Destruction Of Chemicals To Resume Thursday

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A problem with a trap door designed to release chopped-up parts of the rocket delayed the first day of chemical weapons disposal.

But by late afternoon, Mary Binder, the Army spokeswoman at the depot reported that the problem had been fixed and one rocket was successfully destroyed.

The process began with an M-55 rocket carrying about a gallon of sarin, a deadly nerve agent.

The metal rocket was chopped into eight parts. It was about to be dropped through a sliding trap door to a decontaminating furnace when the glitch occurred, temporarily halting the operation.

Crews will don protective suits and enter the contaminated room Wednesday night to figure out what happened with the trap door, and attempt fixing the problem.

Officials plan to use the second 'B line' to burn another rocket Thursday.

Earlier in the day workers carrying gas masks and syringes of antidote used remote-controlled equipment to begin disposal of nearly 4,000 tons of nerve gas rockets and other chemical weapons stockpiled since 1962.

"It's an incredibly historic day. This is a Cold War-era mission that is today starting to end," said Mary Binder, an Army spokeswoman at the depot.

The Umatilla depot was built in 1941 and was used to store munitions from World War II through Desert Storm in 1991. After 1991 it has stored only chemical weapons, including sarin and VX.

An M-55 rocket loaded with sarin was the first of more than 220,000 weapons scheduled to be destroyed, officials said.

The process of destroying the weapons is automated, with robotic machinery removing the explosive charge, then punching open the warhead to drain about a gallon of deadly sarin into a storage tank.

The metal rocket was to be chopped into eight parts and run through a decontaminating furnace, one of four high-temperature incinerators at this sprawling facility near Hermiston in the northeastern corner of the state.

The exhaust from the burn will be sent through an afterburner, then filters, before it is released into the air.

The liquid chemical agent drained from the warhead will be collected in a tank for about a month, until a sufficient amount accumulates to begin destroying it with a separate, high-temperature incinerator.

Workers had removed a pallet of 15 M-55 rockets from an earth-covered and concrete-reinforced storage igloo Tuesday and loaded it into a pressurized cylinder on a truck to transport to the incinerator, officials said.

The first incineration comes after years of delays in construction and testing, and in spite of a lawsuit still pending in the Oregon Court of Appeals seeking to block the process.

A Multnomah County judge denied a request by the opposition group GASP for a preliminary injunction in August. Oregon Court of Appeals Judge Walt Edmonds gave the group 10 days to file for an injunction in higher court, but the group had not filed by Tuesday.

Hermiston-based GASP says burning the weapons risks an accidental release of chemical agents. The group is advocating a chemical neutralization process instead, a newer technology the Army uses at four of eight chemical storage sites around the country.

Burning was to have begun Aug. 16, but was postponed at the last minute when ventilation system monitors during a trial showed larger amounts than expected of a test chemical in the charcoal filters.

The Umatilla Chemical Depot in eastern Oregon holds about 12 percent of the nation's remaining chemical weapons. The military began stockpiling rockets, artillery shells, bombs, land mines and sprayers containing nerve and mustard agents beginning in 1962.

The 7.3 million pounds of weapons are scheduled to be destroyed by 2010 at a cost of $2.4 billion.

With the first rocket disposal on Wednesday, the Army now has three working chemical weapons incinerators in the United States - Hermiston; Tooele, Utah; and Anniston, Ala. A fourth is expected to open next spring in Pine Bluff, Ark.

Another four sites - at Newport, Ind., Blue Grass Ky., Edgewood, Del., and Pueblo, Colo. - use chemical neutralization.