LOCAL
Thursday,
March 25, 2004
Chemical
Depot fined $33,600 for violations dating to 2002
By AMYJO
BROWN of the East Oregonian
HERMISTON — Umatilla Chemical
Depot officials disabled important safety equipment for four days during
testing of its incineration facilities last summer, the Oregon Department
of Environmental Quality has charged.
It recently levied penalties of $33,600 to officials of the U.S.
Army and the Washington Demilitarization Company for the violation, which
occurred in September 2002 during testing of flue gas emissions.
The penalties include four days of violations with increased penalties
for the third and fourth day because depot officials knew then that they
were violating their permit, according to Dennis Murphey, DEQ’s administrator
of the Chemical Demilitarization Program.
“It seems to be a situation where they knew what they were doing
and they continued to operate,” Murphey said.
However, depot officials dispute the severity of the violation and
claim they self-reported the problem and continued to operate with the DEQ’s
approval.
“We acknowledge that it happened and we’re at fault,” said Rick Kelley,
spokesman for the Washington Demilitarization Company, the contractor which
built and operates the incineration plant on the depot. “But we question
the DEQ’s classification of the violation. DEQ officials were on-site at
the time, and they said we could continue testing.”
In order to conduct the tests of emissions, which required bypassing
the pollution abatement system (PAS), workers inadvertently turned off instruments
monitoring feed rates of hazardous waste materials into one of the liquid
incinerators, Kelley said.
He said the problem was discovered on the second day of the second
hour run. There were just four hours of feed runs each day.
Public health was never at risk, Kelley said.
But by classifying the violation as a Class I and by following through
on enforcement actions, Murphey said the DEQ felt there was a potential for
such risk.
The monitoring of feed rates is necessary for the proper operation
of the Automatic Waste Feed Cut-off (AWFCO) systems, according to the DEQ
notice of violation. The AWFCO systems would discontinue feeding to the liquid
incinerator if the feed rate exceeded the capabilities of that incinerator.
Feed rates refer to the number of munitions containing chemical agent
that can be burned within a certain period of time. Depot officials eventually
want to burn up to 40 rockets an hour after incineration of the depot’s storage
of chemical munitions begins this summer.