Anniston Star
August 3, 2003

Exploring the process of incineration

By Sara Clemence
Star Staff Writer
08-03-2003

The chemical weapons incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot is shown in a Nov. 2000 aerial photo. After nearly a decade of planning, the incinerator will begin operations Wednesday. Photo: Stephen Gross/The Anniston Star
For more than 40 years, Anniston has been home to tons of weapons designed not to incinerate tanks or demolish buildings, but to spread toxic chemicals to kill as many human beings as possible.

The stored weapons rest in grass-covered concrete bunkers at the Anniston Army Depot, just miles from population centers such as Anniston and Oxford. They include containers of mustard, an oily liquid that can damage the lungs, and rockets filled with sarin and VX - substances that kill by sending nervous systems into overdrive.

Wednesday morning, after years of preparation and controversy, the Army plans to begin destroying the weapons stored here by feeding them into a $500 million incinerator.

The facility has drawn fire from some residents, elected officials and activist groups. The Army says the process is a safe and efficient way to dispose of the menace; opponents see the facility as dangerous and outdated, and believe the Army should use a liquid process called neutralization to dispose of the weapons.

But unless a coalition of anti-incineration groups succeeds this week in persuading a federal judge to halt the burning, test burns will begin Wednesday.

If all goes as planned, say Army officials, within seven years - and after spending, at the outside, more than $2 billion - the weapons that have been stored near Anniston will be reduced to burnt metal buried in a landfill.

On Schedules

There are about 750 workers at the destruction facility. About 200 of them will be there Wednesday, said Timothy K. Garrett, the project manager at Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility.

The Army has the destruction timetable, including work schedules, mapped out.

Wednesday, workers will destroy just two weapons, but Garrett hopes to destroy five the next day, and then 12. Next week, when the second of four work crews comes on duty, they will go back to five, then 12, and so on until all of the workers are comfortable with the live process.

"We're trying to do everything the most conservative way to start with," Garrett said.

Things will proceed at an increasing rate, going up to about 40 rockets per day by the fall, when the Army will begin trial burns authorized by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. Vast amounts of data will be collected during the full-speed trial burns, and then the data will be reviewed by the agency while the facility slows to half speed. If everything appears to be running as planned, ADEM will let the Army ramp back up for regular operations.

When it began

When the Army began storing chemical weapons at the depot in 1961, the place was known as Anniston Ordnance Depot. By the late 1960s, when the shipments ceased, the installation had been renamed, and 4,507,260 pounds of nerve and blister agent were stored there.

At one time that was about seven percent of the nation's stockpile of such weapons. Today, with about a quarter of the stores having been destroyed in Maryland, Utah and Johnston Island, Anniston's portion is about 10 percent of the remaining total.

The chemical-filled rockets, mortars, mines, projectiles and containers lie dormant in angular concrete bunkers set among trees in the northeastern part of the depot. The igloos, which are spread over about 750 acres, are covered with earth and vegetation, and might almost seem bucolic if their contents were not spelled out in brightly colored, foot-high letters near the doors.

The Army has said that the weapons were not meant to last this long - and they haven't. Over the past 20 years, more than 860 leaking weapons, mostly M55 rockets containing sarin, have been discovered, officials have said.

Because the rockets are failing, they are the first weapons the Army plans to begin destroying this week.

Of the first day, Garrett said: "It's hopefully going to be very anticlimactic."

"They Got Lucky"

The M55 rockets are six and a half feet long, and weigh nearly 60 pounds each. They are long and slim, a little narrower than the diameter a compact disc. On the back of each rocket is a fan-like set of motorized fins. On the front end is a warhead. Inside the warhead is 10.7 pounds, or a little over a gallon, of nerve agent.

The rockets were designed so that when they detonate, the liquid sarin is vaporized and carried by the wind to its victims. In storage, the rockets lie in sealed fiberglass shipping and firing tubes, their metal fins neatly folded.

Late Tuesday afternoon, workers will drive out to the igloo that houses the rockets chosen for the first round.

But first, the Army will plug current weather information - mainly wind speed, temperature and pressure - into computer models, to determine whether the conditions are right for moving weapons. If a leak or accident were to happen, some weather conditions would increase the chances of the chemicals being dispersed into the community.

"If there is a storm bearing down we're not going to move weapons," Garrett said. "We're not going to move weapons at night, because it's safer to move during the day."

The Army also will have notified local emergency management officials about the its plans, 24 hours in advance. The notification is not required by law, Garrett said, but is a policy the Army has agreed to follow. And for now, he said, the Army will move weapons only after school hours, until local schools have had protective equipment installed.

About 10 to 15 workers will be out at the igloo, along with ADEM inspectors, Garrett said.

The workers are "individuals who have been working around these munitions for years." But they weren't chosen to be first because they are better, or because they volunteered.

"We went with the crew the way the schedule's laid out," Garrett said. "It was their time for working; they got lucky."

The first rockets to meet their doom were not selected randomly, however.

"They are presumed to be the easiest rockets to process," Garrett said.

The weapons are not leakers, and they are not "gelled."

In about a third of the rockets, a preservative was added to the chemical agent during manufacturing. Over the years, the chemicals in those rockets solidified, or "gelled," and can't be drained out. That makes the weapons harder to destroy. Until the schools have their equipment, the Army says it will not intentionally burn gelled rockets.

Garrett named the bunker that has been selected, but asked that it not appear in the newspaper. It was chosen, he said, because it is not packed full, and should be easier to maneuver in.

