Star Staff Writer
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| LaVern Dowdy demonstrates how SCANS will destroy the pre-World War II vial found at McClellan. Photo: Kevin Qualls/The Anniston Star |
Inside the fence is a concrete pad, and on the pad is a trailer-sized box.
Inside the box is a stainless-steel capsule. Inside the capsule is a six-inch-long glass vial that rolled out of a bit of dirt and debris taken out of the ground last month.
Inside the vial is a bit of liquid, chemical agent thought to be blistering mustard agent or lewisite.
The agent is diluted enough to have been used for training soldiers, but potent enough that storing and destroying it is a major production for the Army.
On Wednesday, a team from the Army’s Technical Escort Unit, based in Maryland, will use new equipment — debuting in the field — to destroy the vial of pre-World War II agent, which contractors found while cleaning up an old chemical training site.
The equipment looks akin to a big Tupperware bin.
The vial was part of a chemical training kit used by the military for decades to train soldiers "to get their masks on fast," said Rusty Fendick, environmental engineer for the Army’s Product Manager for Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel.
About 160,000 kits were made between 1928 and 1969, Fendick said. The vials were taken outside, blown open, used for training, and decontaminated.
Leftover vials turn up a few times a year in different parts of the country, sometimes at old military sites like the former Fort McClellan, and the Technical Escort Unit, which deals with chemical and biological weapons, is called in.
The new equipment, which is called Single Case Agent Identification Set Access and Neutralization System, or SCANS, is much simpler than its name implies.
"It’s ideal for the situation we have here," said LaVern Dowdy, physical sciences technician for the technical escort unit. "The onesies and the twosies."
A SCANS costs about $4,000 and is a less expensive and more convenient way to destroy single bottles or vials of blister agent on site – the old way involves sending three tractor-trailers worth of equipment, Fendick said.
It still took three vehicles to get all the necessary gear to Anniston, though.
"If you didn’t drop it, don’t pick it up," said Greg Jacobs, site safety and health officer for the Technical Escort Unit, warning visitors that the area where the vial is stored has not been cleared of unexploded munitions.
The van-sized box where the vial is stored is called an interim holding facility and was shipped in for the purpose. It has a built-in alarm system, locks and a fire suppression system, and is airtight.
Near the box, two tents with mud-marked tarp floors have been erected. The first is a command post.
In a worst-case scenario, if the vial were completely broken under perfect weather conditions, the agent would spread, at most, 50 feet, said Sheldon Orr, safety officer for the Guardian Brigade, which is over the Technical Escort Unit.
Still, the second tent is for decontamination, in case something goes wrong, and an Anniston Emergency Medical Services unit is on site.
Plus, there are air monitors hooked up to the storage facility, more hanging on the fence, and even more at the perimeter of the whole operation.
The two people who handle the vial will wear facemasks with respirators, and Tyvek protective gear.
They will fit the glass vial into the SCANs, which is round and made of inch-thick plastic. A glass bottle of neutralizer the size of a pickle jar is placed next to it and the whole thing is closed up and bolted tightly shut.
A mallet is used to drive a metal rod through a valve in the case. The rod breaks both glass bottles, and the SCANs is rolled around and shaken up, so the glass shatters even more and the chemicals are mixed together, making the agent harmless.
After that, the whole thing is double-bagged, put in a 20-gallon container, and trucked off to an incinerator in Texas.
"Once you seal it, that’s it," Dowdy said. "It’s no longer agent, it’s waste.
The whole operation usually takes about an hour, Dowdy said. But Monday and today are devoted to preparations and run-through.
Dowdy said technical people were initially skeptical such a small, simple-looking mechanism could be up to the task. But it has proven itself worthy.
It’s also cheap, she said, and eliminates driving or flying vials of mustard agent to disposal sites.
"It’s getting very difficult to transport these things," Fendick said. "The public doesn’t want it on their roads."