News

01/16/04

The Anniston chemical weapons incinerator is expected to resume operations today after a 10-day shutdown the Army says may have been caused by crystallized nerve gas jamming the works.

After completing its tests on M-55 rockets filled with liquid sarin, the Army in December began destroying rockets filled with sarin that had been corrupted over years of storage at Anniston Army Depot.

Instead of finding the expected gelled sarin in the rockets, workers at the incinerator instead found it had crystallized.

"So far what we're seeing is this crystal that looks like rock salt you can buy when you make ice cream," said Tim Garrett, project manager for the Army.

Garrett said he does not believe the crystallized sarin caused the 20 barrels of fly ash that mixed with decontaminating fluids and cemented the incinerator works shut.

But he and engineers from the Army's contractor, Westinghouse Anniston, say they plan to ask the state for permission to run tests to try to determine whether it is causing the problem or whether the ash has just backed up in the course of processing more than 15,000 rockets since Aug. 9.

Crystallized rockets were burned in the Army's earlier incinerator in Utah, but at a rate of less than two rockets an hour rather than the 14 per hour that Anniston is aiming for. Utah also had maintenance problems when processing the rockets, Garrett said.

So far, tests have not been conducted to determine whether the accelerated burn of gelled rockets is environmentally safe. Those trials are expected in February or March.

However, the Army says its tests on liquid sarin rocket processing showed that it surpassed its requirements for destroying sarin and met its limits for destroying PCBs. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must certify those results before the Army can proceed at full speed with destroying weapons.

In worker safety, the Anniston incinerator is surpassing earlier nerve gas incinerators in Utah and the Pacific Ocean, Garrett said. The facility has operated for 5 million work hours with no days lost because of accidents.

"That is unheard of for this kind of operation," Garrett said. "It tells you this: People are thinking about safely."

For most of those work hours, the incinerator was not destroying deadly weapons but was preparing for operations or conducting maintenance, which can also be hazardous at the facility.

The Army is at the beginning of a 10-year plan to destroy more than 660,000 Cold War-era weapons loaded with nerve and blister agents. Officials say they are particularly concerned with working out the best solutions they can, not only to protect the workers who must otherwise conduct maintenance in hazardous conditions, but also so they can provide help to upcoming incinerators in Oregon and Arkansas that will have identical plans and similar weapon stockpiles.