Janet Bohlen inspects a faded 1918 photo of a dozen Army soldiers standing shoulder-deep in rugged trenches. The uniformed men aim their rifles at an unseen target behind American University.
“It looks like they’re right on the playing field, doesn’t it?” she says, sitting in her living room. “Wouldn’t you love to be able to identify exactly where that is now?”
From the other side of her coffee table, her husband, Buff, quips, “Don’t you recognize your own back yard?”
The Bohlens have lived in the Spring Valley section of Northwest Washington for 52 years, raising three children and now settling into retirement. Over the past two decades, the Army Corps of Engineers has excavated pockets of their wealthy, tree-lined neighborhood, which was built over the Army’s World War I chemical warfare testing grounds, to analyze possible contamination.
Now, Johns Hopkins University is about to embark on yet another health study in this neighborhood. The Bohlens are typical of families there who still wonder whether certain cancers and other serious health problems have been caused by the presence of buried toxic chemicals.
The new study, funded by the D.C. Health Department at the behest of D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), isn’t designed to address individual health issues. Instead, it will incorporate the corps’ most recent soil and water sampling measurements in an attempt to provide an updated community health portrait.
A 2007 Hopkins study found a lower-than-average occurrence of cancer in the neighborhood. But compared with the demographically similar Chevy Chase community, Spring Valley had more cases of arsenic-related conditions that affect the kidney, lungs, skin and bladder.
Citing a general lack of understanding about the long-term effects of chemical weapons exposure, the report suggested conducting another study later.
“What we want to do is follow up on the health outcomes that were raised in the [2007] scoping study, in addition to the arsenic-related cancers that we looked at last time,” Hopkins researcher Mary Fox said.
In the early 2000s, the Army Corps found the vestiges of a shed once filled with detonators under a 70-year-old tree in the Bohlens’ back yard, where Janet Bohlen said her daughter and neighborhood children would often play.
Her daughter had severe mercury poisoning years before the discoveries, but Janet said there is no way for her family to know whether the Army artifacts and that condition were related.
Janet has been treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a condition the 2007 study recognized as potentially arsenic-related.
“My cancer, as I say, is only one of many kinds of cancer, so you can’t really equate it with anything going on in that particular environmental issue,” she said.
Fox said the study won’t draw conclusions about the causes behind Spring Valley residents’ health issues. Residents will be able to fill out surveys about their health, but they will not be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
“It’s a community health study, as opposed to an individual health study,” Fox said.
The Post Most: LocalMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Loading...
Comments