EMA not notified for 3 hours after incident
Assistant Metro Editor
| There is no requirement for Army officials to immediately alert the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency in the event of an agent alarm inside the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility. All alerts, by agreement, are steered through the Anniston Chemical Activity’s emergency operations center, which works with incinerator management to classify the event into one of five levels. The emergency operations center then notifies the local EMA. Wednesday, the process took three hours. The community response, which the EMA helps coordinate, relies almost entirely on Army incinerator officials and Army chemical stockpile officials, to notify the public in a chemical incident. Dan Long, the director of the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency, said he was notified of the alarm at about 7:42 p.m. The alarm, Army officials said, sounded at 4:39 p.m. Long said a call could have been made earlier, but his organization would not have started a community response because of the event’s small magnitude. “If they have an alarm go off I would want to be notified,” Long said. “I know the system and the regulations with this. I would have known what it meant. If it was something different, I could have notified the (Calhoun County Commission) chairman and we could have made some decisions to ready ourselves.” Long said Army officials followed their internal procedures for such an event. Army project manager Tim Garrett said the procedures were agreed upon by the Army and local emergency management officials. Incidents at the incinerator and stockpile are classified into five levels. The lowest, or level 0, equates to an ambulance leaving the depot. The highest, a level four, means agent is going to leave the post. The public is supposed to be notified within five minutes of an incident where agent is released and is likely leave the Anniston Army Depot boundaries. Wednesday’s incident was a level one incident, which requires confirmation that an alarm is not false before the local EMA is notified. Robert Downing, the Calhoun County Commission Chairman, said too much time could elapse between an alarm and confirmation. “(The monitors) are prone to give you false reads as well as true reads and you can’t get a real-time reading.” Downing said. “You treat it like a real alarm, meaning the demil folks, and you don’t know the truth about whether there was a release for some time, until they confirm the release.” Incinerator officials said the agent was detected, then confirmed with an on-site monitor, and then re-confirmed in a gas spectrometer, which is the “bible” of tests, Garrett said. Craig Williams, of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, said the process takes to too long and there are monitors that can do the job more quickly. “They fixed a rover on Mars, from Houston, Texas, and they can’t tell whether there was an agent release within three hours,” Williams said. “And they’re telling me this facility is state of the art.” Long later said the incident was managed appropriately. “From the briefs I’ve received and the knowledge from people here,
I had no problems with what they did for this particular event,” Long said.
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About Nathan Solheim
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Assistant Metro Editor Nathan Solheim is Minnesota native and a University of Georgia graduate. |
| Phone: Fax: E-mail: |
256-235-3551 256-241-1991 nsolheim@annistonstar.com |
