Dayton Daily News
May 4, 2003

Nerve agent disposal plan upsets residents; Jefferson Twp. doesn't want waste from Army's VX

By Jim DeBrosse
e-mail address: jim_debrosse@coxohio.com
Dayton Daily News

JEFFERSON TWP., Montgomery County | For the U.S. Army, the plan offers a relatively quick and cheap way to help eliminate hundreds of tons of deadly VX nerve agent that could fall into the hands of terrorists.

For Perma-Fix Environmental Services of Dayton, it's a chance for a $9 million Army contract to treat and dispose of neutralized VX by flushing it into Montgomery County's sewage treatment system and ultimately its waterways.

But for a growing number of Montgomery County residents, particularly those who live near the Perma-Fix plant in Jefferson Twp., it's a risk they're not willing to take.

"We think they looked at our community, saw it was mostly African-American and poor, and decided that we were expendable," said Willa Bronston, a Jefferson Twp. resident and a member of Citizens for Responsible Destruction of Chemical Weapons of the Miami Valley, a citizens group organized to oppose the Army plan.

"They thought we would sleep through this," Bronston said, "but we're not."

The Army and Perma-Fix have assured residents that the waste product shipped from the Army's chemical depot in Newport, Ind., will contain no detectable amounts of VX agent. Instead, Perma-Fix will be treating hydrolysate, a caustic liquid similar to Drano that results from neutralization of VX.

But opponents point out that no one has conducted long-term studies on the effects of trace amounts of VX and VX byproducts in the water supply, that the neutralization process is not fully proven, and that the skunklike odor from hydrolysate could aggravate complaints from residents near the Perma-Fix plant.

About 50 Jefferson Twp. residents showed up Tuesday night at an informational meeting on the Army plan, mostly to protest. But they're wondering why the rest of Montgomery County, whose watershed may be affected by the disposal, isn't paying as much attention.

"This isn't just a Jefferson Twp. problem," said Mary Johnson, a Jefferson Twp. resident and a member of the citizens group. "This is a regional problem."

Even though Montgomery County operates the township's sewage system, county officials say they have no legal authority to stop Perma-Fix from dumping its treated material into its sewers if the Army approves the plan.

But they're hoping that the Army will take its hazardous waste somewhere else, or that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency will stop the plan for environmental reasons.

Just to be on the safe side, county commissioners have hired an independent expert from Northwestern University in Chicago to look over the Army's and the OEPA's shoulders.

"We want to be sure of what we're dealing with," said County Commissioner Charles Curran. A separate study "will either give us comfort or discomfort."

With its $9 million contract in the balance, Perma-Fix is in the midst of a months-long safety demonstration and a public outreach program to explain to the Dayton area how the company would handle the wastewater products from perhaps the deadliest chemical weapon in the Army's arsenal.

VX agent, an oil-like liquid, can kill a person in 15 minutes with exposure to just 10 milligrams - about an eighth of a baby aspirin.

Disposal process

Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, Calif., has been contracted to neutralize the VX agent onsite at the Newport depot by mixing it with hot water and sodium hydroxide. The resulting hydrolysate would be shipped in vacuum-sealed trucks to Perma-Fix.

In giant bioreactor tanks, Perma-Fix would use natural microscopic organisms to break down the hydrolysate into salts and other harmless byproducts before sending it to the county's sewage treatment center.

Perma-Fix is conducting safety tests on the treatment of 17 gallons of hydrolysate, whose chemical composition is little different from the 16 million to 20 million gallons of industrial wastewater it treats from the Dayton area each year, company officials say. Test results won't be available until summer.

In recent months, Perma-Fix has held an open house at its plant and three informational meetings on its role in disposing hydrolysate. The next informational meeting is set for June 3 at the Jefferson Twp. trustee offices.

If the Army approves the plan and the Ohio EPA sees no problems, the first shipments of hyrolysate will begin arriving at Perma-Fix in October.

Perma-Fix's initial contract calls for disposing of 300,000 gallons, or 75 truckloads, of the material, with up to two shipments a day. The contract could be extended to all 900,000 gallons of hydrolysate at Newport.

Tom Trebonik, a spokesman for Perma-Fix, said even two truckloads a day would put little strain on the company, which handles 25 to 30 truckloads of industrial wastewater per day.

Inside an enclosed bay at the plant, the hydrolysate would be inspected and then pumped from the trucks into the two bioreactors, where microscopic bacteria literally eat the material and break it down into salts and other harmless waste products.

The end product is discharged into the sewer system and treated a final time by Montgomery County's sanitation treatment plant before being dumped into the Great Miami River.

