NOT TO WORRY?????

Last week in Anniston, Alabama the US Army shut down a chemical weapons incinerator following an alarm which indicated that there had been a leak of sarin, the deadly nerve agent. The alarm sounded after a monitor detected sarin gas in the air and on two workers. "The workers didn't have enough agent to harm the community or them," said Tim Garrett, the Army's project manager at the incinerator. However, Garrett confirmed that the alarm sounded at the medical center when the workers were brought in. The contamination probably came from some sort of backdraft or air blowing in the wrong direction, from a contaminated area to the observation room, said Bob Love, project manager for Westinghouse Anniston, the contractor operating the incinerator for the Army. "It needs to be fixed," Love said. "We'll have to change air flows or open doors slower or something."

Some 35,000 people live within nine miles of the incinerator, located in east Alabama about 50 miles east of Birmingham. The incinerator is the Army's first to be located in a populated area. About 2,254 tons of Cold War-era chemical weapons were stored at the depot for more than 40 years in earth-covered, concrete-reinforced bunkers.

Craig Williams, a former carpenter in Berea, Ky., who now heads the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a coalition of resident groups from communities where the weapons are stored, said he is suspicious there could be trouble with air circulation at the Anniston Army Depot plant since air flow problems have affected the Army's two incinerators in Utah and Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Amazingly, there is no requirement for Army officials to immediately alert the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency in the event of an agent alarm inside the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility. Last week, it was three hours before the local authorities were notified there might be a problem. Dan Long, the director of the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency, said he was notified of the alarm at about 7:42 p.m. The alarm, Army officials said, sounded at 4:39 p.m. “If they have an alarm go off I would want to be notified,” Long said. “I know the system and the regulations with this. I would have known what it meant. If it was something different, I could have notified the (Calhoun County Commission) chairman and we could have made some decisions to ready ourselves.” Williams, of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, said the process takes to too long and there are monitors that can do the job more quickly. “They fixed a rover on Mars, from Houston, Texas, and they can’t tell whether there was an agent release within three hours,” Williams said. “And they’re telling me this facility is state of the art.”

The Anniston Star editorialized, “What’s not so clear is the Army’s process of verification and notification of such an incident, or whether the facility’s overall monitoring system is sophisticated as it needs to be, given the dangers inherent in the handling of GB, or Sarin, one of the deadliest substances known to man…”

In 1986, Congress ordered the Department of Defense to destroy a 31,000-ton stockpile of chemical weapons, some dating to World War I. Then in 1997 the United States signed an international treaty agreeing to eliminate chemical weapons. Now, nearly two decades later, almost three-fourths of the original stockpile sits in depots spread across eight states. Efforts to destroy the poisons are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget estimates. The DOD concedes it will miss the 2007 deadline set in the 1997 treaty.

The military agencies created to eliminate the weapons have drawn fire from environmentalists and the wrath of congressional investigators who say the Army often fails to anticipate public opposition to various disposal plans. Officials in New Jersey say the latest example of the Army's tin ear can be seen in a proposal to ship a neutralized byproduct of the nerve agent VX from an Indiana depot to Salem County for further treatment before it is released into the Delaware River. The only warning of the plan was a single legal advertisement in a local Salem County newspaper the week before Christmas and a small notice posted in a local library. The letters "VX" did not appear.

"If one blurb in the paper is a public notice, then I'm a 21-year-old beauty queen," said Sara Morgan, a 62-year-old schoolteacher who fought plans to incinerate the VX near her home in Indiana. "The Army just keeps shooting itself in the foot. It's a wonder they can even walk anymore."

Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club says, "What they couldn't find in Iraq, they want to dump in New Jersey.”

Since its inception, America's program to rid itself of chemical weapons has been at odds with people who live near the places where the deadly compounds are stored and where the Defense Department initially planned to burn them. Public pressure helped derail plans to incinerate weapons in Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland and Colorado and contributed to delays in incineration operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah.

"From our vantage point, success means they haven't killed anybody yet and they're able to operate their facilities for a short time without a breakdown or regulatory failure," said Craig Williams. "The whole thing is not a confidence-builder," Williams said. "Even for government work, it's remarkably dysfunctional." Sources: Anniston Star, Times Daily (Northwest Alabama), WTVY (Enterprise, Alabama, PLA Daily, Birmingham News, WISH-TV (Indianapolis), Chemical Weapons Working Group

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