Up the creek

10/21/03

It's hard to know what's worse about the discovery of hazardous materials in drums discarded from the Army's incinerator in Anniston. The find itself? The conflicting stories? Or state environmental regulators leaving the incinerator's operators to get to the bottom of the whole thing?

This, so far, is what we know: On Oct. 6, a Talladega road worker discovered two 55-gallon barrels on the banks of Choccolocco Creek near Munford. The barrels were labeled "Westinghouse Anniston," the name of the company that operates the incinerator. The "hazardous waste" labels on the barrels, though, had been covered with paint - as Westinghouse says is its normal practice.

The company said it had contracted with a scrap yard to haul the drums away sometime around June 2002, and that it had no reason to send them to a hazardous waste facility. The public had no reason for alarm, Westinghouse said, because the drums had been in no contact with hazardous chemicals, that the chemicals had been contained in plastic bottles within the barrels and that the barrels themselves had protective liners.

Westinghouse said it thought it was telling the truth. But as it turned out, at least one of the barrels did contain hazardous chemicals - hexachloroethane and tetrachlororethylene, which were used in test burns at the incinerator. Since these chemicals evaporate quickly in the environment, it is likely the barrels initially contained a great deal of hazardous material before they were discovered.

Westinghouse Anniston hasn't yet produced answers for why hazardous waste was in the barrels, why they ended up in Choccolocco Creek, or why the facts got butchered along the way. Incredibly, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management isn't even trying to find out why.

Instead of doing its own investigation, the environmental agency is depending on Westinghouse Anniston to get to the bottom of the foul-up. That isn't comforting.

The incinerator is processing substances that are far too deadly for this kind of mistake to be made and for it to be shrugged off by regulators. The public needs to know what went wrong and why, and the state needs to know, too, so it can make sure something like this won't happen again.