HERMISTON -- The campaign to destroy the 8-inch GB sarin-filled projectiles stored at the Umatilla Chemical Depot is almost complete -- officials expect to be finished with the 8-inch projectiles by Christmas.

Once the 8-inch projectiles, or projos as the Army and incinerator folks like to call them, are gone, the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility will go into an outage while workers change over equipment to prepare for the destruction of the 155 mm projectiles.

According to Hal McCune, spokesperson for Washington Group, the contractor at UMCDF, the change over is expected to take about 30 plus days. There are over 40,000 155 mm projectiles to be destroyed. It is expected to take from about the first week in February until next summer to completely destroy the stockpile of GB sarin chemical agent stored at the depot. Once the GB campaign is complete, another change over will take place to ready the facility for the next campaign, which will be VX M55 rockets.

Since the change over from rockets to projectiles began on Sept. 28, 10,313 projectiles have been destroyed. That is about 16.7 percent of the total GB projectiles at the depot. On Dec. 5, 377 8-inch projectiles were destroyed -- a campaign record, says McCune. Twenty-two percent of the total chemical agent stored at the depot has been destroyed -- about 831 tons so far since agent operations started Sept. 8, 2004.