Army lacks money for cleanup of old chemical training site

The Associated Press
August 98, 2005


The state has ordered a cleanup of an old Army training site that could be littered with unexploded chemical weapons dating back to World War II, but the federal government said Monday it doesn't have the money to do it.

Investigations have found about 8,000 pieces of metal in the soil around what was once an Army chemical weapons training base called Camp Sibert. Each item could be something as innocent as a rusty section of barbed wire or as dangerous as an aged artillery shell.

But the Army Corps of Engineers lacks the millions needed for a more complete review to determine what each of the items is, and it doesn't have anything close to the $49 million it would take to clean up the whole site, said spokesman Pat Robbins.

"We've done the ground survey. What we need to do now is go in and investigate each of the anomalies that showed up," Robbins said.

A check in 2002 unearthed an old artillery shell containing the chemical phosgene, a choking agent, in a field near a family's home in Etowah County. The house is located at what was once an artillery range where troops trained in the use of chemical weapons.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management said Friday it had issued an order requiring the Army to remove all unexploded ordnance from Camp Sibert, a 38,000-acre site near the cities of Steele, Attalla and Gadsden.

The state agency said it recently learned of the magnitude of the situation in the area, prompting the order. But Robbins said the Corps of Engineers doesn't know whether any chemical weapons remain on the long-closed firing ranges, most of which are now privately owned.

In February, the government said searches of an area near Interstate 59 had failed to locate any old munitions in a tract where longtime residents told stories of soldiers burying entire trucks loaded with mustard gas and other hazardous substances after the war.

Camp Sibert was the largest U.S. chemical weapons school during World War II. The Army sold the base for a few dollars per acre decades ago after removing tons of debris.