By Karen Hutchinson-Talaski
Staff writer

GASP has filed another lawsuit, this time challenging Oregon's failure to analyze technologies for the disposal of secondary wastes and HD mustard agent stored at the Umatilla Chemical Depot.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday aftrnoon in Multnomah County Circuit Court, allege the state has not complied with a previous court ruling to conduct a review of the best availabale technologies to destroy secondary wastes, which include plastic protective suits, contaminated carbon filter materials and other byproducts of the disposal of chemical agents at the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility.

Rich Duval, Department of Environmental Quality's Hermiston administrator of chemical demil program, says DEQ looked at all the technolgies--incineration, neutralization, moving secondary wastes off the depot or putting it in storage--and found incineration was the best technology available for the materials.

"We think we did follow the judge's order," Duval said. "We didn't look at the nitty gritty of each technology, but we did look at each one. I guess we won't know if we did until the judge says yea or nay."

Karyn Jones, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and founder of GASP, says filing the lawsuit was not something the group took lightly. The group fully expected DEQ to comply with the court ruling.

At a hearing with the Environmental Quality Commission in August, Jones warned the commission that if they continued on their present course of non-compliance, GASP wold have no choice but to file another lawsuit.

"I was extremely surprised and very disappointed," Jones said about DEQ's failur to comply. "Filing another lawsuit was not something we looked forward to. It's not a happy day."

GASP is concerned that the Army and the state continue to say the disposal of secondary wastes and mustard by incineration is safe. Jones says no health risk assessment has bever been done and should have been done before destruction of any chemical agent on the Umatilla Chemical Depot had occurred.

"One of the reasons for moving forward with the lawsuit was concern for the workers (at the UMCDF)," Jones said. "We are becoming really concerned, too, about the delay in the decision-making process."

Jones is concerned that the Army will say, once the VX agent is destroyed and the change over to HD mustard destruction is completed, it is too late to make a change from incineration to neutralization.

DEQ, on the other hand, feels neutralization is not the way to go with secondary wastes.

"We think we did things right," Duval said. "We may have our blinders on but we think we did it right."