Assistant Metro Editor
| Officials with the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Utah have stopped operations due to moisture in a key monitoring system that confirms the presence of deadly nerve agent. Meanwhile, the Army has stepped away from starting the destruction of deadly VX nerve agent at its neutralization facility in Newport, Ind., over questions about its waste disposal process. The monitoring system in Tooele, known by the acronym DAMS, confirms agent readings taken from a frontline monitoring system, known as ACAMS. Officials in Tooele have not processed munitions since Dec. 7 because of the discovery, but they expected the facility to be operational some time this weekend. The Anniston Chemical Disposal Facility employs the same air-monitoring system, and officials there are watching the Tooele developments with interest. Tooele’s incinerator often is seen as a bellwether for the Anniston incinerator. The chemical weapons stockpiles are similar and they have similar furnaces, officials say. “From our perspective, we are aware, but we believe it’s something that’s a VX issue at the moment,” said Army spokesman Mike Abrams. “We are not experiencing any DAMS problems as we are processing GB.” However, groups opposed to incineration, such as the Chemical Weapons Working Group, have asked the Army to look into a different monitoring system, one they say provides more accurate readings faster. Abrams said lessons learned from the incident will be taken into account here when the incinerator begins destroying the stockpile of VX weapons stored at the Anniston Army Depot. Officials at the Tooele incinerator said the DAMS had small amounts of moisture that caused inconsistent readings. Alaine Southworth, a spokeswoman at Tooele, said managers there stopped processing for safety reasons. “If things aren’t quite right, we want to stop and make they are before we move on,” Southworth said. “It all goes back to the safety issue, we’re not going to process unless things aren’t 100 percent right.” Army officials also stepped back from processing bulk VX nerve agent in Newport. The glitch there was the Army’s plan to destroy byproduct from the planned neutralization of the agent, which is stored in bulk containers. Commissioners in Montgomery County, Ohio, the home of a company called Perma-Fix that was to dispose of the byproduct, decided against issuing the company a permit for the work, said officials with the Chemical Materials Agency in Maryland. The Army was left to find another way to dispose of the byproduct, called hydrolysate, and has not yet announced plans for its disposal. Jeff Lindblad, a spokesman for the CMA, said the Army has chosen to put the program on hold until it “chooses a path forward.” The Newport facility was to start disposing of its chemical weapons this past August, but officials at the facility couldn’t destroy VX to the Army’s liking. A fire-safety system also had to be installed, officials said. The Army could choose to destroy the byproduct on-site with an oxidation process or a biological treatment, and could ship the byproduct to a different company. “The issue is what we do as far as disposing the liquid effluent from the process,” Lindblad said. “The actual process will work, the issue is what are we going to do with hydrolysate.” |