Letters, secret documents confirm Utah incinerator still endangering the public, workers and environment

(Excerpted from the May 2000 issue of CWWG's newsletter "Common Sense")

From August 1999 to January 2000 the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) received handwritten letters and internal reports detailing the flawed facility's continued endangerment to workers, the public and the environment. The documents, which CWWG claims were sent by the plant's safety manager, portray the plant as "limping along" with equipment malfunctions, worker exposures and nerve agent migration.

On March 22 CWWG made public the 1500 pages of documents that had been sent during a five-month period alledgedly by Steve Jones, a former whistleblower who returned to the Tooele, Utah facility as the plant's Chief Safety Officer last summer after a federal court ruled he had been illegally fired. The problems and incidents detailed in the handwritten notes and previously secret reports include the following.

• It was discovered in 1999 that the method used to calculate nerve agent concentrations allows false assumptions to be made so that nerve agent levels are underestimated. When EG&G (the Army's contractor operating the Utah facility) managers wanted to review all previous calculations to determine if at any time in the past workers had been exposed to unacceptable levels of agent or if unacceptable amounts of agent had been released to the environment, Army officials would not allow the review.
• A TOCDF employee exposed to GB still tested positive for nerve agent presence after stripping naked and being washed down twice with bleach.
• Workers' protective suits partially melted when they entered one of the liquid incinerators to replace fire bricks before the furnace had cooled sufficiently.
  
• It is quite possible that the nerve agents GB and VX are mixed together in some munitions and that the agents have been mislabelled. However, the agent monitors at the incinerator can detect only one nerve agent at a time and the Army refuses to allow the installation of multi agent monitors.
  
• Data indicates that during a chemical incident nerve agent migrated to the outside environment from the Munitions Disposal Building, although a report on the event concluded that there was no migration.
  
• Nerve agent vaporizes off the rocket feed chutes leading to the Deactivation Furnace, sending up clouds of agent which migrate into adjacent rooms as fugitive emissions.
  
• Dropping steel I-beams down into a rocket feed chute was a procedure used to dislodge M-55 rockets jammed in the chutes.
  
• The facility's engineers consider the liquid incinerators to be fatally flawed.

In the letters, it is stated that Army managers conspired to obstruct justice by encouraging employees to mislead the judge during the June 1999 federal trial in Salt Lake City and by collaborating with sympathetic state regulators. "PMCD [The Army's Office of the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization] threatened to fire anyone who didn't testify "correctly' during the trial," reads the letters, "so they lied or just played stupid... The real problem here is the state completely works with PMCD to find ways to circumvent the laws and permit." Summing up the Utah facility, it is stated, "In total it looks like incineration is a failed technology."

Misstatements impel
CWWG to release documents

(Excerpted from the May 2000 issue of CWWG's newsletter "Common Sense")

At the February 17 meeting of the Utah Citizens' Advisory Commission (CAC), a governor-appointed citizens' group addressing disposal issues, Steve Jones, the incinerator's reinstated Safety Manager, told the audience that the Utah incinerator is "absolutely safe." He assured them that it's "almost impossible for anything to happen that is ever going to endanger these workers from agent, let alone anything that is going to happen to the local community..Incineration is an exact science...it's not mathematically possible [for low-level nerve agent to come out the stack]...We have the best instruments that science has to offer stuck on that stack."

These assertions from Jones were in complete contradiction to the 1500 pages of handwritten letters and official internal documents he alledgedly sent to CWWG from August 1999 to mid-January 2000. Additionally, Jones' sweeping statements on plant safety to the CAC were refuted by two events that happened the week following the CAC meeting. Three days later the Army reported that two workers had been exposed to the nerve agent GB when it leaked into a room where they were working. Then three days after that incident, 40 to 45 gallons of molten slag spilled from a drum and started a fire that burned the covering of the concrete floor and electrical equipment in a secondary room of the liquid incinerator.

It was Jones' misleading assertions in front of the CAC that forced CWWG's hand in releasing his documents. CWWG spokesperson Craig Williams stated, "The CWWG wants to ensure that the U.S. stockpile of weapons is disposed of in a way that offers maximum protection to workers, the public and the environment. We were dismayed and more than a little shocked that Jones made public statements completely contradicting the official documents and handwritten letters we claim he sent to us which detailed the ways in which incineration 'just doesn't work.' We felt we had to get the truth out. If anyone thinks our objective was targeting Steve, they are missing the point entirely."

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