EPA Approves Plan for Army's Nerve Gas Waste Water to be Dumped into Delaware River

February 24, 2006


DEEPWATER, New Jersey (CNN) -- The Environmental Protection Agency has approved the U.S. Army's controversial plan to ship the neutralized remnants of the nation's deadliest nerve gas supply to New Jersey and then, after a second clean-up effort, dump the waste water into the Delaware River.

The plan has attracted strong opposition from New Jersey's new governor, Jon Corzine, all the way to local officials in the century-old scenic resort down river at Cape May.

Until now, the Army efforts had been blocked for the past two years after EPA raised concerns that leftover particles of the nerve gas VX could wind up in the river and kill certain species of fish.

But on Friday, the EPA made public its latest finding that a new second-stage scrubbing process to be carried out at the DuPont facility at Deepwater, N.J., just upstream from the Delaware River Memorial Bridge, will eliminate the last vestiges of the nerve gas.

The VX nerve gas has been stored at the Army's chemical depot in Newport, Indiana, where some nine million pounds of the deadly poison was manufactured during the Cold War in the mid-1960s.

The VX was loaded into artillery shells and rockets sent to ammunition depots around the country, but much of it remained stored in steel casks at the plant in the cornfields of western Indiana.

Under an international treaty, the Army is now destroying that VX, using a caustic solution much like oven cleaner which is heated to almost 200 degrees to help break down the chemical components of the nerve gas.

So far, the Army has processed a little less than 10 percent of the 1,200 tons of VX kept in concrete bunkers at Newport, but it hopes to finish the job within the two years.  None has yet been shipped to New Jersey.

The Army is satisfied there is no more than 20 parts per billion -- a level safe enough for humans to drink -- left in the waste water after that process.  But its instruments cannot measure below that threshhold, and the EPA said two years ago that striped bass could be vulnerable to an even lesser amount of VX when the waste was pumped into the Delaware River.

The Army wants to use the DuPont facility at the river's edge to finish the clean-up because it already has been successful in disposing of World War I-era mustard gas from another military base nearby.

The latest EPA report says DuPont has modified its second-stage process to use a peroxide/persulfate oxidation process that the EPA said "completely destroys VX" in the waste water.

Therefore, the EPA said it "believes that all of our previous ecological concerns have been addressed by DuPont and/or the Army."

The plan may yet face a fierce political battle within the state of New Jersey.

Corzine, a week before his election in November, mailed out a campaign flier which promised, "I won't let the Army use South Jersey as their toxic waste dump."  His brochure had men in gas masks on its cover.

Now, as the top elected official in the state, he oversees New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, which last August restricted DuPont's river dumping permit and specifically banned its handling of the Army's nerve gas waste water for the time being.

DuPont would have to apply to the state to amend the permit, and months of public debate can be expected.

Opposition in New Jersey is bipartisan.  Corzine is a Democrat, as are the state's two senators, but the Republican leadership on the county board in Cape May also has expressed concern how the river dumping might affect the area's health and tourist economy at the mouth of the Delaware Bay.

EPA said it wields federal oversight over a state's discharge permits.  It said it  would work with the Nerw Jersey agency "to ensure that any permit action is protective of human health and the environment."

EPA forwarded its findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, which had been asked by Congress to prepare a report on the Army plan.  Previously, the CDC had found no threat to human health, and had rejected arguments that trucking the Army's nerve gas waste water from Indiana to New Jersey might be unnecessarily perilous.

The various Army arsenals storing VX rockets and artillery shells in locations such as Anniston, Alabama and Pine Bluff, Arkansas are much farther along than Newport in destroying their supplies.  None uses the same process as Newport.  Most are burning the gas, rather than shipping waste water to DuPont to drain into the river.

One step is left before the CDC sends its final report to Congress.  It is expected to arrange for scientific peer reviews of the EPA's latest findings to double-check the conclusions.