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Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Weapons destruction begins

By AMYJO BROWN of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com



TOP: Depot workers prepare to move a container holding rockets filled with sarin into the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility Tuesday. BOTTOM: A truck carrying an Enhanced On-site Container loaded with 15 M55 rockets filled with sarin moves out of K Block toward the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility Tuesday. Contributed Photos
HERMISTON — Practice for destroying the chemical weapons stored at the Umatilla Chemical Depot is over. After a decade of preparation, an M55 rocket filled with sarin nerve agent was placed on a conveyor belt at the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility at 9:29 this morning.

Moments later the rocket was punched with three holes, one to release vapor and the other two to drain the liquid agent from inside. The chemical agent was placed into a storage container, to be burned in about a month, which is when officials estimate they will have enough drained agent to destroy in one of the facility’s two liquid incinerators.

By 10 a.m. the rocket was just about ready to be moved to a blade that chops it into eight pieces, which then fall into a furnace.

Only one rocket was to be destroyed today. The plan is to drain and burn two rockets Thursday. The goal is to destroy five rockets on Saturday. The process will ramp up slowly over a three-month period, depot officials have said.

A crew of about six workers moved a pallet of 15 rockets to the disposal facility Tuesday, traveling about half a mile at 10 mph.

“I watched everything yesterday. It was amazing,” said Rick Kelley, spokesman for the Washington Demilitarization Company, the contractor operating the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility at the depot. “I talked with one of the truck drivers, and he said he was a little bit excited at first, but once we got into it, he said it was old hat.”

The crew used a forklift to move the pallet from a storage igloo into a cylindrical transport container called an Enhanced On-site Container, or EONC (pronounced eee-onk).

The EONC is specially designed to withstand impacts, fire, crushing and chemical agent leaks. It has a hydraulically sealed door with a locking ring mechanism. After the rockets were loaded, the door was closed and the seal checked for tightness before it was pulled by truck to the nearby disposal facility.

The rockets went through the gates of the disposal facility at about 12:40 p.m. Tuesday, Kelley said. The EONC was checked for leaks, then unloaded, ready to be lifted onto the conveyor belt that will carry the rockets toward the furnaces.

“I was extremely pleased with the operation,” said Depot Commander Lt. Col. David “Doc” Holliday, in a prepared statement. “The workers showed confidence and professionalism. The methodical, detailed approach to their work looked routine.”

The depot, which stores more than 7.4 million pounds of nerve and blister agent in a variety of munitions, has spent nearly a decade preparing for today’s events. Workers at the site have been training for about two years.

The depot is storing about 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons, one of eight such sites in the country.

All the weapons must be destroyed in accordance with a congressional mandate and an international treaty. One site, in the South Pacific, has already destroyed its weapons and been eliminated. Two other sites, Tooele, Utah and Anniston, Ala., are in the process of incinerating their stockpiles. A third site, the Edgewood Chemical Activity in Aberdeen, Md., is using a different method, neutralization, to destroy its stockpile.