Anniston Star
December 29, 2002

A tale of two stockpiles: How communities prepare - or don't

By Jason Landers
Star Staff Writer
12-29-2002

HERMISTON, Ore.
The temperature in northeast Oregon plummeted that morning, the day a simple mistake galvanized a region and shocked its leaders into cooperative action.

Sheets of black ice quilted the roads in patches that threatened to spin motorists off the road. But it wasn't bitter cold weather or traffic accidents that incited public outcries on Dec. 30, 1999.

As it happened, the mercury dipped the day after an Oregon newspaper reported all systems were OK with new federally funded emergency sirens and roadside message boards.

A first for the relatively poor region, the items were purchased through a little-known federal program administered jointly by the Army and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Named the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP), it readies communities near the nation's eight chemical weapons stockpiles for an unplanned release of nerve or blister agent.

In Oregon, that stockpile is at the Umatilla Army Depot in Umatilla County, where 10 percent of the nation's aging VX, sarin and mustard agents await purification by fire in a state-of-the-art incineration facility.

Fearing the black ice would cause wrecks, an emergency management employee in neighboring Morrow County flipped a switch that activated the warning system. That single stroke changed the direction of what had been a struggling preparedness program, rife with turf wars and infighting.

Instead of a warning about inclement weather, message boards lit up with information about a chemical weapons accident. Sirens blared out a similar warning, in both English and Spanish. In some neighborhoods, predominantly English-speaking ones, the message only came across in Spanish.

The false alarm was a disaster, and community reaction was swift, officials say.

A few residents ripped into their recently arrived shelter-in-place kits - a cardboard box containing scissors, duct tape, plastic sheeting and a demonstrational video that shows how the items can be used to seal a room. Others gathered their families, braved the icy roads and sped off in the direction of the nearest evacuation route. Still others stood dumbfounded or mildly irritated by the panic of it all.

"It was this community's Sept. 11th," said Umatilla County CSEPP spokeswoman Cheryl Humphrey. "Those alarms going off shook the roots of this community."

Before the incident, cooperation among the CSEPP counties, which include the Oregon counties of Umatilla and Morrow as well as neighboring Benton County in Washington state, resembled bumper cars at a carnival. Personalities collided, and the program had ground to a halt.

Humphrey said the false alarm "made people say, 'Whoa! We are on the same track.' "

Preparedness in Oregon

A total of 43,000 residents live in the Oregon/Washington CSEPP response zones.

Meager ranch-style, three-bedroom houses and rickety old single-wide trailers dominate the market of an area a plume of deadly chemical agent could touch if something ever went wrong. It would take a mammoth accident, though, a major event at one of the hundreds of igloos that dot the depot's landscape for a release to reach the community.

The most likely scenario, say Army officials, is a pallet of rockets tipping over outside an igloo as workers move it to the incineration facility. If that happened, Army officials figure, two rockets would go off and 13 others would leak. The plume likely would never waft off the 20,000 acre depot grounds, they say.

Experts agree that the risk to the public may peak when workers are inside an igloo, moving the weapons. A mishap there could set off a chain reaction that sends an entire igloo up in flames. It's happened before at other munitions bunkers, though never at one that holds chemical weapons.

The Army prides itself on attention to details in reducing public risk. It stacks rockets facing the back of the concrete-reinforced igloos so nothing blows out the door; the igloo doors all face the interior of the depot just in case something does; and there are stringent protocols in moving the weapons that restrict transport on days when weather conditions are ripe for carrying a plume off depot grounds.

CSEPP is an added layer of protection, a just-in-case backup should Murphy's Law prevail and the Army's myriad fail-safes flop.

Should that worst case arrive, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has certified that preparedness of the surrounding communities is "adequate and fully operational."

Motorists, residents, first responders, hospitals, schools and depot workers have protection, his certification says, and they have been drilled on implementing a response.

