Anniston Star
August 4, 2002

Study shifts understanding of VX rockets storage risks

By Matthew Creamer
Star Staff Writer

A new study shows that VX rockets are riskier than previously thought, and knowledge of the study comes as the Army pushes forward with schedule changes that would delay destruction of the rockets at Anniston's chemical weapons incinerator.

An assessment of risk from the weapons stored at the Anniston Army Depot concludes that the single biggest potential storage hazard is a lightning strike on a bunker of VX-filled rockets.

Previously, the Army believed the biggest risk was a lightning bolt hitting a cache of rockets loaded with the other type of nerve agent stored at the depot, sarin, or GB.

This shift in understanding comes as the Army and its contractor, Westinghouse, are adopting a schedule that would accelerate the destruction of the sarin stockpile while pushing back the destruction of the VX rockets by about six months.

These changes to a long-standing schedule, the Army predicts, will save eight or nine months on the overall length of the project, but will result in a "slight increase" in risk, according to modeling done apart from the new risk assessment. At base, the new plan involves the activation of a furnace that will allow the burning of more than one weapon type at once.

The Army's acknowledgment of the risk increase, which was observed in a study that has not been made public, ensured that the schedule changes, announced just months before the
incinerator begins to burn rockets this fall, would be met with resistance and criticism.

Questions raised

While incinerator opponents have charged that these changes are more evidence that the Army is concerned more with saving money than with safeguarding the public, local and congressional officials have asked for independent risk assessments.

And now the changes have led Preston Gray, a former Westinghouse employee who was
involved in the project from 1992 to June 2001, to question the move.

"It reverses a commitment for 10 years to get rid of rockets, to make operational decisions on the basis of community safety," said Gray in an interview. The former Westinghouse project manager is challenging Del Marsh for his seat in the state Senate.

While still expressing his overall support for the project, Gray criticized the moves from a
managerial perspective.

"I'm concerned with such a late change in plans that it raises operational risks that wouldn't have existed with the old sequence, because management of change is different," he said. "They should be moving forward in a deliberate manner.

"Rockets, rockets, rockets should be the focus until they're gone."

Incinerator spokesman Mike Abrams defended the changes as a safe attempt to capitalize on the versatility of the incinerator.

"This is an honest attempt to get full use out of the facility and do right by the community rather than just do half a job along the way," he said.

The Army's stand

The language of risk, with its bleak and esoteric grammar of statistics, algorithms and disaster, is the one the Army speaks in defending a program that has been met with community mistrust and criticism from congressional and cabinet-level officials for its ballooning budget and schedule slippages.

The Army long has said that storing the weapons, where they sit painted with a bull's-eye for a terrorist or a disastrous act of God, is statistically more dangerous than destroying them in facilities that already have proven successful in destroying a significant chunk of the national stockpile.

This language fails to move David Christian, a local architect and a critic of the incinerator. He says the Army's risk studies are conceptually flawed. The studies, he says, place a disproportionate value on time in the effort to justify quick disposal in the incinerator and head off arguments that the Army should wait for the development of a better technology to destroy the weapons.

But, he says, even using the Army's logic the recent changes don't pass "the smell test."

"If you believe the storage risk is greater, then you ought to be making decisions that reduce that risk sooner," he said. "If they're going to use risk as a determining factor then they ought to be consistent. And it looks to me like they're not."

Delay and risk

Though the new risk assessment draws attention to the inconsistency alleged by Christian and Gray, it also says that risk to the community still drops precipitously as the weapons, especially the rockets, are destroyed.

The new risk assessment does not look at the two new possibilities for schedule changes that would delay the destruction of the most dangerous element of the 2,200-ton stockpile.

The first change, already being implemented by incinerator officials, calls for burning sarin
artillery shells during downtimes in the burning of sarin rockets.

The second, which would require the approval of state environmental regulators, would have explosive parts removed from the shells before they arrive at the plant so the metal parts of the munitions could be processed simultaneously with the rockets.

Abrams said that near the end of the GB rocket campaign the incinerator's leadership will decide whether to press forward with the rest of the GB munitions or switch to VX rockets, as was originally planned. Burning all the GB munitions on the front end would eliminate a five-month changeover of plant equipment needed to handle a resumption of GB operations following the destruction of the VX rockets.

Eliminating this changeover period would reduce risk to the workforce, the Army has said.

Public meeting

A public information session to discuss the proposed changes will be Thursday from 6-8 p.m. at the Anniston Community Outreach Office, 11 East 10th St., Anniston.

The risk assessment is a follow-up on a 1997 publication based primarily on plans for the then yet-to-be-constructed incinerator. The new study is based on the Anniston facility, as built, and on operating experience at chemical weapons incinerators in Utah and on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean.

At this point, only a summary report of the 11-volume study has been released. It is available in the Anniston Chemical Demilitarization Outreach Office. Army officials in Aberdeen, Md., are reviewing the entire study and the assessment that was conducted for the schedule changes for security purposes. These documents could be released in some form in the future.

The lightning risk

At the depot, 16 igloos contain M55 rockets loaded with VX nerve agent, one of the most toxic substances known to man.

In 14 of these igloos, the position of the rockets, which sit on pallets, is such that a lightning bolt could ignite the weapons, causing a fire and the release of agent. This threat represents 87 percent of the risk during storage, according to the risk assessment.

"If you look at the numbers, it says we already should have had a fire out at Anniston," said Steven Blunk, safety chief for the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization. "Which tells me that either we've had good luck or the science has flaws in it. That's how high the probability comes out to be."

While officials in Aberdeen are considering how to reduce this risk, depot personnel are writing procedures for repositioning the rockets, a tricky issue because some of the procedures, Blunk said, "come with their own set of problems." For instance, he said, "in moving the munitions, you make it harder to get around the igloo."

John Harsch, chief of the chemical missions division at the depot, said employees might use the opportunity to facilitate the removal of the weapons once destruction begins.

The Army also is working to lessen the threat from facility fires and from jams in the chute upon which chopped rocket pieces travel into the furnace. The incorporation of fire risk is new to this assessment, with much of the data coming not from experience with chemical weapons incinerators but from fires in comparable industrial settings.

"Currently, everything is on the table," Blunk said, "things like reducing the amount of agent in the building."

Jam prevention

Feed-chute jamming long has been an issue and is responsible for the one confirmed agent release in the incinerator program, which happened in the Tooele, Utah, facility in 2000.

Already, Blunk said, several measures have been put in place to prevent jams that could lead to fires, from changing the slope of the chute, to eliminating a lip, to putting in place high-pressure sprays to wash down lingering agent and metal parts.

But because this has been a long-term issue, Blunk said, "I'm taking a wait-and-see approach."

The study of the frequency of industrial fires, in particular, led to a new understanding of the relative risk of burning versus storage during the seven-year period of incineration projected by the Army, a timeline contested by incinerator opponents. The storage of the weapons now poses 89 percent of the total risk, whereas in the phase one assessment, it accounted for more than 97 percent.

Army spokesman Greg Mahall said this shift was the result of a number of factors, foremost the "maturity of the (risk assessment) process" which takes into account new data on the agents' toxicities, among other factors.