| Local News | Tuesday, July 19, 2005 |
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WASHINGTON -- Military officials are considering separating potentially unstable rockets from chemical warheads at the Blue Grass Army Depot, raising new safety concerns from residents around Richmond, Ky.
The Defense Department wants to make sure that aging rocket propellant is safe, following recent fires during the disposal of chemical weapons at the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Oregon and the Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Arkansas.
Blue Grass rockets have not caused any fires or explosions, said Jim Fritche, site project manager at Blue Grass for the assembled chemical weapons alternatives program. But, he said, officials want to know more about the state of the decades-old rocket fuel.
"If it is deteriorating, we want to know that sooner than later," Fritche said. "If we don't have an emergency, we're not going to go forward on this."
The Army may know as soon as tomorrow whether propellant samples from other stockpiles show the fuel has so degraded that it could ignite under certain conditions, Fritche said.
Military officials are scheduled to meet today in Richmond with community groups to discuss the issue. The ultimate goal is to destroy all of the chemical weapons at Blue Grass, although the timing is uncertain.
Some neighbors would rather leave the rockets alone until Blue Grass is ready to destroy them.
"The less handling, the safer it is," said Tom Thilman, 51, a restaurant owner whose home is near the depot fence.
Five fires -- involving rockets like those in Kentucky -- have occurred at the Oregon and Arkansas facilities. No one was injured during the April and May incidents, which happened while rockets were being cut up before their disposal.
The Army's investigation includes sampling the propellant from Oregon at an Army lab in New Jersey.
Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, based in Berea, Ky., said dismantling 77,000 M55 rockets and separately returning the chemical warheads and the rocket components to storage raises questions about cost.
He doesn't want work on the rockets to interfere with the longer-term plan to get rid of all the chemical weapons.
"It shouldn't come from the money we just fought for," Williams said.
Some members of the Kentucky Chemical Destruction Community Advisory Board are to meet this afternoon with military officials to discuss the rockets, the status of designs for a chemical weapons destruction plant and issues related to disposal of some byproducts from the plant.
Williams, who also is co-chairman of that board, said he supports the idea of taking the rockets apart if there is consensus among the experts that it needs to be done.
He said he is concerned about how the Army plans to shield the depot and the community against possible explosions.
"To accommodate these things, you've got to have a facility to handle them once you get them there," Williams said.
Doug Hindman, chairman of the Kentucky Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Commission, said some area residents have supported separating the chemical warheads from the rockets since the late 1980s.
"It certainly would reduce the storage risk," Hindman said. "The question is, how do you do it? ... As they say, 'The devil is in the details.' "
Fritche declined to go into detail about how the rockets would be handled, saying he preferred to discuss it first with the community groups.
The M55 rockets date to the 1960s. At Blue Grass, they are armed with the nerve gas sarin (also known as GB) and VX, a toxic liquid.
Each rocket is 6 1/2 feet long and weighs 57 pounds.
Five rockets were discovered leaking sarin in May and June, but officials said the public was not at risk.
Blue Grass is storing 523 tons of chemical weapons, some dating to World War II.
The Pentagon in December suspended design work on a chemical destruction facility at Blue Grass and at a similar site in Colorado, citing cost concerns. The original plan called for destruction of all chemical weapons in Kentucky by 2012.
But after local protests and pressure from Kentucky Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, their Colorado colleagues, and Rep. Ben Chandler, D-6th District, the military backed down in April.
A new schedule for the final destruction of the weapons is expected by October.