Anniston Star
September 5, 2003

Army again begins sarin agent burns

By Sara Clemence
Star Staff Writer
09-05-2003

BYNUM

The Army began burning GB nerve agent in bulk at the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator for the second time Thursday night.

The burn began a little after 8 p.m., and was scheduled to continue most of the night.

Managers planned to destroy about 300 gallons of GB nerve agent, or sarin, by this morning.

“That’s a goal that we had set so we could keep the (agent storage) tank empty enough to run more rockets,” said plant manager Ken Ankrom, in the control room Thursday evening. “It we get a steady flow, I might get more than that.”

About 120 pounds of agent, or approximately 12 gallons, had been destroyed before 9 p.m.

Since operations began Aug. 9, the facility has drained, cut up and burned 1,284 M55 rockets filled with sarin, including 120 processed Thursday.

More than 660,000 munitions containing nerve and blister agent remain stored at the Anniston Army Depot.

The agent removed from the rockets was fed through a brown pipeline Thursday and sprayed into a furnace that burns at 2,700 degrees.

Operators at a console inside the control room manipulated the feed rate, gradually increasing it. By around 8:45, they had reached a flow rate of about 450 pounds an hour.

Inside the control room, alarms sounded every few minutes, some of the buzzes indicating that monitors had detected nerve agent in various parts of the plant.

A monitor in the control room showed a schematic diagram of the facility, with rooms outlined in blue, and the agent monitors marked with green squares.

Very low levels of nerve agent were detected in the room where the liquid furnace is located. The levels indicated that tiny amounts of vapor were escaping, managers said. They were not concerned as long as the levels did not increase suddenly or dramatically.

“If levels were to spike or max out, we’d probably have a broken flange or something like that,” said Kenny Lauyans, shift plant manager.

All of the air in the plant is pumped from the least potentially contaminated areas to the most potentially contaminated areas, and is heavily filtered before being released to the environment.

Observers were able to safely stand in the room next to the furnace Thursday evening, and watch through double-paned glass as it ran.

Other monitors detected contamination in observation corridors, but the causes of those alarms had been confirmed to be chemicals other than nerve agent.

Small amounts of glue being used to repair the roof have percolated into the building’s ventilation system over recent weeks, setting off false alarms. Wednesday night, rain washed some of those chemicals into the building through the leaking roof.

When the monitors sounded Wednesday night, large areas of the building were announced and marked as restricted as a precaution, Lauyans said. Workers could not enter without wearing protective gear.

At about 1 a.m., when the facility’s lab had confirmed that glue was causing the alarms, only the rooms with the positive readings were kept restricted.

They will be kept so until the monitors stop detecting contaminants, and the negative readings have been confirmed, Lauyans said.