Birmingham News
October 7, 2003

Two hazardous waste drums found on road

10/07/03
KATHERINE BOUMA
News staff writer

A Talladega County roads worker found two 55-gallon hazardous waste drums from the Army's chemical weapons incinerator in Anniston on the side of a road near Munford Monday afternoon.

A spokesman for the Army's contractor, Westinghouse Anniston, said the drums probably were harmless but should not have been discarded where they could alarm the public.

"It was very odd to us," said Donavan Mager. "We're very specific on how we deal with these things."

The drums are believed to have originally contained eight bottles of solvents used in a test run of the incinerator. The plastic bottles containing the chemicals were burned in the trial run, Mager said, and the barrels were taken to a steel-recycling company with instructions that they should not be redistributed.

"They somehow found their way out of a scrapyard out near Munford," Mager said. "There were specific instructions that they should be crushed and recycled."

Westinghouse tested each of the incinerator's three furnaces using surrogate chemicals months before chemical weapons destruction began in August. The chemicals were chosen because they were less dangerous than nerve gas but more difficult to destroy, a spokesman for the state said.

A Talladega County Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman said a county roads worker called the county about 12:30 Monday afternoon to say he had found two 55-gallon drums labeled "Westinghouse Anniston."

Spokeswoman Deborah Gaither said the drums held liquid when they were found, although there was no indication it was not simply rainwater. She said the EMA contacted Westinghouse, which took over the site.

"We did no differently on this from what we would have with any other hazardous waste," Gaither said.

Westinghouse workers took soil samples at the side of the road and will provide the state's environmental agency with a copy of the results of laboratory tests on the soil, said Scott Hughes, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

The chemicals inside the plastic bottles were classified as hazardous waste, Hughes said. But since the chemicals never touched the barrels, he said, Westinghouse was allowed to send the drums to a scrapyard.

Officials said metal remaining from actual chemical weapons incineration is sent to a hazardous waste landfill in west Alabama.

The Army is in the early months of its 10-year project to destroy more than 661,000 chemical weapons that have been stockpiled just outside Anniston since the beginning of the Cold War. The process is being observed by state hazardous waste engineers at the Anniston Army Depot.