Photo by The Skipping Hippy.

Spring Valley is one of the city’s most striking neighborhoods, replete with beautiful residences, spacious tree-lined avenues and planned munitions detonations which will be exploding eight to ten times a day over the next week. That’s right, upper Northwesterners: the Army will soon be blowing some stuff up within earshot of your idyllic neighborhoods.

WAMU reports that the Army Corps of Engineers is getting everything in place to detonate a stock of World War I-era munitions beginning on Tuesday. The Corps will apparently be using a “detonation chamber” located near Sibley Memorial Hospital to safely contain the blasts, but residents could hear what will sound like a car backfiring multiple times throughout the week. (I’m sure that the patients at the hospital will love that.) The whole process is expected to take two weeks to complete — Army officials found the conventional explosives they’ll be blowing up, along with some chemical warfare agents on the site of the hospital last April.

Residents don’t have anything to worry about — the detonation of the chemical munitions last spring went off without a hitch — but, it might be jarring to hear a bunch of booms throughout the day without knowing what’s going on. Consider yourself informed!