WASHINGTON -- It was the kind of nightmare that critics of a planned chemical weapons incinerator in Kentucky feared.
A year ago this month, in the middle of the night, some of the deadly nerve agent Sarin escaped into the air as the Army was burning the chemical in the desert southwest of Salt Lake City.
No one was hurt, but the incident heightened opposition to plans to build similar incinerators elsewhere, including one at Kentucky's Blue Grass Army Depot, where Sarin and the even deadlier nerve agent VX are stored and awaiting destruction.
''The potential of harm to the public is enormous,'' said Sen. Mitch McConnell, RKy., who has been highly critical of the Army's management of the disposal program.
The incineration program has been beset by escalating costs and claims by critics that it is far behind schedule and poses serious health and environmental risks.
The Army insists that burning the chemicals creates much less danger of contamination than leaving them in aging storage containers where they can leak.
In the mid-1980s, Congress directed the Department of Defense to begin destroying its 31,496-ton stockpile of chemical weapons, developed to kill an enemy without the massive physical destruction caused by conventional and nuclear weapons.
The arsenal includes mustard gas dating to World War I; Sarin, developed in Germany during the 1930s as a pesticide; and VX, developed in Great Britain in 1952 and considered the world's deadliest substance. A drop of VX on the skin the size of George Washington's eye on a quarter will kill within minutes.
At the Blue Grass outpost in Madison County near Richmond, Ky., 523 tons of chemical weapons are stored in 55,000 rockets and artillery shells in underground bunkers. The inventory includes 90 tons of mustard gas, a blistering agent designed more to debilitate than to kill, although it is potentially fatal if inhaled. The other 433 tons are Sarin and VX.
A decision on building an incinerator at Blue Grass is about a year away. Construction would require a state permit, which could take another two to three years to approve. Building the incinerator would take about three years, and another 18 months would be needed for testing before full-scale operation began. Burning all of the chemicals would take about two years.
Since the disposal effort started, it has become clear that making chemical weapons isn't nearly as difficult as getting rid of them. The incineration program has encountered technical problems and cost increases as the Army seeks to meet a United Nations-sponsored Chemical Weapons Convention disposal deadline of 2007.
While the U.S. government could seek a five-year extension of the deadline, critics say the Army is so far behind that it won't finish the disposal until 2018. Army officials insist they are committed to trying to make the 2007 target, but they're operating in an area without established procedures. As of this spring, about 22 percent of the weapons had been destroyed.
''There's no prototype to follow,'' said Greg Mahall, a spokesman for the disposal program at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. ''We're pretty much blazing the trail as we go.''
Twice in as many weeks, McConnell has sent letters to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, urging him to overhaul the disposal program and make it a priority.
The second letter came after the Congressional Research Service, which conducts issue studies for Congress, found that critics were right when they concluded from a review of Army documents that disposal schedules are off by years.
''There's significant doubt that the deadlines will be met because the program has been mismanaged for so long,'' McConnell said in an interview. ''It doesn't lead you to have much confidence in anything they tell you.''
The program's cost also has become an issue. In 1985, when Congress ordered the chemicals destroyed, the cost was estimated at $1.7 billion. The latest official estimate is $14.1 billion. Critics say the final cost will be closer to $24 billion.
The reasons for the delays and soaring costs vary, McConnell said. They include initial unrealistic estimates, inflation, new environmental regulations since the program began, the reorganization of the program itself, and cautious moves by states with disposal sites in reviewing the disposal process.
The Army's preferred method of disposal is to incinerate the deadly chemicals under high pressure and 2,700-degree heat. But public acceptance of incineration has been elusive, especially for places like Blue Grass, located near populated areas.
About 52,000 people live in a 6.2-mile radius around Blue Grass known as the ''immediate response zone'' -- the area that would be under greatest threat from a chemical accident. The area includes five elementary schools, two middle schools, a high school, a hospital, a shopping mall and Eastern Kentucky University.
Craig Williams, who heads the Berea, Ky.-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, a national organization that has challenged the Army's disposal program in court and elsewhere for more than a decade, said incineration has ''proven to be a failure'' and poses a serious threat of catastrophe.
The CWWG has organized public opposition in Madison County to the Army's plans to burn the chemicals at Blue Grass.
''If there is a threat to the community, we're going to fight it and continue to fight it,'' Jim Strand, who lives near the Blue Grass site, said at a public meeting in January on how to get rid of the lethal material.
