Local News
Posted: Thursday, July 1, 2010
Interim chem demil manager named
By JOHN NORTON
A longtime engineer with the program assigned to destroy Pueblo’s chemical weapons stockpile was named to head the program here over the summer.
Scott Susman will be interim site project manager, replacing for now Gary Anderson who is leaving Pueblo to run the chemical demilitarization in Umatilla, Ore.
Kevin Flamm, manager of the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program, said, “Hopefully we’ll have a new site manager here by early fall.” Flamm was at Wednesday evening’s meeting of the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Committee.
“Scott’s got a wealth of knowledge,” Flamm said. “He’s been part of the engineering team since the inception of the ACWA program.”
Flamm said he was sorry to see Anderson go. Anderson will be leaving ACWA, which only oversees demilitarization work in Pueblo and at the Bluegrass Army Depot in Kentucky, and will return to the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency, where he’d worked before. The CMA runs all the other demilitarization facilities. Susman lives in Maryland.
“Gary’s leadership really has paved the way,” Flamm said, describing how Anderson had been in charge here since the groundbreaking.
Susman has been an engineer with the ACWA program since 1997, responsible for the test and evaluation of the alternative technologies to incineration that were mandated by Congress for Pueblo and Bluegrass.
Prior to joining the ACWA program, he worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, developing smoke munitions and delivery systems as well as pyrotechnics.
In other business, Flamm said there had been no decision yet from Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on a proposal to blow up as many as 125,000 weapons in special containment devices. The plan purportedly would allow the United States to continue its weapons-destruction work because it’s expected that the last CMA sites will finish incineration two years before the water-neutralization plant here comes on line.
The idea has gotten a cool response from Colorado’s commission and its data also has been criticized by the Environmental Protection Agency.