LOCAL
Thursday, August
19, 2004
Hastiness not
prudent, depot commander says
By AMYJO BROWN
of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com
HERMISTON — Umatilla Chemical
Depot officials are waiting for laboratory test results and are conducting
maintenance on the depot’s heating and ventilation systems before they move
forward with the start of incineration of chemical weapons, said Doug Hamrick,
depot site manager for the Washington Demilitarization Company, the contractor
operating the plant that will destroy the weapons.
The depot was originally scheduled to begin burning M55 rockets filled
with poisonous sarin today. Instead, officials announced earlier this week
that they would delay the start of destruction of the more than 7.4 million
pounds of chemical agent stored at the depot in a variety of munitions.
A trace amount of vapor from industrial chemicals used in testing
of the plant’s operations appeared in the heating and ventilation system
last weekend, causing concern, Hamrick said.
“It surprised us,” he said, adding that the surrogate chemicals,
used in place of real chemical agent, should not have traveled as far as
they did through the system.
Samples of the chemicals were sent to a lab in order to discover
more about their makeup and whether or not they should have easily been caught
by the carbon filter system the plant uses, Hamrick said. Typically, the
surrogate materials should be much harder to catch then the chemical agent
is expected to be.
Also, to be safe, Hamrick said depot employees are replacing the
carbon filters with new ones.
All of that activity is expected to take several days, he said.
Lt. Col. David Holliday, depot commander, said he thought it was
prudent to wait for these activities to be completed before beginning destruction
of the chemical weapons.
Holliday said he does believe the plant will be ready to start up
next week.
“That’s what we have on the plans,” he said.