Hilton Kelley, along with the Kentucky based Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG), Sierra Club and Citizens Against Incineration at Newport (CAIN) announced that they intend to sue the US Army, the US Army Chemical Materials Agency (CMA) as well as the National Environmental Policy Act for allowing VX wastewater, hydrolysate, to be shipped from Indiana to Port Arthur's Veolia Environmental Services plant. The groups base their claims on information from confidential sources at the Newport Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Indiana that the VX wastewater is more toxic than the Army claims it is.

Releasing a Notice of Intent to Sue, attorney for the groups, Mick Harrison of Bloomington, Indiana stresses the dangers of transporting the "VX-contaminated waste" across eight states and "notes that workers at the Army's Indiana facility have made allegations claiming the concentrations of VX nerve agent and other very toxic chemicals in the waste are being misrepresented by the Army."

"All we are asking is that they re-test the top layer of the chemical," Harrison said in a telephone interview Friday. "After being neutralized, the chemical sits and separates into two layers. The top layer can reform into VX."

Harrison said the suit does not believe Veolia is at fault, but said that the company has been mislead with the wrong information supplied by the Army. If he were Veolia, he said, he would demand that the chemical be re-tested before it is shipped across the country.

But even transporting the wastewater is a problem for the plaintiffs in the case. According to Harrison, the Army and Veolia should not legally be able to cross state lines with the wastewater because Congress passed a law that prohibits the shipping of chemical weapons across state lines.

However, according to the Biological and Chemical Weapons: Criminal Sanction and Federal Regulations, governmental agencies and departments are exempted from the Federal law in emergency situations or if they are attempting to destroy or seize a chemical weapon.

Harrison said his clients are just "good, nice people who don't want to play into the "not in my backyard" mentality.

"They don't want Indiana's toxic problems to become other communities' problems. It's not fair to other states," he said.

In an effort to stop future shipments from Indiana, Kelley and the Community In Development Association plans to hold a protest Saturday at 6 p.m. across the highway from Veolia, which is located on Texas 73, three miles past Taylor's Bayou.