Birmingham News
August 30, 2003

Army starts sarin gas incineration Sunday

08/30/03
KATHERINE BOUMA
News staff writer

The Army plans to begin the most dangerous part of its Anniston operation Sunday, taking advantage of the quiet holiday weekend to crank up the furnace and burn the lethal sarin that has been drained from rockets in the past three weeks.

Still, officials are refusing to release information about repeated alarms they say falsely indicated sarin contamination at the incinerator complex.

No rules require the Army to release information about the alarms unless they are found to have been indicating actual leaks of the lethal nerve gas, said Army spokesman Mike Abrams.

"We truly are not dealing with life-and-death situations with those alarms," he said.

Late last week, officials shut down the incinerator complex for two days to check the alarm system.

Abrams would not say when the alarms went off, how many times they sounded or where the alarms were. He said it would be too difficult to explain.

"Without a full understanding, it would be too misleading to just start spouting off some numbers," he said.

He did say that all the alarms were false.

The Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency has not been notified of the alarms, spokesman David Ford said. He said that is not required, although some reports of alarms may have been mentioned in the Army's regular reports on weapons destruction at the facility.

Craig Williams, executive director of the anti-burn group Chemical Weapons Working Group, said the incidents in Anniston are uncomfortably similar to situations at the Army's older weapons incinerator in Utah. There, he said, officials have sometimes claimed that an alarm was false when later reports showed that agent had escaped.

"It's always amazed us that they can't tell you what, they can't tell you where, and they can't tell you what triggered them, but they can always tell you it wasn't agent," Williams said. "And that really isn't an acceptable representation."

Any chemical that triggers an alarm should leave a chemical signature that identifies it, he said, just as sarin would leave traces that could be identified in the laboratory.

"The capability to identify what it is is equal to the capacity to identify what it's not," he said.

After a week of questions, Abrams on Friday gave two instances that caused the false alarms.

In one case, it is believed an alarm in the container handling building was set off by diesel fumes from a passing truck, he said. Toluene from roofing work at the munitions demilitarization building is believed to have set off another alarm.

Scientists with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management have been on the site for its entire operation and have been satisfied that the alarms were false, said Stephen Cobb, chief of governmental hazardous waste branch.

He said monitors that are so sensitive they can pick up trace amounts of sarin also can be easily triggered by other chemicals.

"You have a trade-off between sensitivity or precision and accuracy," Cobb said.

In the slow, startup phase of the incinerator, sarin monitors are the only equipment testing the air. There are no air pollution monitors running, although ultimately the facility will be required to pass tests satisfying the state that it is burning the sarin cleanly.

Sunday is the first mass burning of sarin, when the Army starts destroying about 800 gallons of the lethal liquid that has been drained from M55 rockets. About 42 gallons of sarin is estimated to have burned in the incinerator as it clung to the rockets being burned during the first three weeks of operation.

The Army has said sarin would be burned only at night or on holidays until the schools and community centers closest to the incinerator are equipped with special protective filter systems.

This is the beginning of the Army's 10-year plan to destroy more than 661,000 nerve gas weapons that were stockpiled at Anniston Army Depot since the Cold War.