LOCAL

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Sunday, August 15, 2004

One year later: Alabama residents calmed by safe weapons’ incineration

By AMYJO BROWN of the East Oregonian

	Staff photo by AmyJo Brown Dennis Whitten, far right, works his shift monitoring activities at the Anniston Army Depot, where chemical weapons are being destroyed. At least two people are on staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week at the state-of-the-art emergency bunker built in Jacksonville, Ala.

Editor’s note: East Oregonian reporter AmyJo Brown spent a week in Anniston, Ala., in July, asking residents to reflect on their experiences as the Anniston Army Depot began incinerating its stockpile of chemical munitions one year ago this month.

ANNISTON, Ala. — They look like plastic bags, and common knowledge says plastic bags should not be put over a person’s head. But Daniel Spillers was eager to show a photo of his daughter and baby granddaughter posing while wearing the see-through plastic hoods.

He also fussed proudly over a display of the hoods, lined up and poofed out on a long table at the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) Training and Distribution Center at Fort McClellan in Alabama.

That’s because the protective hoods are designed to save lives if there is ever a release of deadly poison gas over the city of Anniston, Ala. So far, more than 17,400 of the hoods have been handed out, free, to residents living closest to the Anniston Army Depot.

The Anniston depot, like the Umatilla Chemical Depot near Hermiston, is storing part of the nation’s supply of chemical weapons. Contained in a variety of bombs, land mines and bulk containers are about 4.5 million pounds of liquid sarin, VX and mustard gas. While mustard gas is not usually fatal upon contact — it’ll just leave some nasty scarring — just a teaspoon of either sarin or VX is more than enough to kill.

Spillers, the program manager for CSEPP in Anniston, said the center opened in April 2003 and began handing out the hoods, along with portable air cleaners and kits containing plastic and duct tape. The following four months — the summer the U.S. Army began destroying Anniston’s stockpile of chemical weapons — he saw thousands of residents file through the center, first showing proof of their residency, then going through a brief medical exam, followed by training on how to use the equipment.

He pointed to a bland-looking graph printed on 8 X 11 paper taped horizontally to the wall of the training and distribution center. He ran his finger over the spikes in the graphing, and counted off the increasing number of residents who visited the center each day over those hot summer months.

“We had 150 a day on average, then in August, 400, 500, 1,100, then 1,300 in one day — they had to wait a little while.”

The numbers illustrate the growing fear of the unknown Anniston residents felt during the days just before the Anniston depot began incinerating the weapons. It’s a task seven other storage depots around the country must complete based on both a Congressional mandate and an international treaty. The deadline is 2007, although extensions are expected.

The Umatilla depot is expected to begin incinerating its supply this week, processing just a handful of rockets at first and slowly ramping up over a three-month period. It has 7.4 million pounds of chemical agent to destroy. Umatilla will be the third weapons incinerator to go on line in the United States. It models itself after Anniston, its most recent predecessor, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary this month.

That year has made a difference in the community’s confidence level, Spillers said.

Now, visitors to the training and distribution center are rare. When one appeared one day in July, Spillers pushed a button on a remote control and flicked off the hip hop music booming from a television set in front of rows of empty waiting chairs. Time to give a tour? He had plenty.

While people still trickle in — he had 75 visitors in July, “a good month” — he still has a warehouse full of unclaimed protective equipment. More than half of the population has yet to pick up its supplies.

back to the future

Although the Anniston Army Depot has had its stockpile since the 1960s, after the U.S. produced them as a deterrent to attacks from Germany and Japan, their presence was unknown to the majority of Anniston residents until relatively recently.

“It was shocking. ‘Man, you all got chemical weapons?’ Where was I at for 20 years?” said David Baker, recalling when he found out he was working just four miles from the poisonous munitions. “I had no idea — 99, 98 percent of the community had no idea that nerve gas had been there.”

Baker, an Anniston resident and environmental activist, isn’t usually the last one to find out what’s happening in his community, especially about something right up his alley.

The 52-year-old executive director of the grassroots organization Community Against Pollution, or CAP, likes to talk, likes to listen to people. All day long they stream through the front door of his cramped home office, a small house in a ramshackle residential community near downtown Anniston.

Inside the building, binders and papers litter long folding tables, the floor, chairs. Maps cover the walls, and a television stuffed in a corner on top of a filing cabinet squawks the latest news. The phone rings almost as soon as the line is free, the sharp, piercing noise so constant it fades into the background, like the hum of a radio.

Sitting inside the office, stuffed in a corner of a back room, Baker, animated voice rising quickly, described the heated emotions in the community as people learned about the weapons when the U.S. Army hired a contractor in 1996 to build, test and operate an incinerator similar to the one that will burn weapons at Umatilla.

“It was crazy, like opening Pandora’s Box,” he said, admitting he contributed to the panic in the beginning. “I got outraged because they had not informed us of what was out there. I really shoved my butt all over TV, screaming.”

Linda White, a resident on the outskirts of Anniston who works for Baker, said the fears were mostly irrational, fueled by that surprising realization of how long they had lived so close to such dangerous weapons.

