ARSENAL BEGINS DISPOSING OF CHEMICAL ID SETS

By Amy Riggin/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Thursday, August 11, 2005

Crews at the Pine Bluff Arsenal this month began destroying more remnants of the nation's former chemical weapons program.

Now being targeted are identification sets that were used to train soldiers and civilians in the identification and handling of chemical agents.

More than 170,000 of the sets were manufactured between 1928 and 1969. The sets of glass vials and bottles contain small quantities of chemical agents such as mustard and lewisite, as well as industrial chemicals.

The Army declared the sets obsolete in 1971 and began destroying them in 1979.

The transportable rapid response system, or RRS, which was last used at Ft. Richardson, Alaska, in July 2003, is designed to safely identify, access, segregate and neutralize chemical agents found in the sets.

The mission at the Arsenal marks the system's largest project to date, with more than 5,000 sets to be destroyed.

"The RRS site today was once a muddy, overgrown field with little access," Richard DiMauro, RRS system manager, said. "We have built up the land, added an access road and installed utilities. It's required a lot of work and support by great people."

The non-stockpile program spent the past two years analyzing the items at the Pine Bluff Munitions Assessment System, which provided a clear plan to neutralize the items.

The central hub of the RRS is the operations trailer, where chemical neutralization takes place. Inside, operators unpack, sort and neutralize items at a three-station glove box. Negative pressure inside the trailer and glove box prevents vapor release. The air in the trailer is monitored and processed through carbon filters.

The program's explosive destruction system will begin work later this year to destroy and neutralize recovered chemical warfare items stored at the Arsenal. Those items are currently being assessed.

The non-stockpile program, while also a division of the Army's Chemical Materials Agency, is separate from the incineration process currently under way at the Arsenal.

The Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility is incinerating 12 percent of the nation's chemical weapons stockpile. The stockpile items -- sarin and VX rockets, VX land mines and mustard agent -- are still in relatively good condition, while non-stockpile items are fewer in quantity and must be dealt with on an individual basis, a spokesman said.