HERMISTON -- The second day of incineration at the Umatilla Chemical Depot went smoother than the first. Crews successfully destroyed two rockets filled with chemical nerve agent Thursday.

Crews placed a rocket on the plant's second processing line at 8:55 a.m. and the draining, chopping and processing of the M55 rocket containing GB sarin nerve agent was finished by 9:15 a.m., said Rick Kelley, spokesman for Washington Group International, the contractor responsible for the incineration plant 35 miles south of the Tri-Cities.

The process didn't go as smoothly during the facility's debut run Wednesday, where a bumped emergency stop button delayed the process several hours.

The button, which had to be reset, caused a sliding door to stick that should have opened to drop the first piece of rocket into the deactivation furnace below. Crews eventually were able to jump-start the systems and complete destroying the rocket.

On Thursday, the incinerator processed a second rocket on the problem line at 1:06 p.m., Kelley said. This time everything worked and the rocket parts dropped into the furnace at 1:13 p.m.

Depot staff are planning to slowly increase the number of rockets processed each day, Kelley said. Today, two more rockets are scheduled to be destroyed on one line, then two more on the second line Saturday and on Sunday crews will "integrate the two lines with two rockets each."

The Umatilla facility is following a 90-day plan developed at the Anniston Chemical Depot in Alabama, Kelley said. "It is a deliberate process and we have plenty of rockets to continue working on that 90-day plan," he said.

The Umatilla Chemical Depot stores 100,000 M55 rockets, 90,000 of which contain sarin gas. The other 10,000 contain VX nerve agent.

In all, the depot stores 220,604 munitions and containers filled with 7.4 million pounds of deadly nerve and mustard agents.

Mustard agents stored at the depot date to World War II. All the nerve agents were brought to the depot for storage between 1962 and 1969.

The destruction process is expected to take 10 years.

While the plant is permitted to destroy 40 rockets in an hour, Kelley estimated that the plant more likely would process 26 to 28 rockets per hour.

In the meantime, Army staff moved two more pallets of 15 rockets to the incineration facility Thursday, said Mary Binder, depot spokeswoman. That brought the total to five pallets of rockets moved into the facility.

There are plans to move two more pallets from the protective igloos to a holding area in the incineration facility today, Binder said.

Although incineration has begun at the depot, incineration opponents still are hoping to stall the process and today planned to file an injunction request with the Oregon Court of Appeals in Salem, said attorney Stu Sugarman.

Sugarman, an attorney for GASP, a local group opposed to the incinerator, said he was optimistic about the injunction, which previously was denied in Multnomah County Circuit Court. "We have a right to a trial yet were unfairly denied that right in trial court," he said.

The injunction asks that operations at the incinerator be halted until a case called GASP I is decided. The case asks that the permits for the incinerator facility be revoked and the site look at using alternative technology to destroy the chemical nerve agents stored at Umatilla.

GASP I still is waiting for an opinion but Sugarman did not know when to expect one, saying it could be months. He says he hopes to have a decision on the injunction from the Oregon Court of Appeals within 10 to 21 days.

He said he does not worry that the depot's startup would harm the injunction's chances in court.