Anniston Star
December 30, 2002

A Matter of Trust: The blame game

By Jason Landers
Star Staff Writer
12-30-2002

They call it the blame game, an exercise in finger-pointing. It provides many excuses but few results in preparing area residents for an accident involving chemical weapons.

That accident is unlikely, say the risk experts. They cite in reassuring tones statistics generated by numbers-fed machines that spit out unimaginable calculations. Things will be all right, according to the odds.

But the calculations do little to ease the worry that weighs so heavy on the minds of those who live nearest the Anniston Army Depot. They need something tangible, local officials say - something reassuring that they can cling to if things go wrong. They don't have that now.

Residents here are well aware that a few miles down the road aging munitions filled with some of the deadliest chemical concoctions on Earth sit stored by the thousands in dirt-topped concrete bunkers.

Dread consumes some, but for most it is simply a bad thought tucked away deep inside. There are more immediate worries, like paying for Christmas gifts or the light bill, or clocking in at work on time.

More than 600,000 rockets, mortars, projectiles and mines hold 2,254 tons of VX, sarin and mustard in 155 bunkers at the depot.

The weapons spring leaks regularly. Army documents show as many as 859 "leakers" - far more than at any other stockpile - have released agent here.

A catastrophic event involving the stockpile could affect more than 100,000 residents in Calhoun County and an additional 200,000 who live in five surrounding counties within the stockpile's emergency response zones. Despite this, the area - Calhoun County most notably - is not as prepared as other communities where the Army's stockpiles are much more stable.

In 1988, the federal government created the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, or CSEPP, to ready communities at the nation's eight stockpiles for an emergency. The Army and Federal Emergency Management Agency oversee CSEPP, working with local and state officials.

Fifteen years after its creation, local and state officials say, the federal side of CSEPP is not living up to the task: This community is ill-prepared.

Those same local and state officials continue publicly criticizing the Army and FEMA for dragging their feet in providing funding that would protect homes, schools, motorists and first responders. The funding is on its way, but has been, and to some degree still is, mired in a bureaucratic process.

The degree to which the criticism has risen - especially now, as the Army prepares to start its billion-dollar incinerator that will destroy the weapons - may surprise some residents, all of whom depend on cooperation among policy makers.

"They will lie to you, cheat you, discredit you," said Calhoun County Commissioner Eli Henderson, who spent a career sweating off pounds for the Army in bunkers that house the nerve and blister agents. He was one of a handful of civilian employees whose job was to find leakers.

Henderson said, "The Army plays a blame game. The Army blames FEMA. FEMA blames the EMA (state Emergency Management Agency). And then they all ultimately blame us.

"It took me three years to learn the blame game, and I'm an expert on it now."

How it works

Below is a recent example that illustrates how blame is passed when CSEPP responsibilities are shirked:

As late as spring 2001, Calhoun County officials publicly stressed evacuation as the primary vehicle for providing community protection. They did so despite an earlier study, which they commissioned and the federal government funded, that suggested evacuation would not work.

"I think the only action available to the county is evacuation," Mike Burney, the county Emergency Management Agency director, wrote in a letter to state EMA director Lee Helms. (Dated March 14, 2000, it actually was written on that date in 2001.)

On the federal side of CSEPP, FEMA and the Army were emphasizing a "balanced approach." It included evacuation combined with other measures, such as residents sheltering in a room in their homes and sealing off the room with duct tape and plastic - a measure known as shelter-in-place.

FEMA and the Army stand behind that multi-pronged approach, a position they insist they espoused then, now and in the 15-year-old program's infancy.

Models prove it is the safest route toward preparedness, said Craig Conklin, who for the last six months has headed CSEPP for FEMA.

Similarly, Army CSEPP spokesman John Yaquaint said, "As early as 1989, the Army recommended a multi-pronged protective action strategy to the Anniston CSEPP communities. The strategy included both evacuation and shelter-in-place protective measures."

Feuds about the issue between local officials and the federal government have been well documented. What didn't make the news is equally interesting.

Publicly, the county ruled out the shelter-in-place option. Its leaders denounced the duct-tape-and-plastic suggestion, a chemical industry standard, as ineffective. The comments got a lot of press. But privately and in federal budget requests, county officials sought money for shelter-in-place kits and re-circulation filters.

