Piece of Anniston furnace falls apart

A piece of a furnace at the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator fell apart late Monday night when 72 bolts simultaneously broke as workers were firing it to 2,000 degrees during maintenance.

"It was a strange occurrence," said Army spokesman Mike Abrams.

The two sections that separated from the rest of the afterburner weighed about 120,000 pounds, while the bolts are designed to collectively hold more than 3 million pounds, Abrams said.

The afterburner is part of the pollution control system of the incinerator. It is where gases released from the furnace are burned again at higher temperatures to ensure no nerve agent leaves the complex. The afterburner that fell apart Monday night serves the deactivation furnace, where rockets are destroyed.

The incinerator is the third in the Army's plan to destroy Cold War-era nerve agent weapons at eight sites around the country. Some will destroy the weapons by neutralizing them without fire, but each of the incinerator complexes is identical.

None of the other sites has had similar trouble with bolts on the afterburner, Abrams said. Workers at the other two incinerators that are now open are examining the bolts on their afterburners.

The incinerator has been closed for maintenance since March, when it finished burning sarin weapons stored at Anniston Army Depot. It was expected to reopen in July to begin processing VX rockets and later VX munitions.

Abrams said he did not know how the accident will affect the schedule of Westinghouse Anniston, the contractor operating the incinerator. Before this accident, the incinerator was scheduled to finish its work in 2010.

In addition to fixing the part, workers will have to determine what made it break and prevent it from happening.

"We want to be able to assure the work force they will be safe if they work around the afterburner," Abrams said.

The afterburner is more than 52 feet tall and between 11 and 12 feet wide. It stands vertically above the ground, suspended by pipes in any area where workers sometimes walk, Abrams said.

As part of the maintenance, the inside of all the furnaces, including the afterburner, were lined with new brick, Abrams said. However, he said the bolts that later broke were not removed from the afterburner in the process.

Workers were firing the afterburner up to its operating temperature of 2,000 degrees for the first time since the maintenance work Monday night. But when it reached 1,800 degrees, Abrams said, it fell apart.

The afterburner did not fall to the ground, although some bricks did, Abrams said. Two sections 34 feet tall fell from the rest of the equipment and lodged themselves at an angle in some ironwork, he said.

E-mail: kbouma@bhamnews.com