ARSENAL REPORTS ANOTHER FIRE DURING INCINERATION

By Wilson Brown/THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, November 12, 2005 9:41 AM CDT

Officials at the Pine Bluff Arsenal brought weapons incineration in the explosive containment room to a halt after pieces of sheared rocket apparently caught fire early Saturday morning.

A control room operator at the Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility responded to a fire alarm in the containment room at 4:06 a.m., said Raini Wright, a PBCDF spokeswoman, after a small flame came out of the deactivation furnace’s tipping gate.

The flame lasted for several minutes and was put out by the facility’s sprinkler system, Wright said in a written statement.

No rockets were being destroyed at the time of the fire, she said, and no chemical agent reached outside of the room’s engineering controls so there was no danger to the work force, the public or to the environment.

Wright could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

“The cause of the event appears to be the ignition of residue material near the hopper area,” said Mark Greer, the acting PBCDF site project manager, in a written statement.

“The hopper is the container that holds sheared rocket pieces before they are released into the deactivation furnace.”

“Operations will resume after all systems have been checked and it is determined that it is safe to proceed,” he said.

But neither arsenal nor PBCDF officials gave an exact date of when incineration might resume.

PBCDF has processed 27,819 rockets drained of the nerve agent GB and 266,249 pounds of GB to date.

The arsenal houses 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile.

The GB M55 rockets are currently being disposed of in the first disposal campaign, followed by the VX rockets, the VX landmines and by the HD/HT bulk containers.

Weapons disposal at the arsenal began in late March after two rockets filled with sarin nerve agent were incinerated on post.

Arsenal workers have had trouble destroying the M55 rockets since the start of the weapons burn.

A number of small, contained fires occurred in the rooms after certain parts of the rockets caught fire.