KYNews 01/06/06

It ain't over 'til it's over

By Andy McDonald , 01.06.06, 10:22 PM

At first glance, recent developments concerning the demilitarization program at the Blue Grass Army Depot (BGAD) would seem to be cause for celebration.

Last summer, Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass secured a permit to begin work on a facility to dispose of millions of pounds of chemical agent stored at the depot within eight years. An application for the facility’s air quality permit, meanwhile, passed with flying colors.

Things may be headed the right way for now, but Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) director Craig Williams cautions there’s much to be done to ultimately insure the safe destruction of chemical weapons in Madison County.

“The words that sum it up are oversight, accountability, and meaningful citizen engagement in these decisions that directly affect this community," Williams said from his CWWG office in Berea. “There’s a lot more still left to this than ‘incineration good, neutralization bad."

Williams notes, for example, that once the $2 billion facility is constructed, approximately 1,000 workers will be working at a disposal plant that’s within 500 feet to 500 yards of igloos storing deadly sarin gas and blister agents.

While current methods for detecting leaks in the rockets is deemed adequate given the igloos’ location, Williams said bringing 1,000 workers in close proximity of the chemicals creates a need for a new warning system to detect nerve gas leaks.

“You’ve got 523 tons of the most lethal chemicals ever devised and put on the planet sitting in these igloos. The way the situation is now, there is no real-time monitoring capability between the storage area and where these thousand people are going to be building this facility," Williams said. “To us [CWWG] that’s not a reasonable scenario."

As it turns out, the powers that be agreed with Williams, who voiced his concerns to a National Research Council panel in Washington, D.C. The panel evaluated monitoring capabilities at the eight chemical weapons storage facilities around the country, and after discussing the specifics of the BGAD site, officials concluded that CWWG’s concerns were warranted – a development Williams said illustrates the need for continued engagement and vigilance.

Other issues to be resolved include how to properly dispose of secondary waste once rockets are neutralized and destroyed, but more immediately, how the facility can recruit a qualified workforce without raiding the talent of central Kentucky’s other industries.

Williams notes, for example, a situation in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where a disposal facility was built, yet recruiting qualified technicians proved difficult. As a result, many positions had to be filled with workers who weren’t necessarily the best qualified to engage in a sensitive operation like disposing of chemical weapons.

Reflecting on CWWG’s two-decade effort to bring about the safe removal of the chemical agents, Williams said he wishes he had understood sooner the importance of bringing technical experts into the process during the early years of the effort. Moreover, he learned that simply opposing incineration wasn’t enough to achieve the desired end result.

“If you go into a political situation where all you do is take out the light bulb and don’t have one to put back in the socket, everyone is in the dark," Williams said. “You’ve got to have a solution. Once we got to that point, then things started to move. Everybody was rowing in the same direction."

Williams said the Army, for its part, also made a paradigm shift by engaging the community. “Everybody’s on the same page now and everything’s very transparent, and that’s the recipe to get there," said Williams. “The recipe is not ‘We’re the military and we’re going to tell you what to do.’ That doesn’t work. And I’ve seen that create problems. Now the government agency that oversees this program has developed a real sensitivity to what it means to engage communities in a meaningful way."

Last summer Williams was honored in Washington by Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, who praised the Berean’s efforts to insure that the demilitarization program stayed on the right track.

But despite the praise from government officials and an apparent success in preventing the incineration of the depot’s chemical weapons stockpile, Williams says the community isn't quite out of the woods yet. “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over," said Williams. We’re moving in the right direction, but we can’t take our eye off the ball. There are a lot of decisions yet to be made, a lot of issues yet to be dealt with."

Thoughts from
Craig Williams, Director CWWG

Heat from the right:

“People have this thing about ‘activists.’ Well, hell, this country was founded by activists. I’m proud to be an activist. But some people take it in a way that they automatically assume that you have some kind of ulterior motive, and that you’re not really doing what you’re doing for the reasons that you say you’re doing it."

Heat from the left:

“Some people have come up to me, especially people on the left, activist type, anti-war type, and have jumped all over me for this [Mitch] McConnell relationship. My response to that is: ‘Oh. Maybe I should have gone to our other senior senator who is the majority whip. And by the way, who is that?"