "24/7" and the tent and fencing will remain, as well as the fencing, according to Sedmak.
"The Corps has control of the site. No one will have access without their permission," he said.
Once Lot 18 digs are complete, the Army Corps' work at AU will be nearly done. However, there is still a "grid" near Hughes hall that contains low contamination, according to Schilling.
"The contaminated soil we're talking about remediating at AU is pretty low risk and lower down on our priority list," he said.