Evacuation routes are marked. Flashing message boards line the major highways, ready to warn motorists in the event of an accidental release. Swing-arm metal barricades are in place to close off roads that lead in the direction of danger.

Residents have shelter-in-place kits, and those living closest to the depot are receiving re-circulation filters that work with the kits to further purify interior air. They also have tone-alert radios that scream out a warning if an accident occurs.

Twenty schools nearest the depot have been over-pressurized, a technical term for turning a gym or cafeteria into a room that is virtually airtight. The system creates a seal that prevents outside air from entering and re-circulates interior air through large filtration units.

Three hospitals and the city of Hermiston's fire department have the same over-pressurization technology.

The hospitals also have decontamination areas, as well as medical tents and patient-screening procedures. Doctors, nurses and the first responders have the training to recognize symptoms of exposure.

First responders - the firefighters, paramedics and police officers who form the vanguard of a response - possess and are trained to use chemical-resistant suits that offer some protection at the periphery of a plume. They have handheld monitors that detect agent in the air and on victims, mobile decontamination trailers that cleanse agent from the fleeing, and antidotes proven to counter the effects of VX and sarin.

The CSEPP program also has a dedicated staff that has blitzed the area with public information campaigns, surveys and assurances that the safety measures will work.
Not everyone is convinced, and all the duct tape and plastic in Umatilla won't plug the cracks and holes in some of the homes, officials concede.

"It's not fully prepared. It's adequately prepared," said Oregon CSEPP director Chris Brown. "We've still got some work to do."

The governor's certification of adequacy is a legal measure. According to a provision in that state's environmental permit, it must be met before the Army can move forward with testing of the facility.

Army officials say the facility is on track to start burning agent in fall 2003.

Alabama preparedness

About 2,500 miles to the southeast, a sister incinerator in Anniston is tentatively scheduled to start burning agent sometime after the first of the year.

Its adjoining stockpile, tucked away and partially insulated by rolling hills and dense foliage, has more explosives and leaking munitions than any other stockpile in the nation, and, depending on who you ask, more potential for a catastrophic event. About 2,200 tons of nerve and blister agent-filled rockets, mines, mortars, projectiles and ton containers slumber here.

"(Oregon's) potential people at risk is a whole lot less than in Alabama," said Lee Helms, director of Alabama's Emergency Management Agency. "Some of the potential problems we face are much worse because of the number of people we would have to help."

More than 310,000 residents call Alabama's six-county CSEPP response zone home. And officials in Calhoun County, Ground Zero for an event, indicate their 100,000-plus population is no more prepared than Oregon's was before the false alarm of 1999.

As things stand, there are no shelter-in-place kits, save a handful of demonstration kits smuggled in for show-and-tell; no swinging roadside barricades; no highway message boards; no mobile decontamination trailers; little equipment for first responders except for a few plastic suits that have been recalled; no over-pressurization at 27 schools and daycare facilities that are slated for it (three additional schools have the system in place); no over-pressurization at area hospitals or fire halls; no dedicated decontamination units at the hospitals; no antidotes for firefighters to administer (a state health code prevents them from doing so even if there were); no road system that would hold up under mass evacuation; and no provision within the incinerator permit that requires adequate emergency preparedness.

What the CSEPP program in Calhoun County does have is a first-class Emergency Operations Center from which emergency management officials can track a plume. From that 24-hour/7-day operation, officials can calculate a plan of action that takes into account the amount of agent and where it's going, and spit out orders as well as warnings to first responders and the public.

The county has the best digital communications system that federal dollars in 1996 could buy. It is an encrypted system that has the potential to increase communications among law-enforcement agencies but which, critics say, has been used to stifle it. The county has emergency sirens that will squawk when there is a chemical accident or, a much more likely threat, killer tornadoes.

