Anniston Star
August 24, 2002

ADEM says some test burns must be redone

By Matthew Creamer
Star Staff Writer

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management will demand that the Army redo its initial set of test burns at the chemical weapons incinerator, a department official said Friday.

After weeks of reviewing laboratory data from the burns, the department is drafting a notice of deficiency - regulatory language for a failing grade - for surrogate trial burns that took place in March.

A prerequisite to the destruction of the weapons, these burns allow the incinerator to test out on industrial compounds that are more difficult to destroy than the lethal nerve agent stored at the Anniston Army Depot.

The notice, expected to be made public early next week, will require that part of the burns, particularly a series of low-temperature runs, be repeated because of mistakes made by the laboratory under contract to analyze the test data.

The laboratory's actions call into question the crucial conclusion that the incinerator met and even exceeded the standard for destroying the compounds, known as the destruction and removal efficiency, or DRE.

"Due to what appears to be a laboratory error or inappropriate laboratory protocol, the DRE for the surrogate protocol was inconclusive," said Jim Grassiano, chief of ADEM's governmental facilities section.

The development could delay the startup of the incinerator by several months, a significant setback for a project that has struggled to meet its own deadlines. The Army is planning to begin testing the incinerator on nerve agent-filled rockets in October, but there is a growing sense that the date will be changed.

"There needs to be further discussion on what the schedule impacts will be," Grassiano said.

An Army spokesman acknowledged that the notice of deficiency is on its way but declined to comment on it.

"We have not received a notice yet," said Mike Abrams, the spokesman. "We still stand by the results of the surrogate trial burns and it would be premature for us to comment officially on something that we have not received."

Last month, the Army released a largely positive summary of the 17 thick volumes of data generated by the trial burns on the liquid agent incinerator, one of four incinerators at the facility. While citing some apparently small imperfections, the summary contained the essential assertion that the incinerator destroyed more than the necessary 99.9999 percent of the surrogate material

Submission of the report to ADEM was delayed by more than two months, a result, the Army said, of the analysis of the data being more complicated than expected.

At this point, few details are available on the trial burn failure, short of the central fact that regulators are laying blame on the California laboratory working for Westinghouse Anniston, the Army's contractor on the project. The laboratory is called Air Toxics Ltd.

"They got the results they wanted, but, because of the laboratory practices they did, the results were not supportable," Grassiano said.

He said it remains unclear whether the laboratory problems will have any effect on ADEM's review of the second round of surrogate trials, which were completed in June. These burns tried out the deactivation furnace system, which will be called upon to destroy fully loaded gelled rockets as well as metal parts and explosives from rockets that have been drained of their agent. A summary report released last week by the Army offered a glowing estimation of the system's performance.

To prepare for the repeat of the burns, incinerator officials would have to submit a minor modification for its trial burn plans to ADEM, Grassiano said. This would not require a public comment period.