| PINE BLUFF, Ark. — Pine Bluff is the fourth chemical
weapons incinerator to come online in the United States, but work at the
site in the 1980s helped refine many of the procedures used at facilities
like Anniston’s.
In fact, said Randy Long, project site manager at Pine
Bluff, many of the technologies used by the program were first tested at
Pine Bluff Arsenal.
“A lot of the big models, such as the Johnston Atoll,
were prototyped in the Pine Bluff facility,” Long said.
Pine Bluff also had one of the first chemical demilitarization
programs. In the early 1980s, the Army produced BZ, a type of hallucinogen,
at the arsenal. The military destroyed BZ from 1988 to 1990 at the site,
using incineration methods that had been developed at Army bases in Utah.
Pine Bluff’s demilitarization unit was the first to
use independent contractors to destroy chemical agent, under the supervision
of the U.S. government. The reasoning, said Long, was that a private contractor
would be better equipped to run a program with a determined lifespan than
the government. Many who worked at Pine Bluff went on to other disposal sites.
“They followed the program over time,” Long said. “The
BZ demil workers, many went to the Johnston Atoll facility, and ultimately
many came back and worked at Pine Bluff.”
The Pine Bluff incinerator does incorporate designs
from other sites; like Anniston, the facility has carbon masks, a final assurance
that any contaminants that escape the facility’s internal cleaning process
will be caught before they escape into the atmosphere.
And with virtually identical facilities in Anniston
and Umatilla, Ore., crews can consult with workers at those sites on procedures
and problems, said Derick Warick, who oversaw permitting of the facility
for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Management.
“This facility is built almost exactly like Alabama’s,
and having Alabama before us is a great blessing,” he said.
But as at other facilities, safety needs to be monitored
carefully. Difficulties with the Automatic Continuing Air Monitoring System
(ACAMS) and with an injector delayed the start of operations at the facility
Tuesday.
Pine Bluff will go through a shakedown period, with
limited feeds at first. Warick, though, said he had no concerns, saying the
incinerator passed its surrogate trial burns, where material more difficult
to destroy than the chemical weapons was fed into the furnace.
“It passed the six nines test (99.9999 percent was destroyed),”
he said. “We’re very confident the current design will be successful.”
The only real difference between Anniston and Pine Bluff
comes in the facilities’ unpacking areas: Anniston has one area for the unpacking
of all materials, while Pine Bluff has two: one to unload rockets and mines
before destruction, the other to unload ton containers filled with blister
agent.
Pine Bluff’s inventory also does not contain projectiles,
which will eliminate the need to reconfigure the machinery for different
projectiles.
But differences are otherwise minor.
“It’s the same liquid incinerator, the same deactivation
furnace,” said Bob Love, who is temporarily assigned as acting project manager
at Pine Bluff from his job at the Anniston incinerator.
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