Army to slow pace of chemical burn testing

10/30/03

ANNISTON - Army officials overestimated their weapon burning speed by at least 10 percent, so tests beginning as soon as Sunday will proceed more slowly than expected, they said Wednesday.

Instead of destroying as many as 40 M-55 rockets an hour in the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator, the Army expects to destroy 34 to 36 in an hour, said project manager Tim Garrett.

At that rate, the facility still would outpace the Army's older incinerator in Utah, which was permitted to burn 33 rockets per hour.

In the trial burns expected to begin Sunday, the Army must prove to state and federal environmental regulators that it can safely and efficiently burn weapons for six-hour stretches. Its final permit numbers will be based on the incinerator's performance in those tests.

During the tests, the liquid and rocket furnaces will be tested for extraordinarily low levels of more than 200 lethal or dangerous chemicals such as PCBs, dioxins and furans, said Bob Love, who is project manager for the Army's contractor operating the site, Westinghouse Anniston.

Before the trial burn, the Army was allowed to operate the incinerator for up to 720 hours to carefully ramp up to full speed. Since destroying its first rocket Aug. 9, the incinerator has processed rockets or nerve gas for about 510 hours, Garrett said Wednesday.

He said the Army hopes to finish the tests by Thanksgiving.

After a vacation, the staff will begin the same process for gelled rockets - a shakedown period followed by tests. About 20 percent of the sarin-loaded rockets at Anniston Army Depot contain agent that is no longer liquid, so it cannot be drained to be burned in a separate liquid incinerator.

Since it is more hazardous and difficult to burn rockets and sarin together, the state is requiring separate tests for that destruction and has limited the Army to a maximum of 14 rockets per hour. Garrett said the Army expects to be able to prove it can safely process six to nine of the gelled rockets per hour.

The staff has found that to keep the complicated machinery operating smoothly, safely and continuously, it cannot work any faster, Garrett said.

Anniston Army Depot is one of eight sites around the nation where the Army is incinerating or neutralizing its chemical weapon stockpile in keeping with an international treaty.

As of Wednesday, officials said they had destroyed all the weapons in six of 135 storage igloos at the Anniston depot, or about 20 percent of the M-55 rockets at the depot. The depot is also the storage spot for other munitions and the chemical agents mustard and VX.