LATEST NEWS
Saturday,
October 09, 2004
515 sarin rockets
destroyed so far at depot
By AMYJO BROWN
of the East Oregonian
ajbrown@eastoregonian.com
HERMISTON — Workers at
the Umatilla Chemical Depot have destroyed 515 sarin-filled M55 rockets as
of late Friday, exactly a month after the first rocket was processed.
Forty-six rockets were drained, chopped and burned Thursday, and
42 were processed as of late afternoon Friday. If that rate continues through
the weekend, the bulk chemical agent drained from the rockets and collected
in storage tanks will be burned possibly in two weeks, a significant milestone
for the facility, which has yet to operate its liquid incinerators.
“That’s a very large amount of chemical agent that we can get rid
of all at once,” said Mike Strong, deputy project site manager for the U.S.
Army, which has been storing the chemical weapons at the Depot for decades.
“Each rocket is significant,” he said. “But this will be a lot of
chemical agent destroyed over a very short time.”
Five-hundred gallons of liquid agent must be collected before workers
can operate the liquid furnace.
Each rocket contains about a gallon of liquid agent, most of which
is drained from each rocket before the rocket is chopped into pieces and
dropped into a high temperature furnace. Any residual agent left in the rocket
is incinerated along with the rocket, but the bulk of the agent is stored
in a tank.
As soon as the 500-gallon goal is met, the disposal facility will
halt operations for five or six days while samples of the chemical agent
are sent to a lab and examined, said Rick Kelley, spokesperson for the Washington
Demilitarization Company, the contractor operating the disposal facility
for the Army.
The samples are tested to determine the characteristics of the agent
so that there are no surprises when the volatile liquid is burned, he said.
As for the past month’s operations, staff at the Oregon Department
of Environmental Quality, the state’s oversight agency for the facility,
feel comfortable with what they’ve seen, said Don Buso, senior hazardous
waste compliance inspector.
A DEQ staff member has been on-site for part or all of the process
runs, he said.
“Things are going fairly well,” Buso said. “Obviously it’s a complex
plant, and since startup there have been some glitches with the mechanical
equipment. But it’s not unexpected, and they are doing a good job of troubleshooting.
Buso also said that monitoring of workers’ activities has noticeably
increased after two workers made a wrong turn earlier in the month into a
contaminated room without the proper protection gear.
“There is much more emphasis on the tracking of employees,” Buso
said.
Recently, the 765 WDC employees at the Depot were recognized by their
parent group for going 1.5 million consecutive hours of work without a lost-time
injury. It is the third time they’ve received the award since the project
began.
Karyn Jones, executive director of GASP, a local group that has long
opposed the incineration method for destroying the weapons, said the past
month’s operations have not alleviated her concerns.
She said GASP is continuing with litigation to halt the incineration
process, but doesn’t have immediate plans to pursue another attempt at an
injunction. GASP has tried for an injunction twice, in both the Multnomah
County Circuit Court in Portland and the State Court of Appeals in Salem.
Now, the group is awaiting decisions by the courts on two lawsuits
it has filed, GASP I and GASP II, she said.
“We’re also exploring our other options,” Jones said. “It’s far from
being over.”