"I can show you the budget documents," Burney said, as he scribbled a reminder to hand over the papers.

"We've been thinking shelter for five or six years now. We've always suspected there were going to be some zones that could not evacuate."

It is a shocking confession, considering that Burney and others laughed at shelter-in-place just last year during a meeting with this newspaper.

The county EMA later provided the documents Burney promised.

In one budget request after another, dating back to 1998, FEMA, the lead advocate of a balanced approach, refused to provide funding for shelter-in-place.

"FEMA will defer consideration (of shelter kits) pending results (of the study)," reads a line item from the agency's 1999 CSEPP budget.

But when the evacuation estimates were made public in 1999, they said the county's only plan of preparedness, evacuation, was impossible.

State EMA director Helms blames such situations on what he describes as too many studies, too much turnover in management at the federal level, too much delay in funding and too little progress.

"Every one of those issues such as traffic control, equipment in place for responders, shelter-in-place are issues that we have had as part of our requests to FEMA for years. I mean many years," Helms said.

But while the state and local community make preparedness decisions, he said "they (the federal officials) don't do it. They question every decision we make."

Conklin couldn't explain why FEMA was supporting shelter-in-place but denying the county shelter funding. He stressed, however, that he had no involvement in the process when those decisions were made.

But the agency's CSEPP spokesman, Don Jacks, provided some background. He defended the deferrals, saying the agency didn't want to spend public funds on shelter-in-place without a thorough analysis.
Jacks suggested the Army was involved in that decision.

Army CSEPP spokesman Yaquaint said questions about the matter should be forwarded to the agency with the "lead" role in all off-post CSEPP matters: FEMA. He said the agency, not the Army, would have made the deferral.

Both federal partners "made the decision to hold us up on moving to a shelter plan until recently, until we forced the issue," Burney said.

That's not exactly the whole story.

The preparedness holdup

A strange twist developed regarding the funding situation in 2000.

After the evacuation study suggested the road system wouldn't support a mass exodus, county officials, U.S. Rep. (now Gov.-elect) Bob Riley, Army and FEMA officials met. Riley brokered a deal in which the federal government would supply shelter-in-place kits and re-circulation filters.

County officials, arguing it was too little and not sufficient, rejected the compromise. They wanted protective equipment for first responders, computer upgrades at the county's Emergency Operations Center, twice as many shelter kits and re-circulation filters as the federal government was offering, and, the most controversial item of all, protective hoods distributed to civilians.

"The (County) Commission felt like, and I did too, that if we accepted that money knowing we couldn't protect all people that needed to be protected, then we would have a hard time getting the things that we really needed," Burney said.

Those needs caused a year-and-a-half delay in funding that was not fully resolved until the government decided to meet the county's demands. The hoods - a first for any civilian population in the United States - proved the hardest item to win. They carry a risk of suffocation. The government wanted to be exempted from liability before handing over the money.

The county doesn't get exemption, Burney and Henderson said.

"We are heading down the road for a complete stoppage because of the complete mismanagement of this program at the Washington level," Burney said. He was alluding to a hypothetical situation involving potential for a lawsuit. If a contractor refused to accept liability for the hoods, as the county is asking, the contractor might sue the county.

Burney said a lawsuit would force the county to stop other preparedness measures because the hoods are an essential element to the whole preparedness plan. He stressed that a lawsuit is a real possibility.

While money has been appropriated for all the requested measures, the county estimates it will be late summer before the items are purchased and distributed. They blame the delay on strings attached to spending federal dollars.

For now, the only preparedness option for residents remains evacuation using a road system that won't handle it.

The commission defends its rejection of the 2000 offer that Riley brokered, even though that decision has left residents living nearest the depot with virtually no protection. Commissioner Henderson said he doesn't put much faith in duct tape and plastic without the hoods. "I'm really sold on that protective hood," he said.

When pressed about whether he would tell his constituents to shelter-in-place, Henderson said he would advise them to put on the hood, turn on the re-circulation filter, then seal an interior room with pre-cut plastic sheeting and duct tape.

Comparing bottom lines

The federal government has poured more preparedness dollars into Alabama, especially Calhoun County, than it has into any of the other seven stockpile communities in the continental United States. But the numbers can be deceiving.

