Birmingham News
October 18, 2003

Anniston depot barrel held hazardous waste

A residue of hazardous waste was found in the bottom of a 55-gallon barrel that was discarded from the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator and later found in Choccolocco Creek, state regulators reported Friday.

The company operating the incinerator, Westinghouse Anniston, contracted with a scrap yard called Shorty's Southern Yard in Anniston to haul drums away some time around June 2002 but has no further details on the disposal of two barrels later found on the creek bank, said Westinghouse spokesman Donavan Mager.

The chemicals found in one of those barrels are hexachloroethane and tetrachloroethylene. The chemicals were delivered to the facility so Westinghouse could destroy them in a test burn in June 2002, officials say.

According to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, those chemicals break down quickly in the environment and evaporate rapidly.

So if the barrel has been in the creek for a year or more, much of the waste may have dissipated, said Scott Hughes, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. By the time they were discovered, the chemicals were so diluted that they are no longer classified as hazardous waste, Hughes said.

Efforts to reach officials at Shorty's on Friday were unsuccessful.

On Oct. 6, a Talladega County road worker found two of the barrels on the banks of Choccolocco Creek near Munford. The barrels were clearly labeled "Westinghouse Anniston," although "hazardous waste" labels had been covered with paint.

Mager said it is usual for Westinghouse to paint over such labels after use.

A spokeswoman for the Talladega Emergency Management Agency said the barrels were rusty, indicating that they were not new and that they had been in contact with water. They had a bit of liquid on the bottom, but at that time no one could say whether it was rainwater, creek water or waste from the facility.

'Getting a full report':

Officials from the state and Westinghouse said at the time that the 55-gallon drums were not sent to a hazardous waste facility because they were never touched by the hazardous chemicals. The liquids were contained in eight plastic bottles, they said. Further, they said, the barrels were protectively lined.

Mager said he and state officials believed that to be true when they said it.

"Again, that's something we'll have to look at," Mager said. "That's the information we had at that time."

Hughes said ADEM also believed the barrels were clean when they allowed them to be collected by a scrap dealer instead of a hazardous waste facility.

"That was the whole premise," Hughes said. "These chemicals were triple-packed. They were inside the containers. They were inside the liners that were inside the drums. So there was no reason to believe they came in contact with the drums themselves because of the way they'd been packaged and shipped."

His agency does not plan to investigate how the barrels came to be on the banks of the creek that flows through Calhoun and Talladega counties, he said. Instead, it will allow Westinghouse to take its own look at the situation.

"We are getting a full report of what they find out during their investigation," Hughes said. "We will take the results they provide us from their investigation and review them once they are finished."

Westinghouse and the state must vigorously investigate the barrel dumping, said Craig Williams, executive director for the anti-incinerator group Chemical Weapons Working Group.

He said he also was deeply concerned that before investigating, Westinghouse denied any toxic material could have left the facility.

"The community is willing to understand that mistakes happen, but they are much more resentful of those who are not willing to tell the truth," Williams said.

Choccolocco Creek is more widely known for its PCB contamination. The Monsanto Co. routinely dumped PCBs into it for years, spreading the now-banned chemicals as far down the state as Shelby County.