Workers at the Pine Bluff Arsenal have begun destroying thousands of glass vials and bottles that contain small amounts chemical agents such as mustard and lewisite that were once used to train soldiers and civilians in agent identification, officials announced Wednesday.

For decades, thousands of the bottles and vials, part of chemical agent identification sets, were buried at the arsenal, said Joe Daven, field office manager for nonstockpile materials at the arsenal. The arsenal began destroying 5,000 vials Aug. 1 in a process expected to take two to three years.

Daven said 96 percent of the vials were buried at the arsenal in the 1940s and 1950s. By 1971, the Army declared the sets obsolete and by 1979 began destroying them.

More than 170,000 of the sets were manufactured from 1928 to 1969, according to a news release from the Army’s Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel Project. The vials contained diluted agents and industrial chemicals that were used to train soldiers and civilians on how to identify chemicals by their smell, Daven said.

To date, more than 120,000 of the bottles and vials have been destroyed, but it’s unclear how many remain, said Karen Drewen, a spokesman for the Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel Project at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

"What we tend to find are small numbers recovered from burial sites," Drewen said Wednesday. The vials were often buried after they were used for training.

Thousands of the vials and bottles were dug up at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in the 1980s and have been in storage igloos since, Daven said.

The containers will be destroyed in the Army’s Rapid Response System mobile laboratory, which has been set up at the arsenal, Daven said. The Pine Bluff project is the largest destruction project to date for the system.

The operations trailer, where operators unpack, sort and neutralize items from the sets, is the "central hub" of the Rapid Response System. Negative pressure inside the trailer prevents vapor releases and the air in the trailer is monitored and processed through carbon filters to protect workers and the environment, the news release stated.

This story was published Friday, August 12, 2005.