Sara

You're right that regular ammunition would not warrant that. But in this case it's only the chemical weapons and buried materials that are of concern. Anything in those bunkers has long since been removed (If not by the military, then by others. None of the bunkers I came across had any locks and most were hanging wide open.). Also, I do not know of any manufacturing going on at the SJOD, only storage and loading on ships, which would run a low risk of stockpiled materials and improperly disposed-of wastes. Testing I also don't know of, though it is more possible. And when it comes to real estate acquisitions on the scale of of Jacintoport with plenty of prime, Ship Channel-front property, developers are more than willing to spend a few mil to clean it up!

Is that a new park in the upper right-hand corner? I live in a townhouse on Gross Street between W Dallas and W Clay, and I'm trying to figure out what my new neighbor would be. A park would certainly fit well with the historic College Park Cemetery. And let me say my roommate who owns the townhouse was sure happy to hear about this deal...

No, we won't know that for several more weeks--and that's only if the person considering buying the land wants to pay for sampling instead of just dropping the purchase all together. If it was only regular firearms and ammunition that was stored and removed when it was closed there is really no concern. So far we haven't found any conclusive evidence of anything more such as major spills or buried chemicals. I did, however, find one more very interesting article since posting this morning from the Houston Chronicle in 1997: http://www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story/co...ouston.2-2.html The idea that they believe the bombs won't be found in the future since they haven't to date certainly scares me, as there is a lot of SJOD coastline on the Ship Channel that has yet to be developed and all they have to do is put a docking terminal in just the right place...

Those old "tootsie rolls" are indeed part of the San Jacinto Ordinance Depot, which used to cover the entire area from Penn City Road east and I-10/Dezavalla Road south to the Houston Ship Channel. It was built right after Pearl Harbor along with a few others around the country, as I've been told 60 miles out of Galveston Bay because the longest missile range at the time was 40-50 miles. Those structures are old munition storage bunkers, which are spaced evenly along parallel concrete roads running northeast and southwest from Jacintoport Boulevard (you can still see these quite well from above if you look at Google Maps or another satellite mapping website). All of the ones I bothered to poke my head into were completely empty save a piece or two of debris (surprising since many of them are completely surrounded by debris and dumped junk). This is what the inside looks like, if anyone is curious: The SJOD apparently closed down in the 1960s and much of the land there is still vacant. There's still dozens of the bunkers out there on private land, though, as you can see below, and some have been converted by local industries for their own use and fitted with garage doors! (sorry, I don't have any pics of that.) Information on the internet about the SJOD is scarce. There are some informative posts on another older string on this forum at http://www.houstonarchitecture.info/haif/i...amp;#entry75717 or Houston Architecture Info Forum - HAIF