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| Gary Peterson works in the CHB, the place where deadly chemical weapons filled with GB nerve agent arrives in large metal transports before they are destroyed. Photo: Kevin Qualls. |
They graduated high school under the gaze of the four cracked wise men on Mount Rushmore — their school is the only one to hold commencement there. They can all fix junkers, or the latest SUV, and hold the hobby of home mechanics.
They’ve seen the inside of divorce court at least once. And they all traded small-town jobs catering to sunburned tourists in South Dakota’s Black Hills for a world of buzzing, vibrating blue boxes that detect the most lethal substances man has ever created.
Brett, Chad and Gary Peterson destroy chemical weapons for Westinghouse at Anniston Army Depot, carrying on a family tradition started by one guy:
Dad.
“I don’t know that it ever really started out as a family business,” said Ervin Peterson from his home in Hill City, S.D., the brothers’ hometown. “It was something I got hooked up with initially because the company that built (the incinerator on) Johnston Island, I had worked for them in Rapid City. That was my in, so to speak, getting into the demil business.”
The brothers followed Ervin Peterson into the chemical weapons destruction
trade, becoming three of the some 700 employees at Anniston Army Depot’s
chemical weapons incinerator.
The incinerator is more than a monolith on the depot’s northern end, a honeycomb
of boxes and rooms and corridors that somehow erases poisonous nerve gas.
It means jobs for local people and the Petersons. They are part of a workforce
that trickles throughout the community, providing blood and sweat to counterbalance
controversy and debate.
So when the Peterson boys and other depot folks go to the dirt-track races Saturday night and talk to the guy in line buying a hot dog, or strike up a chat checking out at Winn-Dixie, they are the incinerator’s community ambassadors.
They are the people making 2,254 tons of Cold War-era chemical weapons go away.
“I think a lot more people are becoming comfortable with it after they meet people that work out there,” Chad Peterson said. “They see real people of their community working here and that’s making them more comfortable with it.”
Country in the guts
Thirty-four-year-old Brett Peterson looks very much the western cowboy. With his tall, lanky frame and his Wranglers, he could pass for any ranch hand from west of the Mississippi.“I’m not necessarily a cowboy, but I am country,” said Brett, who lives in Pleasant Valley.
Brett works in the incinerator’s guts training employees for toxic areas. In chemical disposal parlance, they’re called entries.
The work involves dressing in big white suits that could come out of any science fiction movie. He’s made more than 50 entries into toxic areas, sometimes working with deadly nerve gas.
“After you work with it awhile, you come to respect it,” Brett said. “You know it can kill you.”
Formerly an auto mechanic, Brett got into the chemical disposal business, “for the money, actually.” He spent four years on Johnston Island before moving to Anniston.
Part of his job is to check each suit for punctures. The slightest breach could be life-threatening. He checks each suit’s oxygen hook-ups to make sure they seal properly.
The suits attach to an oxygen tank or to a system that feeds clean air into the suits from tubes that run along the walls.
“I like being in a safety role, protecting other people,” Brett said. “You take it very seriously, and it can be very rewarding.”
Brett was working day shifts recently to educate some of his colleagues on how to clean properly after working in a toxic area.
His job took on that complexion after a much-publicized incident on Feb. 4 in which two workers set off chemical agent alarms because they hadn’t done a thorough job cleaning their suits.
“My special project was making sure people understand effective decontamination,” Brett said.
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| Brothers Brett, top photo, and Chad Peterson, both help in the process of the destruction of chemical weapons. Photos: Kevin Qualls. |
In the control ‘arcade’
Chad Peterson sits in a darkened room most of his waking work hours. It’s the control room; the brain of the incinerator, where controllers monitor just about every function or operation taking place inside the incinerator.Each operator sits in front of a station that looks like an old arcade game, with yellow, magenta and green lines that signify a separate part of the operation.
Chad can check on a worker making an entry into a toxic area or control the operation of one of the incinerator’s two functioning burners. He’s a troubleshooter.
“You’ll find stuff. One of the most common trends is a valve starting to open and the pump is starting to fail or plug,” Chad said, pointing to his monitor.
Chad, the youngest of the three brothers at 30, lives in Jacksonville and resembles the collegians that reside there. In his polo shirt and beaded necklace, it looks as if he were headed off to a class at Jacksonville State University.
