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The next disposal round at the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal
Facility will take place after a thorough cleaning of the systems, the installation
of a new series of monitors and a retooling of machinery.
Workers at the ANCDF currently are destroying sarin-filled
105-mm shells, the last sarin projectiles remaining in the Anniston Army
Depot’s stockpile. The last of those projectiles should be destroyed in late
January, after which crews will start a four-month changeover to begin the
destruction of VX-filled M55 rockets. The sarin campaign began in August
2003 with sarin-filled M55 rockets.
“They look the same as the GB rockets, they just have a different
agent in them,” Army project site manager Tim Garrett said. “We’re going
to have to retool the equipment.”
Crews will start the changeover with the installation of additional
chemical agent monitors in the facility and the decontamination of the weapons-processing
systems. ANCDF currently has 102 monitors throughout the facility; crews will
install 50 more to monitor VX and GB when weapons processing resumes.
“Most of the monitors will monitor VX, the others GB,” said
Robert Love, the project general manager for the Washington Group, the contractor
at ANCDF. “We will be processing some GB secondary waste and we’ll need GB
monitors during that process.
The GB monitors also will be needed as a backup, should any
sarin remain after the decontamination process.
But officials plan a thorough cleaning of the equipment. Workers
will spend much of February scrubbing out machinery with decontamination
solution, soap and water. Crews also will collect air samples in decontaminated
areas for laboratory analysis of sarin content.
“From a monitoring perspective, you do not want to deal with
two agents at one time,” Garrett said. “You want to eliminate the possibility
of GB (sarin) at all times.”
The Metal Parts Furnace, where the chopped-up remnants of
munitions are cooked at high temperatures to remove the last traces of agent,
will be shut down, cooled down and inspected. The rocket-shearing machine
will be adjusted to prepare for VX rocket processing.
The Liquid Incinerator, which burns nerve agent, also will
be shut down and drained after officials verify that the incinerator has
been decontaminated to acceptable levels. Crews will rebrick a furnace area,
and the incinerator will be filled and flushed.
After all the mechanical work is completed, a month will be
spent on assessment of the equipment, with internal assessments and reviews
by the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency, which oversees the destruction of
chemical weapons in the United States; the Alabama Department of Environmental
Management, and the Centers for Disease Control.
The VX campaign is expected to begin in May or June.
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