The state decided in mid-February to fine the Army and its contractor, Washington Demilitarization Co., $15,000 each for failing to notify Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality before temporarily rerouting waste water during some tests of the incinerator.

The Army and Washington Demilitarization appealed the proposed fines Feb. 27.

The appeals will go to a DEQ hearings officer. However, the two sides plan to meet in mid-May to try to resolve the dispute prior to a formal hearing being held.

The Army and Washington Demilitarization are preparing to start in July to incinerate rockets that contain GB nerve gas.

Each of the four incinerators in the depot facility has its own pollution scrubbing system. Salt water -- or brine -- is the end product of each scrubber.

Each stream of brine is then sent to the same evaporator system, which removes the water as vapor and leaves behind salt to be taken to a hazardous waste landfill.

What happened is that Washington Demilitarization was doing a test run of an incinerator -- minus any nerve gas -- while employees simultaneously did some work on the evaporator.

The company, with the Army's approval, installed a temporary drain to send the brine from the incinerator's test run directly to a tanker truck without putting it through the evaporator, said company spokesman Rick Kelley and Don Barclay, the Army's site project manager.

The state decided to fine the Army and Washington Demilitarization for not notifying it and for not getting a change in the depot's hazardous waste permit conditions before diverting the brine.

The depot contends that because the drain was a temporary -- not a permanent -- alteration, a notification and permit changes were not required, Barclay and Kelley said.

The evaporator work has since been finished, and it is now connected to the four pollution scrubbing systems. The temporary drain has been removed.