Chad was a “body man” in Billings, Mont., before going out to Johnston Island in 1995. He was the first to follow dad into chemical disposal.
“To be honest, I had mixed feelings, the lifestyle was laid back, you had no bills and no routine,” Chad said. “But it was isolated. Outside the family I worked with, I didn’t get to see them a lot. Communications were horrible, they only had eight phone lines for 1,500 people. I’d wait 45 minutes to get a 15-minute phone call.”
Chad started from ground level, at first doing what amounted to maintenance work on the atoll. He worked his way up the ladder and made it to the control room.
He’s seen almost every aspect of the operation, either with his own eyes or on his monitor.
“The health risks are a lot more detrimental in body work than here,” Chad said. “There’s so much emphasis on employee safety that in 30 years, I’ll feel confident that I’ll come away with no ill health effects. I saw guys in auto body with more health problems that you could shake a stick at.”
If a problem comes up, Chad discusses it with his supervisor. He likes the open-door policy incinerator managers have when employees like him have issues.
“The culture here, like the island, is that everybody from the ground up has the ability to stop the evolution and make sure we know exactly what we’re doing before we proceed,” Chad said. “I’ve seen all the engineering controls work.”
The weapons go by
In the CHB, or container handling building known as “the chubb” around the facility, everything is mammoth. The room resembles an airplane hanger with room for a jumbo jet, but there aren’t any planes.There are massive gray holding tanks to transport chemical weapons from storage igloos to the incinerator. They look like elephants, and when they end their journey, they go to the chubb.
Gary Peterson unloads the weapons and readies them for their fiery fate.
“It’s one of those jobs that when we’re busy, the day goes by, but it doesn’t make you feel miserable,” Gary said.
Gary, eldest of the chemical brothers at 36, bounced around the world a bunch, serving in the Air Force and in the South Dakota Army National Guard before going into chemical weapons disposal here.
He looks a bit like a racecar mechanic in his blue coveralls. Around his waist is a belt laden with clips and tools to check air pressure and carry his jumble of keys.
Gary says he and his brothers have gotten closer since they started in chemical disposal, but that doesn’t mean they talk about it when they’re out rough riding in their Jeeps.
“We talk about work at work,” Gary said. “I don’t have much to do with their areas, and they don’t have much to do with my area.”
Gary, who lives in Jacksonville with Chad, often talks the incinerator up with people he meets. He said it’s important. The result is an insider’s view of the place most people don’t get.
“Some people get all excited, others are cool to it,” Gary said. “Some want jobs out here and want to know if I’m scared or how things are done.”
He said enough safety precautions are taken, and he tells people it would take something drastic for chemical agent to hurt people outside the depot’s confines.
“You ever put Raid in your house?” he said. “That’s what we’re dealing with here, is industrial Raid.”
The family business
First of all, Ervin Peterson is proud of his three sons. But he likes to say they all got their jobs in chemical disposal on their own.All he did was get them a phone number. That’s it.
“There’s a point of pride, or whatever you might call it,” Ervin said. “I wasn’t going to ask anybody to get my kids a job, they were going to get it on their own. I gave them a number to contact, and (the employers) came to me to ask if they were any good. I said I don’t know.”
The 60-year-old Ervin runs a handyman business in Hill City, now a growing area. He worked on Johnston Island from 1991 until it closed in 2003. He was one of the last people to leave the spit of land, nearly 800 miles off the coast of Hawaii. The boys’ mother and Ervin’s wife, Louella, 59, works at Golden Spike restaurant in Hill City as well as at the local hardware store.
Because of his own experience with his sons’ line of work, Ervin doesn’t worry much about the children’s safety.
“I guess as a parent, knowing what they do and having done it myself, I don’t have any qualms about it,” Ervin said. “Can they have an accident? Yeah, sure, but an accident can happen on the road. It’s a funny thing, not that it ain’t probably defined as a hazardous line of work, but again, the safety, they inspect and enforce, it would have to be something pretty drastic, it won’t be of shoddy safety concerns.”
Because it’s such painstaking work, Ervin said, he knows his boys are doing fine because they have common sense, and that’s something he helped instill in them.
Besides, the work and paychecks provided by the program have been good for his family.
“Their station in life has certainly been better than if they had stayed around here working construction…” Ervin said. “Could they have made it in something else? Probably. But has chem demil been good for the Peterson family? Yes it has. I ain’t gonna argue with that.”