Defense Environment Alert
May 7, 2002

UTAH CHEMICAL INCINERATOR WORKER CLAIMS SAFETY VIOLATIONS AT PLANT

An eight-year employee of the Army's chemical weapons incineration facility in Tooele, UT, has gone public with allegations of safety problems at the plant, saying workers in certain areas are at increased risk of exposure to chemical agents.

Brenda Mugleston currently works as a brine reduction and residue handling employee, where her responsibilities include environmental inspections for the brine surge tanks, metal parts furnace cool down area, heated discharge conveyor enclosure and the deactivation furnace system cyclone, among other duties. She joins a list of previous whistleblowers at the Tooele incinerator plant, who include: Environmental Permitting Manager Gary Harris; Chief Safety Officer Steve Jones; Chief of Hazardous Waste Management Trina Allen; and former Plant General Manager Gary Millar, among others.

"I am concerned that management has placed production over safety which continues to result in workers being exposed to unnecessary dangers," Mugleston wrote in a Feb. 17 letter to EG&G plant management. The Tooele incinerator is operated by EG&G Defense Materials, Inc. for the Army. An Army supervisor in Utah says compliance with environmental and safety regulations is the top priority. The official says he has made it very clear to EG&G that safety is the priority over production.

An EG&G spokesman said the company is waiting for the outcome of an Occupational Safety & Health Administration investigation before commenting.

Mugelston outlines nine specific concerns in her letter, including workers using agent-contaminated life support air hoses when being sent into areas where agents are known or expected to be present, incomplete destruction of chemical agents in the deactivation furnace, recurring failures of management to ensure compliance with safety procedures, inadequate responses to incinerator waste feed cutoffs resulting from malfunctions, failure to prepare incident notification reports, and shipment of leaking munitions in inappropriate containers into areas where workers are inadequately protected.

Internal EG&G documents obtained by the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG), dating from March 10, 2000, to mid-February 2002, show workers may have used potentially contaminated life support hoses and that workers repeatedly violated plant procedure in documenting waste tracking and validating standard operating procedures prior to use, among other issues.

An Army spokeswoman would not speak directly to Mugleston's allegations, saying this is an issue of dispute between EG&G and Mugleston. The spokeswoman noted that none of the allegations from previous whistleblowers were substantiated in court, although she emphasized that she was not prejudging this case.

The spokeswoman says EG&G is "doing a marvelous Job" in destroying the Tooele stockpile and points out that the plant recently completed destruction of all GB agent, the "most volatile" of the agents in the Tooele stockpile (Dqfense Environment Alert, March 26, p 13). The destruction of the GB stockpile is a "measurable" accomplishment and marks a significant reduction in the risk to the surrounding community, she said.

CWWG, which supports the use of incineration alternatives to destroy the nation's chemical weapons, says the problems cited by Mugleston plague the Army's incineration program.

"Tooele incinerator managers told a Federal Judge in 1999 that these problems were fixed," explained CWWG director Craig Williams in a May 2 press release. "But a confirmed nerve agent release in May 2000 and the reports from courageous employees such as Ms. Mugleston demonstrate that these serious safety and environmental issues have not really been addressed."