STATEMENT OF JAMES ELI HENDERSON
ASSOCIATE COMMISSIONER
CALHOUN COUNTY COMMISSION

Before the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee
United States Senate
April 25, 2001

Mr. Chairman, Senator Shelby, and Members of the Subcommittee, my name is Eli Henderson, and I am a Commissioner in Calhoun County, Alabama. My district encompasses the area around the Anniston Army Depot where 2500 tons of deadly chemical agents are stored in the middle of a population center. There are more than 76,000 people residing in the Calhoun County Immediate Response Zone, a radius of 9.5 miles around the chemical weapons stockpile at AAD.

In sum, my constituents are at ground zero.

Our Commission is involved because we operate the local Emergency Management Agency. The Army says it will destroy the 2500 tons of deadly agents, but they refuse to assume any liability off-post, refuse to make any final decisions regarding what emergency action our county should take, and are only willing to make a protective action recommendation based on a faulty Guidebook they want us to implement.

When the Army came to Anniston years ago to seek approval for the incinerator, I was one of the Army's biggest supporters. I am a former Marine. I believe in a strong national defense. I know how dangerous the agents stored at AAD are because for ten years I worked at the Depot maintaining the stockpile.

When the debate raged about whether to build the incinerator or seek alternative technologies, I stood shoulder to shoulder with the Pentagon. I believed the Army when they told our community they would provide us with maximum protection. I believed them when they said the incinerator was failproof. I believed them when they told us the destruction would be done on a "no effects" basis, meaning exposure to agent would be so low that we would have no adverse health effects. I believed them when they told us they would provide us with the federal funds necessary to collectively protect our schools, hospitals, senior citizens centers and nursing homes so that our citizens would be shielded from these deadly agents. And I believed them when they told us that we would have sufficient time to evacuate.

Events during the past two years have shown that I was wrong. The Army misled the citizens of Calhoun County. The failproof technology they promised us does not exist. The incinerator at Johnson Atoll leaked five times. After a thousand design modifications, the Army constructed a second incinerator at Tooele Utah. Despite promises the technology has been perfected, the Tooele incinerator leaked 42 milligrams of sarin on May 7th of last year.

The accident was due to a number of factors, but human error was the biggest problem, and human error can never be eliminated. The State of Utah shut the incinerator down for the fourth time in five years. In the month before the leak there were 38 false alarms, a dozen of unknown origin. The operator illegally attempted to restart the furnace and waited four hours before notifying local emergency personnel.

So much for a failproof technology.

Regarding the "no effects" standard, our community was always told we would never be exposed to agents at a level that would affect our health. That promise was made repeatedly during the Army's campaign to gain the community's support. That promise continued while the contractor secured the construction permit. Then, last year, after more than $750 million had been spent, and the facility was more than 90% complete, we were given a copy of the Alabama CSEPP Guidebook. This Guidebook contains the protective actions recommendations which the Army and FEMA wants us to tell our citizens to take in the event of an accident.

The Guidebook caught us totally off guard because instead of the "no effects" standard we have promised our citizens, it contained a new, weaker standard of "no deaths." And, when you read the fine print in the footnotes, an even weaker standard of "1% lethality."

So much for promise of no effects.

And the Guidebook contained another disturbing change. Instead of the long promised evacuation option our citizens had been practicing for the past decade, the Guidebook analyzed thousands of potential scenarios and concluded that, in more than 95% of the situations studied for people living in the Anniston-Oxford-Saks-Weaver population center, there would not be sufficient time to evacuate. The Guidebook instead recommended we tell our citizens in the population centers to "shelter in place."

According to last year's letter from the Depot's Commander, shelter in place means- and I am quoting:

Stay Calm
Stay inside, or go inside if you are outside
Close all doors to the outside, and close and lock all windows
Turn off all air conditioning, heating exhaust and ventilation systems and fans. Do not place the system on recirculate
If there is a fireplace, extinguish the fire and close the damper
Close as many internal doors as possible in home or other buildings
Close all garage doors in attached garages, as well as door normally left open for ventilation
Go into a central room with the least number of windows, such as a bathroom or interior closet
Take an AM/FM radio. Keep your radio on and tuned to EAS station
Stay calm and move as little as possible. Activity increases the speed of breathing, which leads to greater exposure to any vapors which might seep into the room
If you suspect that vapor has entered your structure, hold a wet cloth over your nose and mouth.

