Defense Environment Alert
an exclusive biweekly report on defense policies
for cleanup, compliance and pollution prevention
Vol. 12, No. 10--May 18, 2004
OREGON FINES UMATILLA INCINERATOR $184,800 FOR VIOLATIONS
Oregon regulators have issued civil penalties totaling $184,800 to
the Army and its contractor at a chemical weapons incinerator in Umatilla,
OR. The fines cover permit violations on 11 separate days last July, and
come just two months after state regulators fined the facility for similar
violations.
The Army has appealed the March fines and is considering whether to appeal
the more recent penalties, Army sources say.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) fined the Army and the
Washington Demilitarization Co. $46,200 each for feeding hazardous waste
into the disposal facility's metal parts furnace without operating an automatic
waste feed cut-off (AWFCO) system, and $46,200 each for feeding hazardous
waste into the metal parts furnace without operating the carbon filtration
system on the furnace's pollution abatement system, according to a May 10
DEQ press release.
The violations occurred during the shakedown, or preliminary testing, of
the metal parts furnace July 18-3 1, 2003, when surrogate materials were
burned. At no time were chemical agents being processed, but because of the
nature of surrogate materials, the shakedown phase is regulated as a hazardous
waste operation, DEQ says.
An Army spokeswoman says incinerator plant officials and the contractor are
informally discussing the fine with DEQ, and the Army is working with its
contractor to evaluate whether it will formally appeal the penalties.
The March fines, which the Army appealed, totaled $33,600 for violations
involving feeding hazardous waste into a liquid incinerator on four separate
days during a shakedown testing period while required monitoring instrumentation
was disabled. The disabled instruments would have monitored the feed rates
of the hazardous waste into the incinerator, and that monitoring is necessary
for proper operation of the automatic waste feed cut-off systems (Defense
Environment Alert, April 20, p 11).