Disposing of ... Weapons not Heavily DocumentedIn the ongoing search for dumpsites, the Army is plagued by missing records and fading memoriesThe Army has searched for years, but it can't find a load of deadly white-phosphorus landmines supposedly dumped in the Chesapeake Bay. The mines might be there. They might not. The Army has no records, only memories of employees who provided credible details of how, when and where the mines were dumped. On the other hand, the discovery of chemical weapons from World War I beneath what's now an upscale Washington, D.C., neighborhood occurred without anyone remembering a weapons dump or any record of one. The 1993 revelation led to community terror and a huge, continuing cleanup. These two cases highlight the problems posed today by decades of spotty record keeping by the Army. "It's a good example of challenges historians face," Jeffery K. Smart said. He's a unit historian at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, a longtime chemical weapon development and testing base. For many years, the Army viewed chemical weapon disposal as no big deal - akin to taking out the trash, he said. "You have problems documenting normal, routine operations. Most people and most organizations don't document garbage disposal. "Disposing of chemical weapons was not heavily documented," he said. As a result, records sometimes were misfiled, destroyed or taken home when Army employees retired - leaving today's researchers often to rely on employee memories, which might not be reliable. When federal environmental officials began investigating pollution problems at Aberdeen in the 1980s, several longtime employees came forward to report the dumping of white phosphorus munitions in the Chesapeake Bay just after World War I. The employees recalled clearly that the intensely burning, air-activated chemical was in landmines of U.S., British and French manufacture. They remembered the ordnance was loaded on at least one barge, maybe more. They thought it was dumped in the bay just beyond the mouth of Mosquito Creek near Gull Island. They also remembered that in the 1930s, a hurricane churned up the area - and that a large number of ducks mysteriously "turned pink and died." The Army searched for records or photographs. It found nothing. The Environmental Protection Agency conducted chemical tests in that area for several years, found no indication of a chemical weapon dumpsite and gave up in 2002. There is, however, a tantalizing piece of evidence that it - indeed - happened as employees remembered. On Jan. 24, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Proclamation 2383 of the Migratory Bird Act. It declared off-limits 130 acres of the Chesapeake Bay near the Army post. It specifically designated 15 of those acres as a "phosphorus area unit," the EPA learned. The proclamation links birds, the base, the bay and phosphorus munitions. No one knows for sure whether the munitions are still there, waiting to be uncovered by a storm or pulled up by a fisherman. But at least there was something to cause federal officials to check. That wasn't the case in the Spring Valley section of the nation's capital. In 1993, a contractor digging a utility trench in the trendy community unearthed a piece of World War I-era ordnance. It was filled with an unidentified chemical warfare agent. The area used to be the site of the American University Experimental Station, a little-known World War I chemical warfare testing facility. It turns out that some chemical-filled ordnance was buried when the war ended and the site was closed. But the Army had no records to show it was buried - much less where - and no reason to search property that would be developed decades later. So far, more than 143 intact munitions have been dug up in Spring Valley - at least 43 of them filled with chemical warfare agents, mostly mustard gas. Dirt-covered pits of chemical-filled bottles, metal drums and mortar shells also have been found beneath residents' backyards. The Army Corps of Engineers continues to go from yard to yard, temporarily evacuating homeowners, to look for buried chemical munitions. The munitions are taken away as they're found. |
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Meeting
Notes: Summary of Some Chemical Munitions Sea Dumps by the United States
William R. Brankowitz
Jan 30, 1989
Off-Shore
Disposal of Chemical Agents and Weapons Conducted by the United States
Compiled by the U.S. Army Historical
Research and Response Team
Mar 29, 2001
(Acrobat
file)
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