Examiner.com: "The Story of the Sand"

Bloomingdale Examiner author Em Hall attended the community meeting held on Wednesday, September 9. Her multi-part feature on the site starts off with "McMillan, Part 1 – The Story of the Sand."

On Wednesday, September 9th, interested parties convened on St. George’s Episcopal Church in Bloomingdale to discuss what has become the biggest hot-button issue facing the neighborhood and surrounding areas: the fate of the McMillan Sand Filtration Site. Tempers flared only occasionally; the discourse was mostly civil and rational. The presence of professional facilitator Alexander Moll (working pro-bono) certainly helped.

But the passion surrounding the 25-acre McMillan site—a registered DC Historic Site and pending member on the National Register of Historic Places—is never simply a matter of NIMBY (not in my backyard) or anti-development sentiments. The site has lain fallow for decades now and nearly everyone agrees on one thing: its historical and cultural significance to the Bloomingdale neighborhood, Washington, DC, and even nationally, as one of the few remaining examples of a large-scale slow sand filtration system still in extant.

This is the first of a series of articles on McMillan’s evolution from essential component of D.C. sanitation to contentious landmark with a dubious future. Let’s start at the beginning.