LOCAL
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Safety debate
poses no threat to startup
By
AMYJO BROWN of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com
HERMISTON — Erma Wilkins
readily admits she is biased about the Anniston Chemical Activity, the disposal
facility in Alabama which has been incinerating its stockpile of chemical
weapons since last August.
“I think ours is the best,” said the chairperson for Anniston’s Citizens
Advisory Commission, a community group monitoring the facility. Then, in
acknowledgment that her listener lives near the Umatilla Chemical Depot,
which will soon begin incinerating its own stockpile, she quickly added,
“I’m sure your facility will be far better than ours. Every facility learns
from the facility before it. You have nothing to worry about.”
Wilkins’ advice will soon be tested. Oregon is expected to give its
approval in August for the U.S. Army to begin burning its cache of more than
7.4 million pounds of sarin, VX and mustard agents stored just west of Hermiston.
It will be the fourth Army depot to begin incinerating its weapons;
the third in the continental United States. It is also the only chemical
weapons storage site to witness an accident leaving dozens of workers violently
ill. The incident occurred in 1999 when the disposal facility was under construction.
Workers were exposed to an unidentified toxic chemical, and many were temporarily
hospitalized. Several continue to suffer respiratory problems.
“That particular incident is the only incident of that magnitude
that has occurred within the demilitarization program,” said Mary Binder,
an Army spokeswoman at the Umatilla Chemical Depot.
This week attorneys for the workers intend to persuade a judge that
the workers were exposed to the deadly nerve gas sarin — although investigations
by the Army, the contractor at the time, the Oregon Department of Environmental
Quality and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration were unable
to determine what affected the workers.
The workers have sued the Army and a trial began Monday in Portland
that is expected to last two weeks, but a decision by the judge may not be
available for several months.
Regardless of the outcome, it is unlikely the case will impact this
summer’s start-up date, according to state and federal agencies charged with
overseeing the destruction of the weapons. They say today’s management and
work environment on the depot are significantly different than in 1999. They
point to the safety record of the Washington Demilitarization Company (WDC),
the contractor now operating the incineration facility, and also to the success
of the contractor’s previous projects in Anniston, Ala., and Johnston Atoll
— a remote island in the South Pacific that was the site of the Army’s first
chemical weapons disposal facility. It completed its mission in 2000, and
the island is now a wildlife preserve.
“I think that was an isolated incident back then,” said Bob Severson,
mayor of Hermiston and a member of this area’s Citizens Advisory Commission,
about the 1999 incident. “I’ve never worried about it.”
Severson said he is kept updated on the training of the depot workers
and has toured the facility and others like it. Everything he saw, he said,
gave him confidence in the project, including the fact that many of the workers
came from the Johnston Atoll project.
In fact, about 40 percent of the workers at the depot’s disposal
facility have previous experience with chemical demilitarization or with
a nuclear facility, according to Rick Kelley, spokesperson for WDC.
He said the depot facility near Hermiston is one of the safest projects
the WDC is involved with, second only to Anniston. The Alabama facility has
clocked more than 5 million hours since its last reportable injury.
To compare, “we’ve had 1.1 million safe hours, or the equivalent
of 262 days, since our last lost work day case,” Kelley said. That injury
occurred in September 2003.
Anniston and Johnston Atoll were not problem-free. In February the
Anniston facility recorded VX agent in area perimeter monitors, which officials
still can not explain. And recently the Environmental Protection Agency fined
the Johnston Atoll facility $273,625 for, among other items, failing to notify
the EPA about the release of an unknown amount of VX agent. The EPA reported
no harm from the incident.
OSHA area director Carl Halgren supports the WDC’s claims of a safe
record and said he feels good about their activities at the depot.
Since the WDC’s purchase of Raytheon Engineers and Constructors Inc.,
the contractor in charge at the site at the time of the 1999 incident, employee
complaints and site violations have declined, he said.
“It’s important to recognize that we’re looking at two different
animals — one back in 1999 and now the incinerator which is complete and
in operational mode,” Halgren said. “It’s a total different workforce ...
To compare them would be comparing apples to oranges.”
Regarding WDC’s track record, he said, “I think they’re pretty good.
They’re doing the right thing. They have programs, procedures in place that
are good.”
Employees, too, generally feel good about their work environment,
according to David Smith, a depot union representative for the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local No. 112.
“We don’t hear a lot of serious concerns about safety or training,”
he said. “This alleged exposure was totally a surprise, totally unexpected.
(The construction workers) weren’t trained and prepared to deal with it.”
But Smith said the workers at the site now are prepared.
“These people now are going to work in the plant,” he said. “They
plan to be exposed to agent, and they’ve got some good plans and procedures
in place (to handle it).”
Wilkins, who lives in the “pink zone,” just two miles from where
the Anniston Chemical Depot stores its supply of nerve and blister agents,
said concerns about safety are surely going to surface as the depot nears
its startup date.
Now, after nearly a year of operations at Anniston, the community
is generally satisfied with the way things have gone, she said.
“We had a whole lot of problems here because people were so frightened
of this thing,” Wilkins said. “But now all the hoopla has died down. It doesn’t
even really make the front page of the newspapers any more. I have nothing
but praise for the people who are working on the incinerator.”