The military wasn’t prepared for a major emergency at Umatilla, he says.
WILLIAM MCCALL
The Associated Press
October 29, 2003
PORTLAND — Workers who say they were poisoned by a sarin gas leak at an Army chemical-weapons depot four years ago exposed “chaos” in emergency plans to deal with serious problems, the workers’ attorney argued Tuesday.
James McCandlish cross-examined Army doctor Lt. Col. Tim Mallon on the seventh day of a trial claiming the Army was negligent in failing to respond to mass illness at the depot site outside Hermiston.
McCandlish asked whether the hospitalization of 34 workers Sept. 15, 1999, showed that the military was not prepared for a major emergency, such as a weapons leak.
He asked Mallon, chief of the Army’s Madigan Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., whether the Army had no clear line of authority to oversee mass casualties, causing delays in transporting workers to the hospital and overwhelming local medical capacity.
But before Mallon could answer, Henry Miller, an attorney for the Department of Justice, objected to the way the question was phrased, and McCandlish abandoned it without a direct answer from Mallon.
U.S. District Judge Dennis Hubel, who is hearing the case without a jury, earlier had directly asked Mallon to detail the Army response to a hypothetical emergency involving mass casualties at Umatilla Chemical Depot.
The doctor said that he would have to take orders from the depot emergency operations center or the base commander.