136th Year... and still on the job!	Thursday July 28, 2005

Chem demil work to follow most local recommendations

A local citizens' panel got some good news Wednesday night.

It appears that the destruction of mustard agent weapons at the Pueblo Chemical Depot will move forward pretty much the way they wanted.

Bill Pehlivanian, deputy program manager for the assembled chemical weapons alternative program, told the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens' Advisory Commission that the Defense Department instructed his boss, Mike Parker, to continue on with a new plan for weapons destruction here and at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky.

The new plan calls for most of the work to be done here, but explosive materials and wooden crates and pallets will be shipped off site. Parker wants to have the hydrolysate, the contaminated water from the neutralization process, treated on site, but did leave open the possibility of shipping it out if that made sense.

The local commission questioned off-site shipments of both explosives and hydrolysate but felt strongest about problems with transporting the latter.

ACWA is overseeing the programs at Blue Grass and in Pueblo where water neutralization will be used to destroy chemical agents instead of the incineration methods used for other stockpiles around the country.

John Klomp, chairman of the commission, welcomed the news, saying, "A couple of months ago we were very concerned if there was going to be a path forward."

On Friday, Parker met with Undersecretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg and presented a scaled-down proposal aimed at keeping the life cycle cost of the Pueblo project within the $1.5 billion pricetag the Pentagon had set several years ago.

ACWA officials told the Pentagon at that time that they could run a weapons destruction program using water neutralization for a cost comparable to incineration.

The Defense Department sent a certification of that guarantee to Congress using a $1.5 billion figure it estimated incineration would cost and locked ACWA into that figure, even though incinerators later have proved to cost as much as twice that and more.

The cost increases started after one of Krieg's predecessors ordered that the chemical weapons destruction program be accelerated in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Bechtel followed that order in its design work, sending the cost to $2.6 billion by the time it had completed 60 percent of the design work last fall. That's when the Defense Department put the project on hold.

Over the last few months, Bechtel developed a new plan that would use two processing lines instead of the three it had planned in the accelerated mode. It also will remove fuses and bursters from the artillery shells and mortar rounds and store them separately with propellants until the explosives can be shipped out. The original plan called for destroying the explosives here, too.

The new plan will mean that the plant will be less than half the size of the original one and the peak operational work force will be 900 instead of 1,200 originally expected.

Now that Krieg has given Parker a green light, Bechtel can start working again on its design. It's expected that it will be 60 percent complete, the point at which it goes back to the Pentagon for review, by February. This fall, the Defense Department also will start working on funding requests for the 2007 fiscal year.

Last week, Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Mitch McConnell introduced an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would allow the Defense Department to raise the certified life-cycle cost cap to a more reasonable level.

Pehlivanian said that won't mean going back to the accelerated design but it will mean that when the 60 percent design milepost is reached, the Pentagon can present Congress with a new pricetag.

Actual construction of buildings won't get started until after the design process has sufficiently progressed for Bechtel to know exact specifications.

Nevertheless, some work will get under way with about $25 million in contracts being awarded for phase one work.

Joe Nemec, project manager for Bechtel, said that two contracts have been awarded for preliminary work in the last few days.

A $154,000 contract was awarded for a site survey to White Shield Inc. of Kennewick, Wash. White Shield is partnering with C&M Consulting LLC of Pueblo which will be doing most of the work, he explained.

Soil and concrete testing, a contract valued at $230,000, was awarded to Kleinfelder Inc. of Pueblo.

A contract for fencing will be awarded Monday with work starting at the end of August. The contract for the "northwest passage" road, connecting the weapons storage area with the DOT road and providing a new access point to the chemical depot, will be awarded Aug. 17. That will be the main road in and out of the weapons destruction area, instead of the present main chemical depot entrance on U.S. 50.

Bechtel will issue requests for bids to build an access control point for the new entrance today with a contract expected to be awarded Sept. 27.

The commission also was told that Bechtel has turned over the outreach office to contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a national public relations and consulting firm that already does some work for ACWA at its Edgewood, Md., headquarters.

The outreach office is in charge of public presentations and public relations. A Pentagon inspector general's report last year was critical of letting Bechtel run the outreach operation, citing potential conflict of interest. Pentagon officials also were upset because Bechtel people had let the local commission members know about the problems they were having with the Defense Department.

Pehlivanian said that the outreach office staff will remain unchanged; they will just switch employers.