Birmingham News
September 2, 2003

Sarin leaks detected in first firing

09/02/03
KATHERINE BOUMA
News staff writer

Two sarin leaks were detected within the incinerator complex at Anniston Army Depot when a furnace was fired up for the first time Sunday, a spokesman for the Army said.

Incinerator officials also now say that another alarm activated two weeks ago, said to be false at the time, also was positive for the deadly nerve gas.

In one of the Sunday cases and the 2-week-old case, the alarms detected the sarin vapor only within confines of a room with no inhabitants, said Army spokesman Mike Abrams. He said he did not know the details of the third alarm, which took place sometime after the Army began burning sarin at 1:55 p.m. Sunday.

Sarin is so deadly that a single drop on the skin can kill a person. The Army has been working since Aug. 9 to empty old, decaying M 55 rockets of sarin and burn the weapons.

This weekend, for the first time, the Army began burning the sarin it had collected.

On Aug. 21, Army officials closed the facility for two days to test the alarm system, saying it had trouble with alarms sounding. Officials said repeatedly since that time that every alarm had been false.

As recently as Friday, Abrams said he could not reveal details or provide the laboratory reports of the alarms only because they were too complicated to explain. But he said he could assure the public all the alarms had been false.

On Monday, he said one of the previous alarms actually was positive. He said he mistakenly gave false information because he failed to ask the correct questions of officials at the facility.

"I did not intentionally mislead you, the public or anyone else," Abrams said. "I don't think the facility misled anyone. I think about the Paul Newman movie ("Cool Hand Luke") more than anything else - a failure to communicate."

He said the Army did not notify the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency of any of the detected leaks. The Army is not required to release information about the alarms unless they are found to have been indicating leaks of the lethal nerve gas through the exhaust stack, Abrams said.

"Agent contamination is possible and sometimes expected," he said. "This is not unexpected."

Laboratory results from monitors that sound are supposed to be available to incinerator officials within hours. Abrams said he did not know when officials received word of the leaks.

The 2-week-old leak was detected in the closed room where the blades that chop up rockets were washed, he said. The system was using water, which was contaminated and set off an alarm in a room near the liquid incinerator.

He said Westinghouse Anniston, the contractor running the incinerator, has begun using a chlorine-based decontaminant to wash the blades and has had no further troubles.

He said Sunday's detection came soon after workers began to pump sarin into the liquid incinerator before a 1:55 p.m. startup of the incinerator. An alarm sounded outside the furnace, within the closed liquid incinerator room.

"It was not a spill; it was not a failure of the system," Abrams said. "There was a little bit of vapor detected and operations were able to continue."

He said he did not know the details of the second positive alarm that sounded on Sunday.

The Army had estimated it would need 10 or 11 hours to burn the 800 gallons of liquid sarin that had been collected.

Instead, the facility stopped burning about 5:30 a.m. Monday when workers had spent more than 15 hours on the job and had destroyed a little more than 500 gallons, Abrams said.

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

The Army expects to spend the next decade burning more than 661,000 Cold War-era chemical weapons that have been stockpiled at Anniston Army Depot for 40 or more years.