ARSENAL INCINERATION RESUMES AFTER FIRE, MAINTENANCE, TRAINING

By Amy Riggin/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Wednesday, July 27, 2005

WHITE HALL -- Chemical weapons incineration at the Pine Bluff Arsenal resumed Tuesday after a two-week lull in operations.

Randy Long, site project manager for the Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, told members of the Arsenal's Citizens Advisory Commission during a meeting Tuesday that one rocket had been processed that afternoon, the first since July 7. There has been no chemical agent incinerated since July 8.

Long said he expected incineration to continue today after "final preventative maintenance activities" were conducted.

"Since we had an outage of this duration, we actually will go through a slow and deliberate restart again," he said.

So far, the facility has disposed of 13,330 rockets and nearly 120,000 pounds of the nerve agent sarin that was drained from them.

Long said that processing had taken place only 31 of the past 56 days since the Commission last met.

Officials reported that the delay has been due to routine maintenance activities and additional personnel training.

A small, 40-second fire also occurred on July 17 in the explosive containment room while operations were halted, which resulted in the need for additional repairs and testing.

David Reber, project general manager for contractor Washington Group International, said Arsenal officials notified the Army on Friday that the facility was ready and received the green light to resume processing Monday.

Reber also told commissioners that the company voluntarily halted operations during a portion of the down time to investigate the misuse of employee security badges used to access different areas of the facility.

Reber said WGI did not find out until July 5 that five employees were involved in exchanging badges back in May, apparently in an effort to speed up the process by getting into areas of the facility to which they no longer had access. He said the badges were exchanged "to accomplish some work at the facility," and that there was never any danger to the public as a result.

"However, it's clearly in violation of the process," Reber said.

In response to a question from Commissioner Betsy Francis, Reber declined to give specifics what action was taken involving those employees.

"But this is serious enough that we don't tolerate that behavior ... so not all of the employees will be returning with us," he said.

Reber called on two employees to address the Commission, who assured them that there would not be a repeat of the incident.

"For the majority of the people out there who are left this is a wake-up call," Roger Rheaume, a munitions handler at the facility, said. "We follow our rules."