LOCAL
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Another step closer
to incineration
By AMYJO BROWN
of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com
PORTLAND — The end is
near.
After 10 years of anticipating the start of destruction of deadly
Cold War-era weapons long stored at the Umatilla Chemical Depot, U.S. Army
officials are finally “very close to ready,” reported Don Barclay, an Army
depot site manager, at the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission meeting
Friday in Portland.
That means the Army could begin burning its stockpile of more than
7.5 million pounds of nerve and blister chemical agents at the depot as early
as mid August.
“We’re waiting on Congressional approval, which is due soon,” Barclay
told the EQC, which will be the final agency to approve the project. It will
vote on the issue at its next meeting, to be held in Hermiston Aug. 13.
“Department of Defense and Department of Army concurred with readiness,”
Barclay said. “We’ve met the Environmental Protection Agency’s requirements.
The Centers for Disease Control is with us. As far as the Tribes’ requirements,
we’ve addressed those and they are ready as well. And CSEPP (the Chemical
Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program) is with us.”
“It’s been a tremendous collective effort,” Barclay said.
Dennis Murphey, program administrator for the Department of Environmental
Quality’s chemical demilitarization program, the state agency that has oversight
of the project and which reports to the EQC, said he, too, expects the August
date to be met.
“Although we still have several issues that need to be completed,”
he said.
Those issues include several permit modification requests under review
— nothing unexpected, Murphey said — and the review of the Brine Reduction
Area (BRA) testing, which concluded Thursday.
The BRA, a treatment system for hazardous waste generated by the
furnaces, got off to a late start and has been a subject of concern in recent
months because its readiness is a key requirement for the startup approval.
The BRA’s testing results should be to the DEQ next week, in time for the
August decision, Murphey said.
“We’re obviously nearing completion of all activities that must precede
your approval,” Murphey told the four members of the EQC panel.
The depot is one of eight chemical weapons stockpile sites in the
U.S. It has stored nerve and blister agent-filled weapons since 1962. Today,
it has about 7.5 million pounds of agent in about 220,000 individual munitions,
such as rockets and land mines, as well as bulk containers.
The Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, the incinerator that
will destroy the weapons, took seven years to construct and was completed
in 2000. It then took about three years of prep work to get the facility’s
staff ready to handle the weapons and to operate its machinery, Barclay said.
The disposal process is expected to move slowly the first three months
of operation.
“If we see anything we don’t expect, we will stop and thoroughly
investigate until we understand what happened,” said Doug Hamrick, depot
site manager for the Washington Demilitarization Company, the contractor
in charge of the UMCDF’s operation.
When the facility is given the go-ahead by the EQC, it will begin
destroying M55 rockets filled with GB (sarin) nerve agent, the most volatile
of all the munitions the depot stores. GB nerve agents are clear, colorless
and tasteless liquids and have no odor. There are 91,375 M55 rockets at the
depot.
About five days after the EQC approval, workers will begin moving
the rockets a few at a time to the disposal facility. The destruction process
will move slowly that week, rocket-by-rocket, step-by-step.