ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Date: 10/9/2001

Army sets new arsenal target Chemical stockpile destruction date pushed back 2 years

EMMETT GEORGE

PINE BLUFF -- Completion of the destruction of all chemical weapons stored at the Pine Bluff Arsenal will be delayed until 2008, nearly two years later than expected, U.S. Army officials have announced.

Earlier this year, officials with the Pine Bluff Chemical Weapons Disposal Facility said destruction of the aging stockpile would be complete sometime in 2006.

Congress has set a 2007 deadline for destroying the weapons.

A statement released Friday by Boyce Ross, project manager for the Pine Bluff incinerator, followed the Pentagon's recent release of the Defense Acquisition Board's report that reflected the revised destruction schedule and new operating costs for the Army's Chemical Demilitarization Program.

Last month, Jim Bacon, the Army program's manager based in Aberdeen, Md., presented the new timetable to the Defense Acquisition Board, Ross said.

Bacon is overseeing destruction of chemical weapons at eight locations, including Pine Bluff.

"The revised schedule indicates [the Pine Bluff incinerator] should safely complete operations by 2008," Ross said. "I think we can successfully complete our mission before 2008, if all factors remain in proper order."

Craig Williams, executive director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, said, "In the Army's own documents, there is only a 50 percent confidence that they will actually get done at Pine Bluff by December 2014."

The Berea, Ky-based group favors chemical neutralization of the weapons as an alternative to incineration.

Factors contributing to the delay, Ross said, were: condition of the aging stockpile; external delays, such as weather; evolving environmental regulatory requirements; changing monitoring standards, and congressional funding.

In February, Ross said, "We are slightly behind schedule. We are currently projecting a completion [of construction] date of February 2002."

Construction of the incinerator began in 1999 and is about 65 percent complete, Ross said recently.

Based on the old timetable, Ross said destruction of the weapons would begin in the spring of 2003 and be completed in 2006.

At the time, Ross said last winter's ice storms and a shortage of skilled laborers would result in only minor delays.

In his statement Friday, however, Ross acknowledged, "We may have been overly optimistic in assuming that the condition of the stockpile is good enough to support our plant's maximum capacity."

The Army's experiences with its incinerators on Johnston Island and at Tooele, Utah, indicate "that some of the these agents have gelled or solidified over time, which will make it much more difficult to remove from the munitions," Ross said.

On Sept. 27, Ross announced he was resigning as project manager to join the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Huntsville, Ala.

The Pine Bluff Arsenal has about 12 percent of the nation's chemical weapons, including about 110,000 rockets containing nerve gas. There are also land mines and 1-ton containers holding mustard gas.