Back in July of this year, the National Park Service (NPS) halted construction on a long-awaited formal pedestrian trail on the eastern side of Fort Totten Park linking North Michigan Park to Fort Totten Metro station, after the construction team found an unexploded ordnance on the unpaved trail. NPS subsequently fenced off the trail entirely to prevent people from walking through the area.

According to an update Kym Elder, NPS Program Manager for the Civil War Defenses of Washington, provided to ANC 5A and the Ward 5 council office yesterday, NPS “continues to work with a contractor to test the soil within the impacted area for any related contaminants. The contractor has just recently notified [NPS] that all test results are expected later this winter, no later than mid-January 2021. Pending the test results, the pedestrian trail construction could restart shortly after, as weather conditions permit.”

Interestingly enough, a neighbor and I independently wrote to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office last month in November before a scheduled NPS meeting to inquire about the trail’s status and any updates on the ordnance. That NPS meeting ended up getting cancelled. I received an acknowledgement of my inquiry but have not received a response just yet. My neighbor received a response from Congresswoman Norton’s office dated December 15 in which NPS stated that the agency would begin testing the soil in early January 2021 and would receive results several weeks after that.

When I originally wrote about the ordnance discovery, that same neighbor reminded me that I previously covered a couple of ANC meetings that might bear on this issue. In October 2017, NPS informed ANC 5A that the agency belatedly learned that Metro brought in infill dirt from a superfund site in Spring Valley (a WWI munitions testing site) to rehabilitate an area of Fort Totten Park that NPS permitted Metro to use for staging during construction of Metro’s green line in the 1980s and 1990s. That staging area was on the western side of Fort Totten Park near the access road for Aggregate Industries concrete company. At that October 2017 ANC meeting, NPS officials stated they decided to hire a contractor to test the soil in that area out of an abundance of caution. The NPS representatives stated that they believed any health effects would be rare because of the topography of the land in that area, that the area was not near any pedestrian access points or trails, and that waterways in the area were scarce so they were not concerned about leeching into waterways. In February 2018, NPS informed the ANC that preliminary test results showed no hazardous conditions or contaminants.

NPS’s July 2020 press release on the unexploded ordnance stated it was a WWI-era ordnance. Fort Totten Park is so named for its role in the Civil War, so armchair historians wondered how a WWI-era ordnance could have ended up in the park. Media reports in July noted that the ordnance was found after heavy rains possibly unearthed it as the construction crew worked on the new pedestrian trail. Not being an armchair historian or scientist myself, I have no idea if Metro’s rehabilitation of an area on the western side of Fort Totten Park using infill dirt from Spring Valley might have played a role in the ordnance’s appearance further east in the park. I have no idea what NPS considers the “impacted area,” if that means just the fenced off trail area, or if they are also testing widely throughout the park, particularly near other pedestrian access points. I guess we will hear more about all of this in the new year.