"The whole city of White Hall is ready for this to happen," Morgan said Friday. "These things need to be destroyed, and it needs to be done as quickly and safely as possible."

Last week, the U.S. Army announced that the furnace system will go into action after years of preparation.

Today, crews will pull the first batch of rockets from earthen storage igloos, place them within a protective metal tube that looks like a tanker truck and haul them three miles to the furnace system.

The furnaces will tackle only two rockets during the first day of operations. Workers will gradually speed up the pace to burn 30 rockets per hour. If all goes as planned, all nerve and blister agents at the Pine Bluff Arsenal will be destroyed by 2010.

That completion date would put the Pine Bluff Arsenal in compliance with the international treaty that calls on all nations to destroy their chemical weapons by 2012.

"The risk of storing the munitions is far greater than disposing of them," arsenal spokesman Raini Wright said. The Pine Bluff Arsenal opened in 1941, and weapons have been stored there ever since. The arsenal houses 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile. As years pass, the risk of leaks involving chemical agents increases, and the sturdiness of the dirt-packed cement bunkers used for storage becomes more questionable, Army officials say.

Morgan said he has no doubts about destroying the weapons being the right thing to do.

"They need to be gone, not only for the treaty deadline, but for our safety," he said.

Although it’s the first week for weapons incineration at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, destroying chemical weapons isn’t new to the Army.

The Jefferson County arsenal is the sixth of eight weapons storage sites to begin burning the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile. Incineration is already under way in Umatilla, Ore.; Tooele, Utah; Newport, Ind.; Edgewood, Md.; and Anniston, Ala. Weapons destruction has already been completed on Johnston Atoll, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean.

Operations at these sites haven’t always gone smoothly.

In 2000, a small amount of GB nerve agent escaped out a smokestack at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele, Utah.

And since the Army began destroying chemical weapons at its first disposal site on Johnston Atoll in 1990, about a dozen workers have been exposed to chemical agents.

Maintenance workers were exposed in 2002 while changing pipes at the Tooele incinerator. In 2004 the nerve agent sarin spilled on technicians in Anniston, Ala. Also last year two workers at the Oregon incinerator entered a room where nerve agent was stored. The workers weren’t wearing protective gear. The incident shut down the plant for five days.

Test runs at the Pine Bluff Arsenal haven’t always gone perfectly, either.

Last year, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality fined the U.S. Army and Washington Group International, the company hired to destroy Jefferson County’s chemical weapons, $22,389 for three accidents.

Part of the fine was levied after lye, a caustic chemical, leaked into the plant’s storm water system. The leak was discovered when a worker’s arms started tingling after he cleaned mud from a catch basin.

The state environmental department levied the rest of the fine because two monitoring devices were disabled during test runs.

But a recent check by the Environmental Quality Department gave the arsenal the all-clear to begin incinerating.

"We’ve been down there a bunch in the last few weeks," said engineering supervisor Derick Warrick, a member of the team of state environmental officials who will help monitor burning operations. "We have issued them a facility construction certification approval, and they are cleared for agent operations."

Someone from the Environmental Quality Department will be on site at the incinerator 40 hours a week to make sure operations run smoothly.

"Also, here in our offices we have a computer hookup remote monitoring system to monitor the furnaces," Warrick said Thursday. That computer records activity at the arsenal so if anything goes wrong, Warrick and his team can go back to see what happened.

Incidents at other incinerator sites and the lessons learned from them will help workers at the Pine Bluff Arsenal successfully and safely burn the 3,850 tons of chemical weapons stored there, U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency spokesman Greg Mahall said.

Workers at other sites have already learned, for example, that liquid chemical agents can gel or crystallize over time, making rockets and barrels more difficult to drain.

"Some of our assumptions have proven false," Mahall said last week. "We expected to find the same agent in the munitions now that were put in them decades ago."

While few have spoken out against the potential dangers of chemical weapons incineration at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, many nearby residents say they’re upset about a study being done by the Army to speed up the incineration process to make the 2012 treaty deadline. One option being considered to meet the deadline is moving weapons at stockpile sites in Pueblo, Colo., and Richmond, Ky. where destruction facilities have yet to be built to sites that already have incinerators.

That study is ongoing, and the Army is expected to present findings to the Department of Defense in early April.

The Army previously studied the possibility of relocating the stockpiles to central locations for disposal but nixed the idea because of worries about traffic accidents or terrorist attacks while the weapons were in transit.

Mayor Morgan was among the group who went to a meeting earlier this year to oppose bringing more weapons to the Pine Bluff Arsenal to be burned. This week, he said he felt confident the Army would confirm its earlier findings and destroy chemical weapons where they’re stored.

He pointed out that the incinerator near his city isn’t fitted to process projectiles like the ones stored in Colorado and Kentucky, and retrofitting the facility would be very expensive.

"It would take millions of dollars to retool our plant. It’s just not feasible," Morgan said.

This story was published Monday, March 28, 2005