For immediate release: July 23, 1996

STATE OFFICIALS ADMIT SUPPRESSING EVIDENCE OF INCINERATOR HEALTH RISKS TO BREAST FEEDING INFANTS AND SUBSISTENCE FARMERS

SECOND DAY OF UTAH CHEMICAL WEAPONS INCINERATOR TRIAL
REVEALS SECRET RISK ASSESSMENT DOCUMENT

Salt Lake City (July 23)-- Utah Department of Environmental Quality Officials revealed that
they intentionally suppressed data on the risks to breast feeding infants and subsistence
farmers in testimony given during the second day of a hearing on a preliminary injunction
to block the start up of the nation's first mainland chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele,
Utah.

Utah state officials testified that state's initial risk assessment, recently discovered by
plaintiffs attorneys, showed risk to the public that exceeded federal guidelines. As a result,
the Department of Environmental Quality requested that their contractor remove breast
feeding infants from the risk scenario, and reduce the assumed exposure to subsistence
farmers in its risk assessment. The revised risk assessment assumes in one scenario, for
example, that subsistence farmers live on their farms only 175 days a year, and consume
no homegrown dairy or vegetable products. It completely excludes risks to breast feeding
infants, estimated by EPA to be one of the most vulnerable populations for incinerator
produced dioxin and other chemicals. The EPA estimates that exposure to incinerator
produced dioxins are up to 1000 times greater through the food chain than by direct
inhalation.

Marty Grey, DEQ Section Chief of Chemical Demilitarization testified that after a series of
closed meetings between his agency and the Army, the decision was made to exclude
vulnerable populations from the risk assessment contrary to standard EPA guidelines.
Moreover, he testified that the explanation for those changes was included in several key
risk documents that had been "destroyed or recycled."

Formal requests from the citizens for key risk documents were repeatedly denied during the
development of these risk assessments. Cindy King, Utah Sierra Club Vice Chair, said
"When I asked for the risk assessments in early 1995 they told me the numbers were
wrong and they would fix them. I didn't realize what they meant by 'fixing' them."

In other testimony, Bob Perry, Chief Risk and Safety Manager for the Army's incineration
program, said that problems that had occurred at the Army's experimental incinerator on
Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, such as blast gate failures have also been occurring at Tooele
during test burns, even as recently as October, 1995.

Another witness, Dr. Peter deFur, independent risk assessment expert and a member of the
EPA's Dioxin Reassessment Panel, testified that risks of cancer and other serious health
problems such as disruption of the immune, reproductive, and hormone systems are 90-
100 times greater than EPA acceptable risk standards.

Environmental lawyer Bob Guild, representing the Chemical Weapons Working Group,
Sierra Club , and Vietnam Veteran's of America Foundation said "the evidence presented
shows significant new health risk and safety hazards requiring court intervention to halt the
Army's rush to burn these chemical weapons."

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