Army records show more than $230 million have been appropriated for CSEPP in Alabama, most of it distributed by EMA to the various county agencies involved.

Calhoun County has received about $74 million, records show, a third of that money in 2002. Next year the state will get $62 million more, of which 80 percent will go to Calhoun County.

But Oregon, a two-county CSEPP region with less than half of Calhoun County's population - 31,000 people in the response zone near the depot compared with Calhoun County's 70,000 - has received nearly as much funding through 2002, roughly $72 million.

The Army's Yaquaint warned the sites are too different for a meaningful and fair comparison.

For example, Oregon requested the measures years before Calhoun County did. And while the population in Oregon's two CSEPP counties is much smaller, the terrain is flat desert that offers no barrier against an accident. In Calhoun County, hills and dense foliage insulate the stockpile, which in theory would delay the progression of a chemical plume.

The two states have organizational distinctions as well. Oregon has achieved a high level of preparedness through a centralized management structure involving the community, Yaquaint said.
FEMA also hails the management structure, known as the Governing Board, saying it is the chief difference between the sites. The board includes representatives from every aspect of CSEPP - the public, cities nearest the depot, first responders, the medical community, a representative from each county, the state, the depot and FEMA - and provides a single point of contact for funding negotiations with FEMA and the Army.

Oregon CSEPP director Chris Brown described the nine-member board as the vehicle that propelled the state down the preparedness road.

Alabama has no such board, no centralized body that cements its six CSEPP counties into one cohesive group. Instead it relies on what Henderson admits is a "heavy-handed political game."

As one FEMA official put it: Oregon turns to its governing board, and Alabama turns to its congressional delegation.

"The only thing the Army understands is when a senator talks down to them," Henderson said, adding that the help the delegation and Gov. Don Siegelman has provided was critical in getting the recent appropriations.

As for the governing board approach, state EMA director Helms dismissed contentions that it might make a difference in Alabama.

"I'm not certain that another committee or board could have helped us," he said.

Burney and Henderson said the counties have traveled too far down their individual roads to even think about another board. Besides, they said, we've hired an attorney.

Lobbying for dollars

The hire is an unprecedented action among the nation's CSEPP sites but an action that has paid big dividends for Calhoun County.

Lobbyist-attorney David Springer helped secure the protective funding that will pay for the hoods, shelter kits, filters and equipment for first responders. He also was instrumental, officials say, in getting the county $10 million in impact fees, money the federal government will pay the county to offset the negative impact of housing a chemical weapons incinerator.

A contract with the county Springer signed this summer provided for his cut of the impact fees. There is no way of documenting how involved the lobbyist was in the process, other than commissioners' assurances that he was and the fact that Sen. Richard Shelby got the appropriation in this year's defense budget.

Only one other CSEPP community, Tooele, Utah, has received impact fees. It got $15 million because its county commission demanded it in a local ordinance.

In Alabama, counties cannot pass laws without legislative authority, and they have no zoning powers.
Springer, whose various firms have been paid more than $170,000 for the services, earned an additional $500,000 for his current firm because of the fees.

While Alabama officials do not begrudge Oregon the level of preparedness it has accomplished, they accuse the Army and FEMA of abandoning Alabama.

"They have not given us a priority," Burney said. "The priority shifted to Oregon. They decided it was easier to go to another site and use that site as a poster child for how things should be."

It is an accusation the Army and FEMA dismiss, but one that Burney cannot shake.

"If they had the Calhoun County citizens' preparedness at heart, they would have first come here and applied the resources and attention to our problems instead of dodging them and going somewhere else."

Local officials say the Army and FEMA went elsewhere because they didn't want to set a funding precedent here.

"The CSEPP mission is to protect the public by working with the installation and the community to identify emergency preparedness measures that materially enhance public safety," Yaquaint said. "The program's focus is on preparedness, not precedent."

Now, for all the bitterness and conflict, funding is arriving. Since Conklin was hired at the agency, it has recommended the Army pay millions to make 27 area schools and day-care facilities airtight using a system called over-pressurization. It creates a seal that keeps outside air out and inside air re-circulating. Under Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee verbally committed to funding the recommendation.

"If an accident should happen down there," Conklin said, "and the state and locals needed our support, we would be there."

The question locals are asking, is will FEMA and the Army provide the needed support before an accident arrives?.