Handling
deadliest substances is all in a day's work
By Douglas Birch
Sun Reporter
Originally published December
10, 2006
He's been called one of the U.S. Army's premier chemical weapons
experts, and has worked around the world to disarm rockets, bombs and
shells containing some of the world's most toxic substances.
When it comes to handling and defusing weapons of mass destruction,
Timothy A. Blades, a 31-year veteran of the Edgewood Chemical
Biological Center, has few peers. "Tim has handled every dangerous and
deadly and lethal compound known to man," said Jim Allingham, a retired
spokesman for Aberdeen Proving Ground, where the Edgewood center is
located.
William E. White, a retired Edgewood chemist, called Blades "an amazing
person," as comfortable taking apart a chemical warhead as he is
testifying before Congress.
At the Harford County military post, he has helped direct the disposal
of tons of obsolete U.S. chemical arms. He and his crews have worked at
poison arms depots, dump sites and disposal areas around the world. As
a U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s, he made 42 trips to Iraq.
At Aukheider, near the Iraqi city of Karbala, he drilled mustard gas
bombs cooled by ice. He came to admire the resourcefulness of Iraqi
weapons scientists. "They made mustard agent in an incredibly elegant
way that was so simple," he recalled.
At Kamisiyah in southern Iraq, he supervised the destruction in
131-degree heat of 1,000 sarin-filled rockets that the Iraqis had
incompletely burned and abandoned. In the United States, with its
strict environmental standards, the project would have taken years and
millions of dollars, he said. In Iraq, it took six days, with Blades
and his crew working in lightweight protective gear because of the heat.
He has helped destroy stockpiles of aging Soviet chemical weapons in
Romania, the Czech Republic and -- in recent months -- Albania.
As deputy director of Edgewood's Chemical Biological Services
Directorate, Blades supervises a staff of 244 technicians and weapons
experts from a small office in a one-room building, nicknamed "The
Condo," on King's Creek in an isolated corner of the base.
Some of Blades' resume is classified. A glass case in his office
includes a 1998 commendation from then-CIA director George Tenet.
"That's probably something I don't want to talk too much about," said
Blades, 50.
Blades' embrace of dangerous work owes something to the lessons he
learned from his father, a Maryland State Police trooper. His dad would
bring home traffic safety films that graphically depicted accident
scenes and projected them on the living room wall. The point, Tim
Blades said, was: "Life's got risks. You just have to deal with it."
After graduation from Bel Air High School, Blades took a job at
Edgewood Arsenal in 1975 for $1.25 an hour. Originally, he worked on an
environmental cleanup project at Edgewood's old Pilot Plant, which made
small quantities of nerve gases and other toxic agents for medical and
technical tests.
He felt comfortable in a chemical moon suit, and wasn't scared of the
poisons. Over the years, he learned what the world's most toxic
chemicals smell like: Mustard has the odor of sulphur and creosote;
Lewisite evokes geraniums; soman, Blades thinks, has the fragrance of
Juicy Fruit gum. (When his crews work on soman, they're forbidden to
chew that brand of gum.)
Twice, Blades has been injured by exposure to deadly chemicals. In
December 1975, he was making hydrogen fluoride, a chemical precursor
for a nerve agent, when some spilled on his arm. He still bears scars.
In 1979, he inhaled the nerve agent sarin after someone accidentally
tracked it into a changing room. He vividly recalls his pupils
shrinking to pinpoints, and a "dead-cat-in-the-stomach nausea -- unlike
any nausea you've felt before."
In a frantic effort to save his life, co-workers sprayed him with a
hose, naked, on an Edgewood lawn. He was rushed to a military hospital,
where doctors saved his life.
During his career, he has disarmed, dismantled and disposed of scores
of chemical weapons. None, he recalled, had ever behaved like an Iraqi
chemical shell that he and a colleague, Frank Evans, 50, were asked to
analyze last May.
The shell sat in a protective steel box equipped with chemical-proof
gloves and a sealed glass window. Equipped with a power drill purchased
in a local hardware store, the two men worked inside a closet-sized,
blast-proof chamber. The chamber sat inside a 60-by-60 foot concrete
bunker, under negative air pressure and hooked up to a massive air
filtration system.
Blades and Evans wore only lightweight protective suits and masks.
(Blades never wears a flak jacket when working close up with
explosives, he said, because if he made a serious mistake the jacket
wouldn't in the end make much difference.) With the Iraqi shell, the
trick was to drill deep enough to pierce the weapon's steel skin, but
not so deep as to hit the explosive core. As Blades carefully punctured
the warhead, a yellow mix of sarin and cyclosarin, super toxic nerve
agents, sprayed into the box.
The two men were among the most experienced poison arms experts working
for the U.S. Army, but neither had ever seen a chemical weapon act like
a seltzer bottle before.
The glove box should have protected them. But a mist of nerve agent
seeped into their small steel chamber. Somehow, the ventilation hose
attached to the glove box wasn't pulling air into the lab's massive
filtration system.
The leak posed no threat to anyone outside the concrete bunker. Inside
the chamber, the only things between these lethal agents and Blades and
Evans were their chemical-proof jumpsuits the thickness of a sports
shirt, their gloves, boots and gas masks equipped with charcoal filters
-- and five minutes of air in emergency tanks on their backs.
The gear would prevent exposure to traces of agent. But the two men
were not protected from droplets or puddles of agent, which could form
on the cubicle's surfaces.
Blades did not panic. Tests, he said, have shown that when he is faced
with a critical task, his heart rate actually drops.
Although he does not enjoy taking unnecessary risks, he says he gets a
certain satisfaction from work that includes what he called "the
possibility of catastrophic failure.
"It definitely focuses your attention on just what you're dealing
with," he says. "You get very attuned to the problem at hand."
The pair put down their tools, unbolted the steel chamber door, left
the concrete bunker and entered an adjacent decontamination chamber.
There, two Edgewood colleagues in protective moon suits scrubbed Blades
and Evans down with bleach and hot water.
Moving into a second room, Blades and Evans waited for several minutes,
wondering if they had been exposed, while chemical sensors sniffed the
air. When no contamination was found, the pair shed their light
protective clothes. Neither man showed symptoms of exposure.
In a third room, they put on heavy butyl-rubber suits with large air
tanks. Then they returned through the decontamination chambers, into
the the contaminated blast-proof cubicle to clean up, and to finish the
job.