Public opinion

The Army's decision to send as much as 900,000 gallons of hydrolysate to the Dayton area depends not only on the safety demonstration but on public acceptance of the plan, according to its contract with Perma-Fix.

So far, the governments of Dayton, Trotwood, New Lebanon and Jefferson Twp. have passed resolutions against the plan. In addition, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, D-Dayton, argued in a letter to Army officials in April that Jefferson Twp.'s opposition alone should be enough to nullify the contract.

After months of hounding Army and Perma-Fix officials, opponents in Jefferson Twp. say they have been unable to get a definition of what the contract means by "public acceptance."

"We want to get the right information into the hands of the public and its leaders," the Army's chief environmental engineer, Glen Shonkwiler, told protesters at Tuesday's meeting. "We don't see this as a couple weeks' decision process. We want to evaluate the whole community and the whole leader input."

Drexel residents who live near the plant say Perma-Fix has eliminated much of the odor that fouled their neighborhood last summer, leading to complaints of headaches, respiratory problems, dizziness and nausea.

In response to those complaints and pressure from county air-quality officials, Perma-Fix emptied and cleaned its bioreactors and added a thermal oxidizer unit to burn off odors.

Still, many Drexel residents say that the problem hasn't been completely solved and that they fear the processing of hydrolysate will make matters worse.

"We don't want it here," said Florence Broyles, 70, of 27 West End Ave., a few blocks from the plant. On a walk through her neighborhood last Monday, Broyles and neighbor Dorothy Shephard said they were forced to turn back to their homes after a smell was released from the plant.

"It's hard on your breathing," Broyles said.

In 1990, the United States decided it would never resort to chemical or biological weapons, even if they were used against Americans first. Then in 1997, along with 147 other countries, the U.S. ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention that requires all chemical agents to be disposed of by April 2007.

In the mid- to late 1990s, the Army looked at a process called Supercritical Water Oxidation that would have allowed the VX hydrolysate to be treated onsite at Newport.

A review panel of the National Research Council, an independent group of scientists, criticized the plan in January 2001 after a pilot program in Corpus Christi, Texas, ran into problems, including corroded tank, plugged drains and doubts about whether all the hydrolysate could be destroyed.

Sept. 11 attacks

Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. By May 2002, the Army decided its chemical stockpiles, particularly the 1,200 tons of VX nerve agent at Newport and the 1,600 tons of mustard blistering agent at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, would have to be destroyed as soon as possible.

The huge stockpiles, they decided, posed a far greater threat to the public safety in storage than they would in the disposal process.

Since then, the Army has switched to a two-step plan to eliminate VX agent. First, the VX would be neutralized onsite with water and hydrogen peroxide; then its waste products would be shipped to a commercial facility such as Perma-Fix for further treatment before being dumped.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the Army has not asked it to monitor the new disposal process.

Peter D. Lederman, chairman of the NRC's review committee on the Army's chemical weapons disposal program, said 9/11 has put the Army on the fast track.

"I don't think there's any question that the pressure is on to make sure we destroy this material as quickly as possible, with proper consideration given to safety and the environment," he said.

Last week, a wastewater treatment company in Terre Haute, Ind., 25 miles south of Newport, said it would be willing to handle the hydrolysate from the depot, reducing shipping costs and risks of sending it 195 miles to Dayton.

But Army officials said the company, Wabash Environmental Technologies, does not have proper permits or expertise to handle hazardous wastes.

Protesters and some government officials in Jefferson Twp. have urged the Army to dispose of the hydrolysate onsite at the Army's Newport base. They note that Newport is in a far less densely populated area, with 16,000 residents in Indiana's surrounding Vermillion County compared with the 554,000 residents in Montgomery County.

But for the Army to build its own biotreatment plant at the Newport depot would "be orders of magnitude" more expensive than shipping VX waste product to Dayton, said Shonkwiler, the Army's chief environmental engineer.

"The quickest way is to use a commercial treatment process already out there, like Perma-Fix," he said at Tuesday night's meeting. "Through a complex selection process - including safety, history, technical ability and other factors - we selected Perma-Fix as the potential best value."

But Tom Tiller, a retired automotive engineer and a member of the eight-person citizen advisory board to Perma-Fix, said the Dayton area would gain nothing be becoming known as one of the few places in the world where the waste products of VX nerve agent are treated and flushed.

As the 2007 deadline for the Chemical Weapons Convention nears, scores of other countries will be looking to send their VX waste products to the area as well, Tiller said. "I'm afraid this is what Dayton is going to be known for throughout the world if this, in fact, happens," he said.

Contact Jim DeBrosseat 225- 2437 or jim_debrosse@coxohio.com