Published: March 2, 2010
Chem demil methods divide Army, local oversight panel
Blowing up weapons could start in 2012 .
By JOHN NORTON
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
The Army said its environmental assessment sees no problem with blowing up some of the chemical weapons stored here but leaders of a local oversight panel called the report inadequate and questioned the timing of its release.
The Pentagon, feeling the need to make a better effort to keep weapons destruction programs moving in the eyes of other countries with their own programs, wants to bring equipment to the Pueblo Chemical Depot in 2012 to start blowing up weapons two years before the earliest estimate for startup of a water neutralization system.
The plant now under construction will clean out the weapons and chemically break down the mustard agent.
The depot houses 780,000 mortar rounds and artillery shells containing 2,611 tons of mustard agent and the Defense Department figures it could blow up 125,000 of them over two years.
Irene Kornelly, chair of the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Commission, has said that Pentagon officials tell her the State Department is concerned that it will look like the United States isn’t serious about its treaty obligation if it stops destruction activity after the last incineration plant closes in 2012. The Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternative program, the Pentagon agency overseeing water neutralization programs at Pueblo and Kentucky’s Blue Grass Army Depot, calls the new idea the “Bridging the Gap” program.
The agency released a draft environmental assessment over the weekend saying there would be “no significant impact” from the program.
Kornelly said that at last week’s meeting of the Colorado commission, she asked ACWA officials when the assessment would be released. “They said they didn’t have any idea. The public comment period ends before the next scheduled commission meeting April 28,” she said. “Call me cynical?”
Kornelly said she has been e-mailing commission members to set up a March meeting to go over the report.
“We will have a CAC meeting in March. We definitely will have one,” she said Monday.
After reading the assessment, Kornelly said, “It’s a little short on any kind of details.” For example, she added, “It says, ‘We’re not going to use that much water,’ but they didn’t tell us how much we’re going to use.”
Commission members have always known that some of the weapons, the more than 500 leaking ones that have been secured in steel cylinders, would have to be destroyed in some sort of explosive chamber but the new plan is on an enormous scale.
Ross Vincent, of the Sierra Club and another commission member, agreed with Kornelly.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “It is typically superficial and inadequate for a proposal that’s as dramatic as this one is. It’s a major change in the design for the destruction of chemical weapons. It’s inadequate in scope and detail and falls short of the kind of discussion (the National Environmental Protection Act) requires. They need to go back to the drawing board. They need to do a full-scale supplemental environmental impact statement."
ACWA officials will host a public comment session from 6 to 8 p.m. March 18, at the Olde Towne Carriage House, 102 S. Victoria Ave.
norton@chieftain.com