East Oregonian
October 29, 2003
Wednesday, October
29, 2003
Attorney: Depot
incident exposed emergency plan chaos
By WILLIAM McCALL
Associated Press
PORTLAND — Workers who
claim they were poisoned by a sarin gas leak at an Army chemical weapons
depot four years ago exposed “chaos” in emergency plans to deal with serious
problems, the workers’ attorney argued Tuesday.
James McCandlish cross-examined Army doctor Lt. Col. Tim Mallon in
the seventh day of a federal trial claiming the Army was negligent in failing
to respond to mass illness at the depot site outside Hermiston.
McCandlish asked whether the hospitalization of 34 workers on Sept.
15, 1999, showed the military was not prepared for a major emergency, such
as a weapons leak.
“Would you say that this event, the first time the Army had to respond
to such an event, opened a host of issues?” McCandlish asked Mallon, chief
of the Army’s Madigan Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash.
He asked Mallon whether it showed the Army had no clear line of authority
to oversee mass casualties, causing delays in transporting workers to the
hospital and overwhelming local medical capacity.
Before Mallon could answer, Henry Miller, an attorney for the Department
of Justice, objected to the way the question was phrased and McCandlish abandoned
it without a direct answer from Mallon.
U.S. District Judge Dennis Hubel, who is hearing the case without
a jury, earlier had directly asked Mallon to detail the Army response to
a hypothetical emergency involving mass casualties at Umatilla Chemical Depot.
The doctor replied that he would have to take orders from the depot
emergency operations center or the base commander.
“The picture I get from the testimony, and it’s probably too strong
a word, is that the medical people are essentially held hostage” by the chain
of command, Hubel told Mallon.
McCandlish spent much of the day laying groundwork for his final
arguments that the Army was negligent for failing to respond quickly to the
mass illness.
Earlier testimony from the civilian manager of the depot indicated
the military acted quickly to rule out a chemical weapons leak.
The workers were employed by Raytheon Co., the military contractor
for an incinerator that will be used to destroy nearly 4,000 tons of deadly
chemical weapons.
The aging sarin, mustard and VX nerve gas weapons are about 12 percent
of the national chemical weapons stockpile.
Mallon said Tuesday that, had there been a leak, the depot operations
center would have declared an immediate emergency and dispatched a team of
rescuers who would have relayed their initial findings to the depot clinic
doctor while the Army mobilized a larger response with outside resources.
But under questioning by McCandlish, Mallon admitted he did not know
whether Raytheon, now the Washington Demilitarization Group, maintained antidote
kits at its trailer clinic on the incinerator construction site.
The trial is expected to conclude by Wednesday but Hubel said it
may extend into Thursday.