INDIANAPOLIS - Activists from six states accuse
the Army of distorting the facts in a recent letter rejecting their proposal
that the waste from a deadly nerve agent being destroyed in western Indiana
be disposed of on-site.
Last month, several watchdog and environmental groups urged
the Army to abandon plans to ship millions of gallons of wastewater to a
DuPont Inc., plant in New Jersey for treatment and eventual discharge into
the Delaware River.
Their joint letter to the Army declared it would be safer,
cheaper and ultimately faster to dispose of the waste at the Newport Chemical
Depot, where a VX nerve agent stockpile is being destroyed and its byproduct
temporarily stored.
The director of the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency, Michael
Parker, called the suggestion premature in a Sept. 27 response to the groups.
Parker said DuPont has successfully demonstrated technology
to treat the waste, a caustic substance called hydrolysate. He stated that
the on-site process the groups endorse poses "very significant engineering
challenges."
Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group
in Berea, Ky., said his group and activists from Indiana, New Jersey, Delaware,
Ohio and Pennsylvania are upset with Parker's reply to their proposal. In
a letter they sent to Parker on Monday, they claim his Sept. 27 response
is filled with "distortions" and "inaccuracies."
Williams pointed to Parker's statement that after the 2001
terrorist attacks there was "universal support" among Newport-area residents
to treat the neutralized wastewater off-site.
He said Newport-area activists overwhelmingly support treating
the waste on-site.
Among them is Sara Morgan, a retired schoolteacher who led
protests that prompted the military to drop an earlier plan to incinerate
the VX waste. She has said repeatedly that she and others don't want their
problem shifted to another state, he noted.
"To come out and say that everybody in Indiana supports moving
this stuff off-site is just atrocious," Williams said, adding that opposition
to the DuPont disposal plan is strong in New Jersey and Delaware.
He also said the Army has exaggerated technical problems involving
the process the activists suggest be used to treat the hydrolysate at Newport,
about 30 miles north of Terre Haute, Ind.
Army spokesman Jeff Lindblad said the Army stands by its response.
In his letter, Parker also said DuPont's plant in Deepwater,
N.J., had treated more than 4 million gallons of mustard hydrolysate left
from the destruction of mustard agent stored at Aberdeen Proving Ground in
Maryland. He said that work demonstrates that process is "safe and cost-effective."
Williams said that is misleading because mustard hydrolysate
is chemically different from VX hydrolysate.
However, Lindblad said DuPont intends to use the same biological
treatment process used on the VX hydrolysate that it used to treat the mustard
hydrolysate. The company, however, has added a pretreatment process intended
to remove phosphorous compounds that environmentalists fear could pose a
threat to humans and wildlife in the Delaware River.
"The pretreatment would be the only thing that would be different,"
Lindblad said.
In May, an Army contractor began destroying more than 250,000
gallons of VX, a Cold War-era chemical weapon, using a chemical neutralization
process at the Newport depot. The project was halted in June after a leak
but resumed in late August.
