ARMY NERVE AGENT

Reason for concern

Published: Friday, March 3, 2006
Updated: Friday, March 3, 2006

The Environmental Protection Agency has dropped its opposition to a plan that calls for the transfer of 4 million gallons of caustic wastewater --a byproduct of deactivating the chemical weapon VX -- from Indiana to New Jersey.

But this battle isn't --  and shouldn't be -- over yet.

VX is a nerve agent developed in the 1960s. One drop of the liquid can kill a man. Some 250,000 gallons of the chemical have been stockpiled at an Army facility in Newport, Ind. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, however, requires destruction of chemical weapons by the year 2007.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the Army wants to dump the caustic VX byproduct -- hydrolysate -- into the Delaware River after further treatment by the DuPont Co.'s wastewater-treatment plant in Salem County.

The EPA may have signed off on the deal. But the state of Delaware, the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will still have to review the plan.

Considering the sensitivity of the Delaware River and Delaware Bay ecosystems, those reviews are crucial.

An earlier report by the CDC said the hydrolysate -- a drain-cleaner like substance -- could still contain traces of VX. And according to a May 2004 Army document, VX neutralized at levels that humans could tolerate in emergency situations was still well above levels that killed striped bass. In that study, 20 parts per billion was referred to as the detection limit. A human could drink the water and not die. But seven out of 10 juvenile striped bass did die. And, at a slightly higher ratio of 25 ppb, 10 out of 10 white perch were killed.

The DEP is already waging a battle to save the red knot, a tiny bird that flies thousands of miles on its yearly migration. It stops in New Jersey specifically to feed on horseshoe crab eggs. The red knot is now threatened by a decline in horseshoe crabs, leading to controversial plans for a ban on horseshoe-crab harvesting.

And this is only one of the environmental issues in the Delaware Bay. Adding a nerve-agent byproduct to the mix could be a dangerous step.

DuPont would reportedly get $13.5 million a year during the two- to three-year treatment process. Considering what that money would mean to the company, and considering the dismal record of environmental protection under the Bush administration, New Jersey and Delaware have good reason to remain concerned.