Defense Environment Alert
an exclusive biweekly report on defense policies for cleanup, compliance and pollution prevention


Vol. 12, No. 18--September 7, 2004


ARMY PLANS TO DEVELOP CRITERIA FOR NEW CHEMICAL WEAPONS MONITORING

Following congressional and citizen pressure, the Army is planning to work with a small group of stakeholders to develop objectives and criteria for evaluating new technology to better monitor air emissions at chemical weapons storage and disposal facilities.  

Greg St. Pierre, director of risk management for the Army Chemical Materials Agency, announced the plan Aug. 24 after a day-and-a-half workshop on chemical agent detection technologies. The workshop included the development of draft criteria for additional monitoring technology as well as presentations by technology developers and providers.

The workshop "gave us a lot of data to chew on," St. Pierre said, explaining the August workshop was a first step in gathering concerns about and expectations for the Army's agent monitoring program from citizens, state and federal regulators and local government officials.

The Army is aiming to meet again with a smaller group of community members in late October or early November to develop quantitative objectives and criteria for evaluating possible technologies, he said. Another large workshop will likely occur in January, he said.

In general, the draft objectives that came out of the workshop focus on reducing the number of false alarms, adding layers of monitoring technologies to have more real-time data for multiple chemical agents and increasing the transparency of the chemical weapons disposal program through increased public access to monitoring data.

One regulatory source says though that a lack of transparency in the chemical weapons demilitarization program, combined with a lack of trust in the Army, is the real problem for community stakeholders. Changing the type of monitors used at the storage and disposal sites will do little to solve that problem, the source says.

The Army in recent years has been under increasing pressure to improve its agent monitoring capabilities, but has generally maintained that no other technology is as good as the existing system. Earlier this year, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) included $2 million in the fiscal year 2005 defense appropriations bill for upgraded monitoring at the Blue Grass chemical weapons stockpile site in his state. And the FY04 Defense Authorization Act included a "sense of Congress" provision saying the Army should work with DOD research and development agencies to
invigorate and coordinate efforts to develop chemical agent monitors with improved sensitivity, specificity and response time. The provision also says the Army "should deploy improved chemical agent monitors in order to ensure the maximum protection of the general public, personnel involved in the chemical demilitarization program, and the environment."

Citizen organizations such as the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) have also called on the Army to improve its monitoring technology (Defense Environment Alert, May 4, pl3). The citizens say they are not asking the Army to eliminate the current monitoring system, but instead want additional monitors.

In particular, CWWG has advocated the use of a technology known as Open-Path Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectrometer, which the National Research Council has also highlighted as a technology that could provide real-time monitoring data.  

But the Army has said FTIR and other potential monitoring technologies do not detect agent at a greater sensitivity level than the chemical demilitarization program's current technologies, and in some cases are not as good as what the program already has.
   
At the workshop, however, Ram Hashmony of ARCADIS said most of the criticism of FTIR is based on older versions or on a passive form of the technology. ARCADIS, among other things, provides onsite laboratory services to EPA's Air Pollution Prevention and Control Division in Research Triangle Park, NC.
   
FTIR has been around for at least 10 years but it has improved in recent years, he said. It was a "hot" technology in the 1990s and was sometimes wrongly applied, but is a technology with a lot of potential, he said. The technology is especially good for source characterization, rather than for ambient monitoring, and is able to detect agent at very low levels, he said.