Sarin leak exposes workers

04/17/04

Work shut down at the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator for more than four hours Friday after four employees were exposed to the lethal nerve gas sarin while changing a filter.

"All four were masked," said Mike Abrams, a spokesman for the Army.

However, the maintenance workers were in various stages of protective gear and not wearing the full suits of those who expected to enter a "hot" area.

An alarm sounded at 11:30 a.m. indicating that the sarin level was not safe, even for those wearing masks, Abrams said. At that point, the entire incinerator staff put on safety masks until the all-clear was given at 12:17 p.m., Abrams said.

He said the employees at the filter site were found to be exposed or to be wearing gear that showed sarin exposure. Under a formula scientists use to assign numbers indicating levels of exposure to extraordinarily small amounts of sarin, the workers' numbers ranged from 0.49 to 2.5.

Incinerator workers are trained to take protective measures with numbers as low as 0.2 and say they are unsafe at levels above 1.

Abrams said he did not know what level initially set off the alarm, but it was safe to assume it was significantly higher than the residue left on the employees. The workers were scrubbed with a bleach-like decontamination solution until they registered 0, Abrams said.

By the time they reached the incinerator clinic, they were not hot enough to set off alarms there, Abrams said.

None of the employees had any medical complaints and Abrams said blood tests did not show elevated levels of a marker for sarin exposure. They returned to work at 1 p.m.

The contractor, Westinghouse Anniston, began processing rockets again at 4 p.m.

The incinerator is destroying M55 rockets loaded with sarin. It is working at half-speed while awaiting final pollution-control approval from the state and federal governments.

Over about 10 years, the complex at Anniston Army Depot is expected to destroy more than 660,000 Cold War-era weapons loaded with nerve agent.