Hermiston Herald
March 14, 2003

Groups file suit to stop incineration

By Frank Lockwood
Staff writer

HERMISTON - GASP, a Hermiston environmental group, is among the nineteen
organizations who filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. Tuesday against the
Department of Defense and the Army in an effort to halt the incineration of
chemical weapons here.

Hermiston is home to Umatilla Chemical Depot, one of the nation's nine
chemical weapons stockpile sites.

Before the weapons began to be destroyed several years ago in Utah and
elsewhere, Umatilla held 12 percent of the nation's stockpiled chemical
weapons. There are eight chemical weapons stockpile sites in the continental
United States.

Umatilla Chemical Depot is one of four for which incineration is still the
method identified to be used to destroy Umatilla's 12 percent of the
nation's stockpiled chemical weapons. Incineration was the Army's first
technology of choice, but, with pressure from interest groups, the Army was
told to develop alternatives to incineration, which it did, in what is
called the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment program.

Now some of those alternative methods are approved for several sites, but
not for others, depending on the types of munitions stockpiled at those
sites. GASP, Sierra Club and other groups opposed to incineration have
tried for years to force the Army to use other methods.

Besides GASP, plaintiffs in the suit included groups from across the nation:
Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Washington DC, Arizona, and Oregon.
Among them are wildlife groups, a veterans group, citizen action and public
interest groups, environmental councils, women's groups, a toxic alliance,
research groups, Physicians for Social Responsibility (Portland) and
Christian Leadership Conference.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., claims the
Army failed to adequately assess and compare the impacts from the
incineration of chemical weapons with non-incineration alternatives and
failed to update their assessments of the impacts expected from the baseline
incineration program, including the impacts on workers.

The suit seeks to ban any additional spending on incinerator construction or
operation until the Army complies with National Environmental Policy Act
(NEPA) requirements to review and update its agent destruction plans. The
plaintiffs charge that the failed performance of prototype incinerators in
the Pacific and Utah was never incorporated into ongoing environmental plans
as legally required.

Chemical Weapons Working Group, which has been a major critic of the
incineration program, stresses that reports from other federal agencies show
the incinerators released live nerve agent releases into the environment and
exposed facility workers to agents. Army representatives have repeatedly
noted that those releases were very minor. A CWWG press release counters
that the emissions from the two facilities contain "significantly greater
quantities of toxic compounds than contemplated in the Army's original
environmental planning documents."

The Army decided to build and operate chemical weapons incinerators at eight
stockpile sites in 1982. Since then, public pressure has forced the
abandonment of incineration plans in Maryland, Indiana, Colorado, and
Kentucky. Instead, the Army has agreed to destroy the lethal agents at these
facilities using technologies that advocates say present fewer environmental
dangers.

According to Craig Williams, Director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group,
"These safer alternatives have never been adequately considered for the
sites named in today's suit."

NEPA requires Supplemental Environmental Impact Statements to be prepared if
there are significant new circumstances or information relevant to
environmental concerns and bearing on the proposed action or its impacts, or
if the agency makes substantial changes in the proposed action that are
relevant to environmental concerns.

"The unacceptable performance of the existing incinerators, even after
hundreds of major modifications to their original designs, coupled with the
Army's own acceptance of safer disposal options at four sites clearly meets
the NEPA requirements for a supplemental study," Williams concluded.

In a March 3 letter to Thomas Bean of the DEQ's Eastern Region, GASP
representative Karyn Jones claimed that DEQ had mislead the public into
thinking certain modifications would allow the UMCDF to manage the Pollution
Abatement System (BRA) brines in a safe manner.

Jones expressed concerns that the changes or modifications made to the
system were not analyzed thoroughly enough as to their effects upon safety
to the workers. "The rush to burn is outweighing the careful analysis of
changes and modifications to the system," Jones wrote.In Tuesday's suit, the groups alleged eight oversight failures in the decisions that led to going ahead with the the chemical demilitarization
program's baseline, incineration technology. Alleged failures are
paraphrased as follows:

• Failure to prepare a supplemental programmatic environmental impact
  statement (PEIS) to properly evaluate alternatives to incineration
  
• Failure to prepare supplemental site-specific Environmental Impact
  Statements
  
• Failure to assess and evaluate "significant" impacts of incineration
  program (impacts on infants, children, pregnant women, wildlife etc.)
  
• Failure to assess and evaluate alternatives to incineration
  
• Failure to include the Oregon site in the ACWA PEIS
  
• Failure to include Utah site in ACWA PEIS
  
• Failure to take a hard look at latest information concerning significant
  impacts and alternatives
  
• Failure to consider environmental justice

In her letter to Bean, Jones wrote, "The point is that incineration,
including the BRA, was sold to Oregonians as a complete package; that
incineration was a mature and proven technology. Nothing could be further
from the truth."

Jones referred to the hundreds of modifications which the Army has made. In
the past, the Army has represented those modifications as merely
improvements to make a good system better, since there is always room for
improvement.