Assistant Metro Editor
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Officials at the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility have shut down operations to clean out more ash and rocket pieces that jammed a chute feeding one of the facility’s incinerators. It is the second time incinerator officials have stopped processing because of a jam. The first was in January, when workers removed enough ash and rocket pieces from the same chute to fill 20 55-gallon drums. The incinerator has not processed munitions since Saturday, but operations could begin again as soon as today, said Mike Abrams, the incinerator spokesman. Officials have been working in a process known as shakedown to fine-tune the incinerator to burn M-55 rockets that contain crystalline GB nerve agent, or sarin. The shakedown is to prepare the facility for agent trial burns, which are critical tests of its capabilities. Those burns are set to begin March 8. The chute to the deactivation furnace had become clogged with the ash, which when combined with decontamination solutions, forms a cement-like substance, officials said. As processing continued, rockets pieces stuck to the mixture. Bob Love, the Westinghouse site manager at the incinerator, said all indications so far point toward the jams coming from burning M-55 rockets and their agent in the facility’s deactivation furnace. Both jams occurred as workers were processing these munitions, called full-up rounds. But more investigation is needed to pinpoint the cause, Love added. The current shutdown has little to do with last week’s 20-hour shutdown, initiated after a monitor detected sarin in a room where the presence of agent was thought unlikely. In that incident, two workers were changing filters used to strain crystals from agent. The incident underscores a key decision facing incinerator officials as they work out the best way to destroy rockets in which agent has crystallized. Tim Garrett, the Army’s project manager at the incinerator, could decide to drain the rockets containing crystallized agent. That would necessitate sending workers into toxic areas periodically to change the filters. Alternatively workers can clean the kicker chute when it jams, as they are presently doing. That could require periodic shutdown for maintenance. The current shutdown occurred after the facility had burned about 545 rockets, Garrett said. Workers enough ash and debris from the chute this week to fill about ten 55-gallon drums, with enough to fill about five more drums still to be removed. “We’re still evaluating the information, we’ll probably do another week of full-up rounds,” Garrett said. “But I want to stress that this is not an issue of the furnace not acting the way it should. It has worked well so far.” Jamming problems were a rare issue for the incinerator in Tooele, Utah, a precursor to Anniston’s. The reason for that, Garrett said, is that the Tooele incinerator burned only one rocket with crystals or with gelled agent per hour. Here, officials are trying to burn 14 per hour, he said. He said another week of processing full-up rounds should help him decide on the incinerator’s course of action. The crystals in sarin formed over the past 30 years after the Army added a chemical to the rocket’s agent to preserve the purity of the agent while in storage. It instead led to the crystal formations, which are about the size of rock salt. Over the past month, officials incinerated the rockets in batches to determine the cause of the first jam. Officials said at the time the jam could have been caused after the incinerator started processing crystalline rockets or could be the result of destroying more than 15,000 rockets since the facility started up Aug. 9. Garrett said at this point, the study has been inconclusive. To date, 18,124 M-55 rockets and 20,197 gallons of liquid sarin have been destroyed. |
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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 |