In the Igloo

At the igloo, workers will take an air sample from inside by attaching a hose to a valve in the wall. Only when have they have confirmed that no agent has leaked into the bunker will they open the doors.

The workers will not be wearing special protective gear, just standard coveralls. Slung around their waists will be Army-green bags containing gas masks and nerve-agent antidote.

They will use a forklift to pull out the pallets of weapons, which are five rockets deep and three high, and put them on the concrete apron in front of the igloo. A second forklift will carry each pallet a few feet to where an enhanced on-site container, or EONC, awaits. The large, white, double-walled metal containers weigh about 20,000 pounds and were designed to seal in the agent.

There will be only two pallets per EONC. Tuesday, officials hope, they will be able to load three EONCs, for a total of 90 rockets.

A truck will drive each EONC to the destruction facility, which, depending on the location of the igloo, could be a few miles away. They will proceed at a slow pace, Garrett said, of less than 10 miles per hour.

In the Facililty

The facility seems like any other industrial plant, with shiny pipes, tubing, beams and walkways, tanks, cables, and the chug-chug of motors running. Inside, bright blue doors lead from one area to another, and plastic-like industrial paint coats most surfaces.

The EONCs will be driven into the high-ceilinged loading bay, where they will be attached to an overhead crane and placed on huge conveyor belts. More than 40 containers can be stored there, waiting for their turns.

Wednesday, the first EONC will be loaded right onto an elevator and carried to the second floor.

Once it gets there, the inside air will be sampled to make sure there were no leaks, again with a hose attached to a valve. If the air inside is determined to be clean, the EONC will be opened.

A forklift will remove the pallets and put them on the concrete floor next to the processing line - the place where the destruction begins, and where the weapons will be handled by humans for the last time. Here, too, the workers wear coveralls, plus aprons and gloves, and the gas-mask bags.

They will undo the pallet and lift a rocket onto the metal feed table, which juts out near the wall, and which is slanted to keep the rockets from rolling off.

The workers place the rockets into the conveyor system so they are pointing toward the wall, toward the gate into which they will soon disappear. A metering machine checks to make sure the rocket is correctly oriented.

There are two lines for processing rockets at the facility. The first day, the Army plans to use both.

"First we'll do one line, one munition," Garrett said. "We'll back up look at the way the equipment performed, how the crew performed."

If they are satisfied with the way everything worked, they will move to the second line.

Chop and Drop

From here on, the weapon's fate is manipulated by machines and supervised from inside a control room in the facility.

The control room looks the way the name sounds. There are three rows of bright-blue metal workstations, facing away from each other in a U-shape. Dozens of video and computer screens blink and glow. On the left side, workers track the weapons as they move through the system. On the right, they watch the furnaces.

Near one end of the room are three wall phones. The red and green phones connect to the depot and its emergency operations. The beige one links to the inside of the destruction facility. A large master screen covers the wall at the other end of the room. There are no outside windows.

Cameras will watch as the rockets move into a sort of waiting area, a room that can contain an explosion. During normal operations, they will stay there until the weapon ahead is processed.

Wednesday, the rocket will move head-first along the conveyor system, through another gate and into the next room. The rocket will be clamped in place, and three metal rods will puncture it in three places.

A thumb-sized ventilation hole will be poked into the top, and two smaller drainage holes will be made on the bottom. A pump will suck out the toxic liquid, which will flow to one of two holding tanks (1,300 gallons and 660 gallons) in the heart of the facility.

The agent will accumulate in the tanks for a few weeks, Garrett said, until about 7,500 pounds of it has been collected. Then it will be burned. Until the schools have their protection in place, the agent will be burned only at night or on weekends

When the time comes to burn it, the liquid will be fed through narrow pipelines to the liquid incinerator, which burns at 2,700 degrees.

The system forces a fine mist of agent into the furnace, mixed with air and natural gas to stoke the fire. It is similar to a car's fuel injection process, Garrett said. The amount of natural gas decreases as the agent becomes the fuel for the fire. The chemicals are destroyed almost instantaneously, he said.

If the furnaces burn too cool or too hot, the system is supposed to automatically shut down.

Wednesday, after the first rocket is drained, it still will contain a residual amount of sarin - up to 5 percent of the original load. The rocket will be rolled 90 degrees to keep any leftovers from dribbling out. It will be moved past a metal blade, shaped like a home plate, which will slice through the rocket seven times, cutting it into eight pieces.

The chunks go down a square metal chute to the deactivation furnace, which burns at 1,050 to 1,100 degrees. The chute has gates to keep the heat from backing up, and sprayers for cooling and in case of an explosion.

The furnace has a spiral design, and a rotary system that shuttles the rocket chunks from entrance to exit. That will take six minutes, long enough to destroy the propellant and explosives.

The exhaust from each furnace is piped to an afterburner, which cooks it at 2,000 degrees to further destroy contaminants. The exhaust is pushed through huge charcoal filter banks before being released through the smokestack.

From the furnace, the rocket pieces will get spit out onto a closed conveyor belt, which is heated to 1,000 degrees. The conveyor moves very slowly, allowing the fragments to roast for another hour, to destroy any remaining chemical agent.

To make sure they are sarin-free, they go into an airlock, where the air is sampled to make sure the pieces are clean. Then they ride down a final chute, landing outside in square metal bins with hinged lids. The containers eventually will be bound for the hazardous waste landfill in Emelle, because the rocket leftovers contain cadmium and other heavy metals.

The entire process should take less than an hour and a half. And then, if all goes as hoped, the second rocket will begin its demise.