LATEST NEWS
Thursday,
September 16, 2004
Safety procedure
error halts burn
By AMYJO BROWN
of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com
HERMISTON — Operations
at the Umatilla Chemical Depot are on hold after two workers took a wrong
turn Tuesday inside the plant incinerating sarin-filled M55 rockets and entered
a contaminated room without proper protection.
The unidentified workers are OK and still at work, said Doug Hamrick,
the plant’s manager for Washington Demilitarization Company, a contractor
for the U.S. Army.
The room contains tanks storing about 11 gallons of sarin drained
from rockets over the past week. Sarin, also known as GB, is a clear, colorless
liquid meant to be used as chemical warfare. If inhaled or touched, it attacks
a person’s nervous system and is usually fatal.
The tanks were sealed and the room ventilated, Hamrick said. But
monitors picked up low levels of chemical agent in the air of the room.
The incident raised serious concerns with both depot officials and
state regulators, who said they must be addressed before the depot can continue
destroying its stockpile of chemical weapons, which includes more than 7.4
million pounds of nerve and blister agents or about 12 percent of the nation’s
supply.
“This time around no one was harmed,” said Dennis Murphey, program
administrator for the chemical demilitarization program in the Oregon Department
of Environmental Quality. “It should not have happened. It was a breakdown
in the system and the situation has got to be fixed.”
Depot officials are still investigating why both the workers and
those monitoring them from a control room failed to immediately recognize
the room the workers entered. Essentially, Hamrick said, the workers went
through a door on the left when they should have gone through a door on the
right.
The workers were scheduled to conduct routine maintenance, but before
doing so asked to walk through the emergency exit route they would have to
take if they needed to escape the facility quickly, Hamrick said.
In a 45-minute pre-briefing meeting, they mapped the route using
blueprints of the facility. As they traced the path, both wore gas masks
and rubber protective aprons, a low-level of protection appropriate for the
work they were to conduct, Hamrick said.
After the workers made their error, they went through a hot wash,
to be decontaminated, and then through medical tests to determine if they
had been medically exposed to the sarin agent.
“At no time did we see any agent readings on them,” Hamrick said.
The cause of the incident will be determined and a solution in place
to prevent any similar errors before operations at the depot will start again,
Hamrick said.
Karyn Jones of GASP, a local group opposed to the incineration of
the chemical agent, said “These are the kind of things we are concerned with.
Worker safety is a big issue with us. There have been similar problems at
other sites.”
Since processing its first rocket on Sept. 8, the depot has destroyed
11 rockets. The most destroyed in one day has been four, said Don Barclay,
site manager for the Army.
Several other incidents, including a hose not tightened and debris
in a valve, have caused some concerns. Overall, however, depot managers and
DEQ personnel said they are happy with the way operations have gone.
While Hamrick said he is very comfortable and confident in the training
of his workforce, he added, “I think there are some folks we need more proficiency
with.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.