Army depot eliminates last of sarin

The chemical weapons incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot has finished destroying the last sarin weapon, the part of the stockpile officials have said posed the greatest risk to the community.

The last seven rounds of munitions were destroyed shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday, a project manager said. The incinerator then began the shut-down process so it can be reconfigured to destroy an even larger stockpile of weapons containing the lethal VX liquid.

The Army's contractor, Westinghouse Anniston, began destroying sarin rockets when the $1 billion incinerator complex began operating in August 2003. At the time, officials said those rockets posed the greatest risk because they were leaking at a far higher rate than any other weapon.

Since then, the Army has said newer studies show that VX is a greater danger than previously believed. They have changed their risk estimates, no longer saying that at the conclusion of the sarin campaign more than 90 percent of the risk of the stockpile is eliminated.

Now, said Tim Garrett, Army project manager, the latest research shows that the risk to the community will be reduced by 96 percent after the VX rockets also are destroyed.

Westinghouse plans to spend the next 17 weeks preparing the incinerator to destroy VX rockets and then a year burning them. The entire campaign, including burning additional VX ammunition and mustard weapons, is expected to be complete by the end of 2010, Garrett said.

Craig Williams, an advocate whose group promotes neutralizing the agents rather than incinerating them, said his only concern at Anniston now is that the Army does not release reports of alarms, upsets, pollution or other errors as it does at other incinerators.

"The bottom line is: There's no question that the overall risk of that stockpile has diminished significantly," said Williams, who is executive director of Chemical Weapons Working Group. "I appreciate that they have managed to do that without any catastrophic events or any fatalities."

The Army has been destroying weapons at eight spots around the country, with incinerators or by neutralization, in accord with an international treaty requiring that the nerve gas and other chemical weapons be destroyed. Officials say that most of the Cold War-era weapons that have been stored at the Army bases are so old and unstable that they also must be destroyed for the safety of the surrounding population.

The Anniston incinerator had a few troubles destroying the sarin weapons, including two fires in the rooms designed to contain explosions and a false alarm outside of the area where sarin should ever be present. But the weapons have been destroyed with far fewer problems or controversies than other, identical incinerator complexes.

"We had challenges along the way but nothing that the technology couldn't overcome," Garrett said.

In contrast, two other incinerators were shut down for investigations of the frequency of accidental fires while the Utah plant accidentally released a small amount of sarin into the air from the stack, an event officials had previously called impossible.

E-mail: kbouma@bhamnews.com