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Posted on Tue, Mar. 11, 2008
Depot design draws scrutiny
Madison facility might be delayed
By Greg Kocher
gkocher1@herald-leader.com
A Pentagon board has questions about the design of a building where chemical weapons will be destroyed in Madison County, which could delay construction of the plant.
"We're just going to have to wait and see what this translates into," said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a Berea-based watchdog organization. "It could be a minor blip or it could be a major setback, and I really, really don't know. I don't think anybody knows at this point, until they sit down with these people who flagged it."
The matter will be discussed Tuesday at the quarterly meeting of a community advisory board. That group will meet at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Carl D. Perkins Building on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.
At issue is the design for the munitions demilitarization building, the yet-to-be-constructed facility at Blue Grass Army Depot that will have rooms where explosives are removed from the munitions, said John Schlatter, spokesman for Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass, the company contracted to build and operate the $2 billion neutralization plant.
"Those particular areas have to be designed to withstand an explosion should there be one. It's never happened, but you have to design for it," Schlatter said.
The Department of Defense Explosives Safety Board, which reviews and approves designs for facilities that handle explosive material, raised questions about the design.
"They have come back with some questions about it that relate to the reinforcing steel or rebar inside these walls," Schlatter said. "We have to go back to them and provide additional information about the design, and why we think it is the right design, to try to resolve their questions and get their approval.
"If we're able to resolve all that by the middle of June, there won't be any impact on the construction," Schlatter said. "If we're not, we might either have to do some testing to demonstrate that the design is adequate, or we might have to do some redesign. How long that would take and what it would cost, we don't know at this point."
The board specifically has questions about the modified layout of the rebar, the reinforcement bars of steel within the concrete forms, said Williams, who was briefed about the matter last week.
Typically, rebar is aligned horizontally and vertically, and where those intersect, "a steel wire is wrapped around that intersection, and tightened, and that holds it together at that joint," Williams said.
In buildings at other chemical destruction sites, Williams said, "there was so much rebar that when they pulled the forms away, there were huge voids in the wall because the concrete didn't form well, didn't settle well, which is a problem. If you've got a hole the size of a basketball backboard in your explosive containment wall, it's not really going to contain much."
The modified design to be used in Madison County involves clamps at those rebar intersections.
"Instead of having those two pieces of steel lap each other, you plug all four ends into a clamp -- it looks like a cross -- and you clamp it together so that you have a smooth line," Williams said. "They designed an innovative method of hooking together the rebar to avoid those hundreds of overlaps of rebar in one of these forms."
But the Pentagon board was not familiar with this method, Williams and Schlatter said.
"If it were a design they had approved previously, then they would approve it right away," Schlatter said. "But because this is a design that they have not seen before, they had more questions about it."
Schlatter said the design has been used in U.S. Department of Energy buildings, but it apparently has not been used in buildings related to the destruction of chemical weapons. The rebar would be used only in the "explosive containment vestibules," the rooms where explosives would be handled, he said.
But until the board approves the design, "we cannot do any work on that particular building," Schlatter said. "Because if we had to make some changes, it might affect the whole footprint of the building."
The foundation for the building was scheduled for construction in July, Schlatter said.
Williams is taking a wait-and-see attitude for now. He has long sought the destruction of the 523 tons of mustard agent, sarin and VX stored at the depot.
"I don't have the grounds around which to be too concerned about it just yet," Williams said. "First of all, my priority is safety over schedule. Of course, I don't like to see the schedule slip by a minute. But if that's what it takes to do it right, I'd rather do it right.
"If they come out in a week and they say 'Look, they're not going to accept this and we've got to go back and redesign, and it's going to take us six months to do it,' then I'm going to be upset and concerned. But I can't go there yet because I don't know. I think they're being upfront with us as far as what they know."
Said Schlatter: "This board is there for safety reviews, and this is a safety issue, and we're not going to sacrifice safety for schedules. Safety has to be the first consideration."
Reach Greg Kocher in the Nicholasville bureau at (859) 885-5775.