“There was a lot of fear that Anniston was a contaminated town,” White said.

Since then, a year’s worth of safe operations have done much to temper community concerns — but the memories of what it took to get there are still fresh.

Pam and James White (no relation to Linda) live less than a mile from the incinerator. They are the closest to the depot’s entrance and remember waking up one morning to see the street in front of their house barricaded by people protesting the facility.

“There were 400 people, screaming and hollering,” James White said. In addition, the Whites’ neighbors were up in arms, worried about what it meant exactly to be living so close to the weapons.

Neighborhood meetings were held. Keith Howland, who lives behind the Whites, gained attention by calling himself Enviroman and dressing in a green cape, a green headband and mirrored sunglasses.

He appeared at public meetings held on the topic of Anniston’s chemical stockpile. In the getup, Howland unrelentingly questioned U.S. Army officials and those who worked for Westinghouse.

“I did it out of frustration,” he said. “I wanted to get at the table ... As Keith Howland I was an irritation to the Army,” but as Enviroman, a super hero of sorts, he was hard to ignore.

“They were interested in what he had to say,” Howland said. “There was no hostility, no resentment to Enviroman. There was humor.”

Howland soon started a cable television talk show that lasted a half hour seven to eight times a week, heating up the political debates and informing the community. He said he received more than 10,000 phone calls, e-mails and letters over the three months the show aired.

“People were hostile,” Howland said.

The ripple effect

In response to the fears, political leaders demanded funding for emergency preparedness planning just in case an accident happened at the depot. They have spent about $259 million federal dollars, according to the General Accounting Office, the most of any stockpile site.

The local CSEPP community comes in second, with approximately $90 million spent so far on Umatilla and Morrow counties’ preparedness.

In addition to protective equipment, Anniston spent money on a state-of-the-art emergency management bunker in Jacksonville, 12 miles north of Anniston.

It rivals any Hollywood could produce.

Emergency responders can position themselves in offices that span two floors, with one glass wall in each office facing six large screens flanked by televisions. At the bottom of the “pit” a horseshoe of computer consoles provides constant data from the depot. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week two people monitor the systems constantly.

“The depot tells us exactly what they’re doing every day,” said Dan Long, director of Calhoun County’s Emergency Management Agency. “If someone stubs their toe, we know about it.”

The facility is equipped with 10 bunk-beds, a bathroom with multiple showers and even a bathtub. There also is a large, homey kitchen filled with emergency rations.

“We can house 40 people here for five days,” said Shay Cook, spokesperson for the EMA.

As the money came in and preparations were made for the public’s safety, those initially wary of incineration threw their support behind the idea.

Baker joined with local CSEPP planners, and his CAP organization helped collect data on residents living near the stockpile and identifying needed safety precautions eventually implemented, particularly in the lower-income communities.

“Our job was to keep the community safe. If I’d had to fight them, I would have,” Baker said. “The stockpile was leaking. It was unstable and unsafe. For anyone to take the position not to get rid of them was crazy.”

Howland, too, began to believe it best to act quickly to get rid of the chemical weapons instead of bemoaning their existence. Enviroman threw his endorsement behind the process.

“Any delay was a disservice to the community,” Howland said.

Finally, at the 11th hour, community leaders gave the Army the go ahead. They had no idea it would be so anti-climatic.

Living with incineration

“The first day we processed one round and we stopped,” said Tim Garrett, site manager for the U.S. Army. “Everybody expected a big grandiose event. They saw one rocket processed and the show was over.”

Indeed. No other chemical demilitarization facility has had such a relatively problem-free existence. Anniston has built up more than 5 million safe hours. As of Aug. 12, the depot has processed 34,979 rockets and destroyed 38,076 gallons of liquid sarin — nearly all the sarin on site. Soon, it will begin destroying VX nerve agent.

While the buildup to that first day seemed explosive, it and many others passed without incident.

“I have never even cut the plastic,” said Pam White, one of the Anniston residents living closest to the incinerator, referring to the plastic in her shelter-in-place kit that is meant to cover windows and doors if chemical agent is released.

Melissa Reamy, a resident of the Shady Acres Mobile Home Community, a stone’s throw from the Whites’ house, said the depot’s startup didn’t give her a second’s pause.

“People around here were in shock,” she said. “We didn’t even know they had chemical weapons. But after it started burning, everyone was real fine about it. They grow their gardens and keep their livestock. No one has a problem.”

Baker also is feeling confident about the disposal process. “We have people living at the fence line and they ain’t moved,” he said. “I haven’t moved, and I haven’t even yet got my hood and mask. It’s not to praise the Army for their efforts, but to give them credit. They have done what they said they were going to do.”

The Howlands admit to being a bit worried at first. “She didn’t want to be around that day,” Howland said of his wife, Sherwood, on the first day of incinceration. “It took us a while to feel comfortable. We thought it was possible, by human error, to have a release.”

Now, after a year of incineration, Howland said the risks he was told about initially seem greatly over-emphasized.

“We have more confidence in what they’re doing,” he said. “They’ve lowered the risk to nerve agent by a tremendous amount. But it will be a real relief when it’s over.”