Buried chemical weapons leaked toxins into a residential Washington neighborhood.

Evidence

Decades later, among the children growing up in tree-filled Spring Valley were siblings Nancy and Robert Dudley Jr. Nancy and Robert loved playing in their yard and the nearby woods. They ate almost year-round from their mother’s garden, which was fed by a small creek running through their property. But in 1993, local construction workers began stumbling upon buried munitions, some of which were armed and filled with chemicals. Six years later, after the Army Corps of Engineers declared a cleanup complete—and after Nancy and Robert had moved away from Spring Valley—the Army found a 75-millimeter bomb six inches beneath the surface of Nancy and Robert’s former yard. The bomb contained mustard gas. Over time, the Army uncovered 680 more remains linked to chemical weapons where Nancy and Robert once lived, including live explosives and shells that had leaked mustard gas and arsenic. Some of the soil at their former home was literally smoking. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 401

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Families lived atop buried chemical weapons long after official cleanups. (similarity 0.92)
• Army cleanups of chemical weapons sites can be incomplete and dangerously flawed (similarity 0.85)
• A World War I chemical weapons base was buried beneath Washington D.C. suburbs. (similarity 0.83)
• Childhood exposure to buried chemical weapons may have caused cancer deaths. (similarity 0.79)