Birmingham News
September 11, 2003

Shelby seeks Anniston monitors; New perimeter, incinerator alarms sought

09/11/03
KATHERINE BOUMA
News staff writer

A month after the Army began burning chemical weapons in an incinerator in Anniston, leaders from Sen. Richard Shelby to anti-burn activists are calling for better monitoring at the site.
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The Army currently has no alarms around the perimeter of the site, and the monitors inside the incinerator complex are subject to false alarms and long delays for verification.

A newer "real-time" monitoring system has been the buzz of state leaders since Shelby, a Republican representing Alabama in the U.S. Senate, co-sponsored a resolution asking the Secretary of the Army to "develop and deploy a program to upgrade the airborne chemical agent monitoring systems at all chemical stockpile disposal sites across the United States."

"Given recent events at (the incinerator), I believe the Army should establish a new standard for agent monitoring by looking at more modern real-time systems for use in the chemical demilitarization program," Shelby said in a printed statement. "I believe the safety benefits that would accrue to the workforce and the surrounding communities are well worth the time and effort required to identify and implement this new technology."

Already, Congress has required "maximum protection" for the people and environment surrounding the depots where the Army is destroying chemical weapons that have been stockpiled since the beginning of the Cold War.

Now there's a growing question of whether the monitors in Anniston do provide maximum protection.

In addition to Shelby's call for a look at the new technology, members of the state Environmental Management Commission say they plan to ask for a demonstration of the new technology.

"This community deserves the best technology, and with the best technology, whatever that is, comes a higher level of trust and comfort," said Pete Conroy, director of Jacksonville State University's Environment Policy and Information Center.

Shakedown testing:

The Army has one monitor in its incinerator stack that draws in air and tests it continuously for sarin, the lethal gas being destroyed in the incinerator. It also has stack monitors for the basic air pollutants as required under the U.S. Clean Air Act, such as nitrogen oxide. But it does not monitor for dangerous pollutants that are hazards of chemical weapons incineration, such as PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals.

The incinerator was tested for hazardous pollution during a test burn, using a chemical other than sarin. But it will be tested for hazardous air only once during operations - after it finishes its "shakedown" period of slowly ramping up to a full burn. Then, the equipment will be disconnected.

The state will assume, based on models and a successful test, that the incinerator is destroying the dangerous chemicals in the burner, said Stephen Cobb, who oversees the program for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

That's because there are no known, reliable methods to continuously monitor air to be certain it has been cleansed of 99.9999 percent of the toxins, Cobb said.

"That is a very small amount of material that you're looking for," he said. "In some cases you're almost looking at the molecular level."

Better or worse?:

With the equipment proposed by Shelby and others, the incinerator operator Westinghouse Anniston could continuously monitor for such chemicals and PCBs and dioxins, although not at such low levels.

"That's one reason Westinghouse Anniston is fighting this so hard," said Craig Williams, executive director of the anti-burn group Chemical Weapons Working Group. "They don't want a multi-spectrum, real-time monitoring capability that can give you a reliable and consistent emissions reading capacity over the life of the plant."

The proposed equipment, which measures minute amounts of chemicals using a beam of infrared light, is not as sensitive as the elaborate one-time tests required by federal law. But advocates say it may be more reliable.

Williams shows volumes of Army records that state the current monitoring systems can become clogged and sometimes are not working upon their 90-day service checks.

But the proposed monitors would be worse, said James Dillon, an Army chemist who said he tested a similar system in the mid-1990s.

They weren't as sensitive as the current equipment and they were prone to false alarms "all the time," Dillon said.

With the current stack monitor, if nerve gas enters the monitor, an alarm sounds within eight to 15 seconds, Army officials say.

The community should be alerted while information is carried to a laboratory to determine whether sarin was actually captured. An answer should be returned in an hour to 90 minutes.

With the proposed system, Dillon said, false alarms could disrupt operations around the clock while providing the community with no quicker notification.

Perimeter reports:

Proponents of the new technology say they are not asking to replace the existing monitors, but to add an extra layer of protection to them.

Unlike the stack monitors, the monitors at the perimeter of the incinerator site would not be attached to alarms. Instead, information from them would be retrieved twice a day.

And unlike the infrared beam technology, they cannot span the entire fence-line, only draw in air in their immediate vicinity.

Members of Congress from all states involved in the chemical weapons destruction program signed on to the resolution calling for monitoring upgrades, with the exception of Utah, where an incinerator has been operating since 1996. The proposal, which was attached to a defense bill in Congress, would not bind the Army to act on the recommendation.