With Reused Dirt Come Glass, Other Dangerous Debris

Lisa Dubay was on her usual walk through Silver Spring's Nolte Park one recent morning when she noticed something odd.

Montgomery County parks employees were spreading fill dirt across the baseball field, part of a long-awaited park renovation. But glistening in the dirt were hundreds of large pieces of broken glass.

Dubay, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University school of public health, was aghast. It was impossible that the workers were unable to see the glass as they pushed the dirt around, she said. When she tried to point this out, she said, the parks employees balked and refused to stop. They were behind schedule on the park renovation, and a supervisor would need to be called. Just then, another neighbor happened by, saw the large chunks of glass and persuaded the workers to stop spreading the dirt.

"It looked like someone knocked down a bar and this is what you got," said Robin Gaster, the neighbor who intervened.

Dirty dirt is not an anomaly in the Washington region, where fill often comes from construction sites, officials said.

"It is a fairly common problem because dirt can have a lot of things mixed in it, and you don't know the history of the site it came from," said John Lehman of the Fairfax County Park Authority. "We actually require bag samples before any material enters our sites. People have a lot of motivation to bring you materials they can't get rid of any place else."

Fairfax parks officials do not permit dirt within two feet of the surface to include any debris.

In the District, mayoral spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said, field conditions in the school system "are horrible. They probably should have been redone a long time ago."

At Nolte Park, county workers put rubber fencing on the field and small warning signs to deter people from using it, although on a recent day there were many people using the park and walking across the field. The agency is unable to trace the dirt to its origin, but Montgomery parks chief Mary Bradford said officials think it came from within the parks system.

The agency sometimes buys dirt. No matter its source, it is dumped in a big pile at Pope Farm, the agency's Derwood nursery, where it is mixed in with whatever other dirt piles are there. The parks department hires a contractor to sift the dirt with a screen, blocking particles larger than an inch.

Replacement dirt for Nolte Park will be double-sifted, said Steve Chandlee, a parks official examining what went wrong.

A contractor who is familiar with these types of repairs said they can cost local governments thousands of dollars each time a field needs to be repaired.