The U.S. Army's Deseret Chemical Depot voluntarily stopped work at a facility that catalogs and stores secondary hazardous waste after state inspectors criticized the plant's faulty monitoring system.
  
The temporary shutdown Thursday of the Stockton plant does not include the chemical weapon incinerator, where the U.S. Army is destroying a large portion of the nation's aging chemical weapons stored in Tooele County. The only area included in the shutdown analyzes potentially contaminated items such as equipment, cleaning materials, tools and gloves.
  
The threat caused by the lack of proper monitoring could have potentially harmed workers in the area, according to a letter sent Tuesday by the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
  
"Standard operating procedures are often not followed or have not been thoroughly developed," state inspectors concluded after a two-month review of the depot's Chemical Agent Munitions Disposal System, which has operated since August.
  
Moreover, "the overall attitude toward hazardous waste compliance is lax," the letter states.
  
Two days after receiving the letter, Col. Raymond Van Pelt decided to halt operations, fix the monitoring system and review procedures.
  
The depot expects the closure to last two to three months and will not restart the secondary waste evaluation until "we have corrected all deficiencies and achieved a disciplined operational mind-set," Van Pelt said.
  
The depot has three years to finish classifying the secondary waste before the Army closes the facility.
  
The affected building was previously used for research and development of the Army chemical waste incinerator.
  
In the first few months of its new mission, 130 Army civilian employees have examined a few hundred barrels of waste.
  
Overall, about 8,000 barrels are stored in the igloos that also contain nerve agent being destroyed at the depot's incinerator.
  
The state has asked depot managers to fix the monitoring system and provide new written procedures by Oct. 21.
  
"We recognize that this is something we need to work on," said depot spokeswoman Alaine Southworth.
  
mcanham@sltrib.com