LATEST NEWS
Friday, May 20, 2005
Officials agree frequency
of rocket fires alarming
By HAL
MCCUNE of the East Oregonian
hmccune@eastoregonian.com
HERMISTON — If the Army and its incinerator operator at the Umatilla Chemical
Depot are unable to determine the root cause of rocket fires that prompted
the state to stop operations Wednesday, the focus will shift to reducing
“the frequency and consequences,” Dennis Murphey told the Citizens Advisory
Commission Thursday night.
But he stressed that it’s important to make every effort to find the cause
of “these unexpected events.”
Murphey, administrator of the Department of Environmental Quality’s chemical
demilitarization program, issued the stop order Wednesday after the third
incident in six weeks of a rocket bursting into flames while it was being
cut into pieces before being dumped into the incinerator.
As fate would have it, the state-appointed CAC to chemical demilitarization
was scheduled to meet the next night, to a full room with plenty to talk
about.
Murphey, the Army and incinerator officials agreed the frequency of rocket
fires at the Umatilla Chemical Depot has become alarming, even though they
caused no injuries and relatively little damage. The lowlevel explosions
occurred in the explosive containment room where rockets are drained and
then sheared. It is sealed off from workers and constructed to withstand
an explosion.
Rocket fires of this frequency “weren’t expected by anyone,” Murphey said.
He noted that the incinerator at Anniston, Ala., had just one rocket fire
while processing 43,000 M-55 GB rockets, the same type Umatilla has been
destroying since September.
Umatilla’s three fires, the first two in April, occurred while less than
4,000 rockets were destroyed and there are still 77,000 to go.
Pine Bluff, Ark., started operations recently and had a rocket fire last
week. Based on that and Umatilla’s experience, officials agree there may
be a “shift in the rocket sensitivity,” but no patterns or keys have emerged,
despite extensive testing and analysis.
While eager to find the cause, Mike Parker, director of the U.S. Army Chemical
Materials Agency, said “storage is still our biggest concern” because that’s
where the weapons present the biggest risk to the public. “When there’s a
fire in a plant, it’s in a controlled environment” designed to handle even
an explosion, he added.
Murphey agreed he didn’t want to extend the timeline for destroying the weapons
and he expressed hope that rockets can be processed again in “the not-too-distant
future.”
But while the explosive containment room “performed as intended,” it was
never intended to “function this way as a regular event.”
The investigations begun after the April 23 incident need to be completed
before burning resumes, Murphey said. That includes everything from analyzing
the rocket propellant to comparing machinery and techniques to other depots.
The depot also plans to send several rocket motors off for analysis, said
Doug Hamrick, general manager of Washington Group, which operates the incinerator
complex.
The disposal facility already has made progress in mitigating the impact
of rocket fires. The two fires in April burned for more than 10 minutes and
caused some damage. This week’s fire was extinguished in seconds and damaged
just one sensor.
Murphey said it’s important to get the operation back on line both to continue
the destruction of rockets and because the fires are throwing off the trial
burn schedule in preparation for destroying the other weapons on the depot.
Parker said the Army is committed to doing the job safely, but the safest
thing for the public is to “have these weapons gone from the face of the
Earth.”