For Calhoun County, there was no cold day in 1999 that served as a wakeup call. Its turning point, if that description is appropriate, happened only last year when local officials publicly acknowledged evacuation alone was insufficient and got the Army's top brass to agree.
Promises were made in 2001 by the Army for the federal government to fund local shelter-in-place kits, recirculation filters, safety equipment for first responders, protective hoods for thousands of residents living nearest the depot and upgrades of emergency management software.

It took months before the promised money was appropriated, and months more before it slipped past a bureaucratic maze of red tape. In the meantime, county officials did nothing, arguing that their local efforts were meaningless without the federal funds. They became embroiled in a blame game with federal agencies and the Army.

Because of the delay, the county only now is sending out bid requests. Officials have said the preparedness items probably won't arrive or be distributed before late summer 2003, possibly later.

"If we had agreed in the beginning that we were going to get this equipment and this funding, we would be as successful as (Oregon)," Helms said.

In a more recent meeting with members of Alabama's congressional delegation, Under Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee made additional commitments. He pledged $26.5 million for overpressurizing 27 schools and daycare facilities in Calhoun County. It's a promise that has not been made in writing, at least not on any document county EMA director Mike Burney has seen.

"We've been begging for overpressurization," he said of a request that was first made four years ago and has been continual ever since.

Add to the list of concerns an influx of nearly 250,000 race fans converging on the nearby Talladega Superspeedway for two weekends every year, and you serve a dish that local officials are describing as a recipe for disaster.

During those two weeks, the small Talladega municipal airport is the second-busiest airstrip in the nation. That fact only adds to the remote possibility that an airplane might accidentally or, in the case of an attack, intentionally crash into an igloo. Only a few miles separate the track and stockpile.

A terrorist attack is a scenario the Army has considered, but a threat against which there may be limited security measures in place. Only a few weeks have lapsed since a high ranking stockpile official told reporters the nation's stockpiles had no air defenses.

Questions posed by The Anniston Star on that subject met sharp resistance. "To discuss this could possibly circumvent any security procedures that are in place," said a spokesman at the Army's Soldier and Biological Chemical Command. "I will not discuss security measures that will be in place as discussing them would violate operation security."

The Star agreed to withhold from this series other information it learned regarding defense of the installations, on matters such as air defense and the special deployment of ground troops.

Waiting for preparedness

"We are not prepared today for a chemical accident with either the stockpile or during operations at the chemical demil (incinerator) facility," Burney said. He and other county leaders are advocating a delay in startup until after the county has walked further down the path of preparedness.

"I would prefer we be fully prepared before any additional risk is taken," Burney said, adding that the movement of munitions from igloo to incinerator will increase the risk of a major accident. "Logic will tell you that when humans start handling those things, the risk rises."

Right now, about every credible study suggests the risk of storage far outweighs the risk of burning. That assessment also was a conclusion reached in a recent study by the National Research Council, a branch of The National Academies. It reached that conclusion after studying chemical events at two other Army incinerators that have burned agent.

But there hasn't been a quantitative study of the risk of moving weapons versus the risk of slightly increased storage, Burney said.

"We need an apples-to-apples comparison on which is more risky," he said.

The Army's standard answer is that storage is the greatest risk. Its officials will say, however, communities should have been prepared back when the chemical weapons were stockpiled here in the 1960s. CSEPP wasn't created until 1988.

Though a high-ranking official within the branch of the Army that oversees destruction has hinted that operations might be postponed until the community is better prepared, the Army's only official answer on the subject is that operations and preparedness are not connected.

The Anniston Star asked former NRC committee chairman and recognized expert David Kosson if operations should start before first responders are equipped or residents have capabilities to shelter in place.

"That's a difficult question," Kosson said. "Risk comes from storage and movement, not
from either an incineration or neutralization process."

When asked the same question, Craig Conklin of FEMA replied, "I really don't think that is a FEMA call." He said it is a call state and local officials must make.

Ultimately, the Army and state environmental regulators control when the incinerator will begin its work.