Four new shipments of VX nerve agent residue arrived early this morning at the Veolia plant in Jefferson County.

Last week a federal judge in Indiana ruled the Army could continue the shipments until he makes a final ruling.

Environmental activists are suing the Army and Veolia to prevent the residue from coming to Southeast Texas for incineration.

The plant manager is confident the judge will allow the work to continue.

Four shipments of VX nerve agent residue from Indiana rolled into Port Arthur about four in the morning. They were the first shipments in almost two months.

Veolia says shipping and destroying the nerve agent residue meets all safety standards.

"We believe that before we signed the contract. We believed it with the first 103 shipments and with the remainder of the loads coming to us," said Plant Manager, Mitch Osborne.

The U.S. Army voluntarily stopped the shipments when environmental activists began raising questions about the safety of the project. Activists used protests, emails and even You Tube to get the word out.

"You read headlines that there's nerve agent coming to Port Arthur and that brings a lot of emotion to the table," said Osborne.

"Apparantly they didn't rule in our favor. Maybe there wasn't enough nerve gas present," said Hilton Kelley, a community activist.

A judge refused an injunction filed by activists to stop the shipments temporarily after throwing out all testimony from activists' expert witnesses.

"My first reaction was disappointment. I was upset with the system. We proved the VX was still present but they didn't take that into consideration," said Kelley.

But Veolia's plant manager says there will always be some of the agent present and the Army has decreased the amount from the required 20 parts per billion to 9 parts per billion.

"VX can continue to roll in. We have to file another injunction or ask the judge to reconsider his decision," said Kelley.

If an appeal is not granted everyone will wait for the case to go to Federal Court.

"We're confident even at that point the outcome will be positive," said Osborne.

And with the shipments coming again, all of the nerve agent residue could be shipped and destroyed long before it's resolved in the courts.

The plant manager says it will take another year to receive the shipments and complete the incineration.