Associated Press
October 16, 2003

Report: Army should speed destruction of gelled rockets

By KYLE WINGFIELD
Associated Press Writer

Cold War-era rockets with gelled nerve agent pose a public risk if they remain in storage at Anniston Army Depot, and the Army should try to burn them more quickly than it has in the past, a new government report said Wednesday.

The report from the National Research Council advises the Army to assess the risks and run tests demonstrating that it's safe to increase the pace that gelled rockets are destroyed at its Anniston incinerator, which began operations in August.

A spokesman for the incinerator said testing of a faster burn schedule would begin in December, but a critic of incineration said the area around Anniston is too populous for experimentation with such deadly agents.

Some nerve agent in the aging rockets remains in liquid form, allowing it to be drained and destroyed in bulk. But over the four-plus decades that the 2,254 tons of weapons have been stored at the depot, some nerve agent has gelled inside the rockets - making it trickier to work with, said incinerator spokesman Mike Abrams.

When the Army found gelled agent at its incinerator in Tooele, Utah, regulators allowed only one gelled rocket to be destroyed per hour. The Army now believes it could destroy about nine gelled rockets an hour, and the NRC's report urges it to do so.

"Because there is a small chance that stored sarin- and VX-filled rockets might self-ignite at any time and release toxic agents and metals, these rockets need to be destroyed as soon as possible," said James F. Mathis, a retired engineer and chairman of the NRC committee that wrote the report.

Abrams said officials plan to begin those tests in December and then consult with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management on how to proceed.

"Looking at the reports that will be generated (by the December tests), we will have very frank discussions with experts at ADEM, and together we will determine what is the safe rate that we will process gelled rockets," he said.

But Craig Williams, executive director of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, said Anniston is too heavily populated to be used for "experiments." Some 35,000 people live within nine miles of the Army site, which is 50 miles east of Alabama's most populous city, Birmingham.

"We strongly disagree that the storage risk justifies pushing the envelope on operational safety concerns, many of which the report admits are unanswered, in such a populated area," said Williams, whose group opposes incinerating nerve agent.

On Thursday, the Army plans to lift self-imposed restrictions on the hours it can deliver rockets from storage igloos to the incinerator complex and burn them. Since the incinerator began operations Aug. 9, rockets have been moved only on the weekends or after 4:30 p.m. on weekdays, and the incinerator has operated only on weekends or between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays.

But now that more than 30 schools, hospitals and jails in Calhoun, St. Clair and Talladega counties have been overpressurized, Abrams said, the Army has cleared incinerator workers to move or destroy rockets 24 hours a day.

With the restrictions, workers destroyed more than 400 rockets Tuesday, Abrams said. That number isn't likely to grow above 700 without the restrictions, he said.

"Now that we're able to deliver weapons throughout the day, we can expect that we will have more days like (Tuesday)," Abrams said. "Maybe on occasion we will do even more rockets during a 24-hour period. But the bottom line is that we will never operate at a rate that is unsafe."

Williams said the Army still has not met all its commitments for preparedness, particularly for people with special needs and for providing equipment and training for emergency workers.

"Those things were promised to that community, still haven't been fulfilled, and should have been addressed prior to any operations, never mind ratcheting up to 24 hours," Williams said.