11/08/03

Workers were evacuated from the laboratory at the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator early Friday after an alarm detected sarin in a room with no known source of the lethal gas, officials said.

An alarm in the laboratory sounded about 1:15 a.m., said Donavan Mager, a spokesman for Westinghouse Anniston, the contractor running the incinerator for the Army.

Workers were evacuated for 24 minutes as monitors throughout the 11-room building checked the air every six minutes. No further alarms rang.

The sarin was detected in one unoccupied room used for maintenance of monitoring equipment, Mager said. He said late Friday that he did not know how recently the technician working in that room had left to go to the main incinerator complex.

The Army and Westinghouse said no workers were exposed.

The incident was the first confirmed detection of sarin in a worker area. Mager said the lab manager, the plant manager and other officials are interviewing employees to try to determine how volatile sarin suddenly was present in the air in a room containing only equipment that should have been clean.

"It's something we'll, hopefully, uncover in the next few days," he said.

Sarin loaded in M55 weapons at the depot is liquid, but it easily turns into a gas with heat or other changes in its atmosphere.

In August, the Army began burning M55 rockets in Anniston as part of its mission to destroy more than 660,000 aging, Cold War-era chemical weapons during the next decade.

Under state and federal law, the Army was allowed a 720-hour shakedown period to ramp up operations before a rigorous, $1 million monitoring process began to test its emissions for more than 200 toxic and hazardous chemicals.

The first of those tests began at 8 a.m. Friday. The liquid incinerator burned sarin for six hours while a delicate probe in the stack measured emissions. The results will not be available until after further tests and reviews by state and federal engineers, who have been at the depot watching the process 24 hours a day.

At 1:15 a.m., when the gas was detected, the incinerator staff was gearing up for the test burn by draining the sarin-loaded rockets and destroying them in a furnace designed for rockets, a spokesman for the state environmental agency said. The sarin was stored in a large tank until the morning burn to test the furnace designed to destroy the liquid.

The tests were scheduled to begin earlier in the week but were delayed by mechanical problems at the plant, the Army has said.

Throughout the laboratory and the incinerator complex, doors automatically seal each room shut as workers move through the buildings. The lab and the main complex are equipped with separate ventilation systems that send the air through carbon filters to remove traces of sarin before leaving the building.