Birmingham News
September 19, 2003

Army looks to get weapons furnaces up to full speed

09/19/03
KATHERINE BOUMA
News staff writer

ANNISTON - Chemical weapons incineration in Anniston has been so successful that the Army believes it is prepared to get the furnaces up to full speed and begin air quality testing by the beginning of November, officials said Thursday.

At a briefing about seven weeks after the incinerator at Anniston Army Depot began burning sarin-filled M55 rockets, project managers said the work is moving more quickly than it did at two previous sites and that there have been no safety problems.

"We have exceeded expectations as far as the other two facilities," said Tim Garrett, the Army's project manager of the incinerator.

In the November tests, an extraordinarily sensitive monitor will be placed in the exhaust stack to test for dioxins, furans, PCBs and other hazardous substances that are byproducts of the incineration of hazardous waste.

Garrett said he expects the site easily to pass its tests since it already has undergone examinations with less-lethal chemicals that are more difficult to destroy. However, the Army's chemical weapons incinerator in Utah recently failed its hazardous air test, held four months after the incinerator began destroying weapons loaded with the deadly chemical VX.

Officials in Utah say they believe the monitoring equipment was contaminated and that they intend to run the test again. The tests are supposed to begin when the incinerator is up to its permitted limit of destroying 40 rockets per hour and 1,000 gallons of sarin an hour.

In Anniston, all four incinerator crews now have destroyed rockets at a rate of 24 an hour, a speed that will be increased until they reach 40 rockets per hour, Garrett said.

After the process is complete, workers will have to start over with the slow "shakedown" period and testing for rockets that cannot be drained of sarin. In some rockets, the sarin has gelled over the years, so the Army plans to burn them at a rate of 14 an hour.

According to incinerator records, hundreds of alarms and monitors have indicated the presence of sarin in the incinerator complex. However, most of them were within the furnace rooms or rooms built to contain the weapons. Officials of the Army, as well as its contractor, Westinghouse Anniston, said none of the alarms exposed workers or required notifying emergency management authorities.

And, they said, no workers have tested positive for exposure to sarin. One worker tested for a low reaction to the chemical after he failed to leave his office when it was sprayed with a pesticide from the same family of chemicals as sarin, Garrett said.

Sarin is an extraordinarily deadly chemical that has been stored inside M55 weapons at the Anniston Army Depot since the beginning of the Cold War. In August, the incinerator began destroying the rockets as well as more than 600,000 other chemical weapons in the stockpile.

Anniston is one of eight sites where the Army is destroying weapons to meet the terms of an international chemical weapons treaty.

By mid-day Thursday, the incinerator had destroyed 3,000 rockets and about 833 gallons of sarin in a separate liquids incinerator.