It was the CWWG that challenged the Army's timetable claims regarding the 2007 deadline. At Blue Grass, Williams said, the likely disposal completion date is seven years later -- November 2014.
Williams' group also is helping community activists in Anniston, Ala., and Hermiston, Ore., where incinerators are nearing completion.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has said the Army program is making guinea pigs out of Anniston residents, who were given survival kits that included plastic sheets and duct tape to be used to cover windows in case of a leak.
The Army insists that opponents have distorted the threat of incineration leaks.
''We're getting the bigger leaks in the storage yard, supporting our claim that the greater risk to the citizenry is in the storage of these weapons rather than in the disposal,'' Mahall said.
David Kosson, former chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Review and Evaluation of the Army's disposal program, told a House committee last September that people should worry less about incineration and more about a lightning strike, an earthquake or a fire hitting deteriorating stockpiles.
Already, Kosson said, leaks releasing chemical agents ''have been as much as one million times more'' than the May 2000 release in Utah.
Acting Army Secretary Joseph Westphal told a Senate subcommittee last month that the Army program, formally known as the Chemical Demilitarization Program, has destroyed all 2,031 tons of stockpiled chemical agents on Johnston Island, a Pacific atoll, using an incinerator. The Utah incinerator has destroyed 5,000 tons of chemical agents so far.
The CWWG said the disposal facilities themselves leak. In addition to the Utah release, the group has cited worker exposures, spills and fires. The Utah incinerator, shut down for several months after the Sarin incident last year, had more alarms indicating possible leaks -- 41 in a single month, according to the CWWG.
The Army blamed the Utah release on human error and said the amount was so small that it was dissipated within 10 feet of the stack. Mahall said Army records show ''five confirmed agent releases out the stack or through the operations'' of the Johnston Island and Utah facilities.
The CWWG said that there have been 15 live nerve agent releases from incinerator stacks and that isolated places like the Pacific island and the Utah site are far different from places like Blue Grass. Burning deadly chemicals in a populated area is too much of a risk to take, critics say.
Even without a leak, incinerators can emit other hazardous substances such as mercury, lead, arsenic and vinyl chloride, Williams said.
Mahall insisted that stack emissions do not exceed state and federal hazard standards and that ''95 percent or even higher'' of emissions coming out of the stacks are nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor.
Instead of incinerators, opponents want the Army to give serious consideration to alternative technologies that essentially neutralize the nerve agents, a process supporters believe presents few risks of public exposure.
A handful of alternative methods have been tested to remove the hazardous properties of the agents by breaking their chemical bonds. One process includes the use of intense, lightning-like electrical discharges; another freezes the material into crystals, which separates the chemical components.
The Army is planning to use alternative disposal at sites where agents are stored in bulk -- that is, not loaded into rockets, mines or other delivery systems -- at Aberdeen and the Newport Chemical Depot near Terre Haute, Ind. But the program hasn't committed to such technology at Blue Grass or other places.
Congress ordered the Army to test new technologies, and they are showing promise, said William Pehlivanian, deputy program manager for the alternative methods -- called the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment program and also based at Aberdeen.
''It is viable,'' Pehlivanian said. ''It works in destroying the components of the weapon.''
The estimated cost of building an incineration facility at Blue Grass is between $1.3 billion and $1.8 billion. By law, any alternative technology must be roughly the same cost, as safe and within a timetable comparable to an incinerator.
The decision on whether Blue Grass will get an incinerator or one of the alternatives will be made jointly by Rumsfeld's office and the Army disposal program.
U.S. Rep. Ernie Fletcher, R6th District, which includes Blue Grass, hasn't taken a position on how the weapons should be destroyed. ''He wants the safest way,'' said Fletcher aide Daniel Groves.
McConnell said he does, too -- but he has been left frustrated and angry over what he sees as an Army track record of ''obfuscation.''
''What we would like is sound science applied to this review,'' McConnell said, ''and we'd like attention to this whole matter at the highest possible levels at the Department of Defense.''
Rumsfeld has acknowledged McConnell's complaint and is working on a full response, according to McConnell's office.
The CWWG's reckoning, the schedule for incineration at Blue Grass would take the project to 2014. Officials of the Army's alternative technology program told the Senate last month that their approach could shorten disposal time to about 2011.
|
If you have come to this page from an outside location click here to get back to mindfully.org |