At the same time, the Guidebook recommends our EMA tell citizens living outside the population center that they evacuate as soon as possible. Think about that. The leaking agent is so toxic that people ten, twenty, thirty even forty miles away need to evacuate, but people in downtown Anniston will be just fine if they go into their homes. What do you think the people being told to ìshelter in placeî are going to do so if they hear their neighbors in the next zone being told to get away from the plume? The answer is they are going to run. Roads are going to be clogged. Traffic accidents are going to occur. People will get sick and die.

The Guidebook is a very curious document. Neither the Army nor FEMA has been willing to publicly endorse it or validate its recommendations or assumptions. Yet they expect us to follow in every respect. Last week all five Commissioners sent a letter to Governor Don Siegelman asking him to halt the automation of the Guidebook. In that letter, we pointed out the Guidebook was based on a series of false assumptions. The most troubling of these assumptions was the Guidebook's use of the Army's totally outdated and inaccurate toxicity thresholds for Sarin and VX.

A 1997 National Research Council Report criticized the Army's proposal to drop the 50 % lethality threshold for Sarin for healthy male soldiers from 70 milligrams per minute per cubic meter, which reflected the Army's "overkill" strategy, to 35 milligrams per minute per cubic meter. The NRC stated the 50% lethality threshold should be dropped much further, noting 100% lethality for health male soldiers at 40 milligrams per minute per cubic meter. The Army has never adopted the 35 milligram standard, nor has the Guidebook.

During a 1998 hearing before the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, Army witnesses admitted that, if the NRC's proposed new toxicity thresholds for GB for healthy male soldiers were applied to the general population, the Army's recommendations, if the one percent lethality threshold for GB were translated from healthy male soldiers to the general population, the one percent lethality standard would be just two milligrams per minute per cubic meter.

Yet, the Guidebook assumes the one percent lethality threshold to be 10 milligrams per minute. Thus when the Army tells us to follow the Guidebookís recommendations, they are asking our citizens to be placed at risk of serious injury or even death. We can not--and we will not do that.

The Guidebook assumes that 38 facilities in Calhoun County--those schools and hospitals I mentioned--have been overpressurized, a vital factor in deciding whether citizens in a zone should be recommended to shelter or evacuate. Instead FEMA has only authorized nine facilities for collective protection and, with the incinerator less than a year away from the scheduled start, work has started on only five.

The Guidebook assumes no additional dosage to sheltered populations once they leave their home. That is true for Sarin, but it is false for the other two agents stored at AAD: VX and HD. Plumes of VX or HD leave significant deposits of vapor and they create a very serious residual hazard for long periods of time.

Finally, the Guidebook assumes dosage levels are applicable to only the healthy adults. This assumption means weaker regiments of the local population--children, senior citizens, individuals with debilitating illnesses, people confined to a wheelchair or bed--will likely be subjected to far more serious and potentially fatal dosages.

Of course, the population in many sections of the County already face the added problem of having been exposed to large amounts of PCBs over an extended period of time, thereby raising the real issue of damaged immune systems.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous Consent that the Commission's April 18, 2001 letter to Governor Seigelman detailing our objections to the Guidebook's automation be admitted into the record at this point.

Mr. Chairman, our Commission has developed a thirteen point check list which we expect the Army and FEMA to implement if we are going to assist the federal government in providing maximum protection. The list is a sensible one and the items are not negotiable. The Army knows all the items on the list, as do the members of the Alabama delegation. If we can not get these safety items funded we cannot go forward in this effort. We will have to turn the keys to the local EMA over to the State or to FEMA and let them decide what to tell our citizens. But we will reserve our right to take legal action to make certain the maximum protection standard is met.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, our Commission has requested impact funds to the County to compensate us for having endured 2500 tons of deadly agents for the past forty years, for the continuing negative effects they have on our local economy and our business development, and for the risks we will assume over the next decade during the destruction process. Your colleague, Senator Sessions, is working hard at the Armed Services Committee on this issue. I realize the real power resides here in this Subcommittee which controls every dime the Pentagon spends.

Our senior Senator who sits on this subcommittee and who had the wisdom to ask for this hearing will, I believe, ultimately be able to resolve all of these thorny problems.

I thank you and would be happy to answer any questions you may have.