Birmingham News
September 3, 2003

Opinion

A real alarm:  Army's bungling of sarin leak should scare us all

09/03/03

When the issue is deadly toxins, there's no room for error. That's why American taxpayers are spending billions of dollars to destroy chemical weapons in Anniston and why officials there insisted that millions of dollars be spent on emergency response gear.

But all the grand scientific designs and disaster planning won't go very far to protect the public if the Army doesn't shoot straight when things go wrong at the incinerator.

So far, it's not looking good.

After insisting that an alarm Aug. 21 had falsely indicated a sarin leak at the incinerator, the Army has now acknowledged it was no false alarm. Sarin was actually detected in a room where blades that cut up rockets had been washed.

Army spokesman Mike Abrams acknowledged the leak just this past Monday, having repeated the false alarm story as recently as Friday. He said he got the story wrong because he didn't ask the right questions of incinerator officials. This was no effort to deceive the public, he said, just a failure to communicate.

His explanation is supposed to be - what - comforting?

A flub of this sort is unacceptable at a chemical weapons incinerator that's burning deadly nerve gas in the midst of a heavily populated area.

Sarin is so deadly that a single drop on the skin can kill a person. Whether it leaks from the incinerator is of paramount concern to the people of Anniston and beyond. Lives depend, literally, on the Army's ability to tell a false alarm from a real leak. There should be absolutely no question about whether a leak has occurred and about whether the Army is leveling with the public.

True, the Army said the sarin vapors were contained in the Aug. 21 incident (and in at least one later leak) in an area of the incinerator where there aren't any people. Then again, the Army also said there had been no leak, so who knows?

In this and future events, Anniston residents need to be able to trust the Army to tell the truth. But when "false alarms" turn out not to be false, citizens have more reason to doubt they are getting the straight story. Who knows when Abrams again might not ask the right questions?

Already, there have been at least three sarin leaks in the incinerator complex. They may have posed no threat to the public, and there may have been no cause to sound a public alarm. But the people of Anniston ought to have confidence that the Army is correctly interpreting what's happening at the incinerator and that the Army is being entirely honest with the community.

Perhaps Abrams might have started by releasing the lab reports regarding the initial "false alarm." He refused to do so because, he said, the reports were too complicated to explain. Unfortunately, in hindsight, Abrams' secrecy has to appear suspect.

This is a deadly serious matter. The people of Anniston must be able to rely on the Army to keep them informed about the incinerator. Any deception seeping from the facility is as toxic as sarin to public confidence. It kills it. That is cause for real alarm.