A high-temperature furnace near Hermiston destroyed more than 21/2 tons of sarin nerve agent Sunday, lowering the stockpile of Oregon's deadliest possession.
Since Sept. 8, an assembly line of workers and machines has drained sarin from roughly 660 rockets stored at the U.S. Army's Umatilla Chemical Depot. The emptied rockets were chopped to pieces and processed in a 1,000-degree Fahrenheit furnace, to burn off chemical residues.
The drained nerve agent, about a gallon per rocket, was stored until crews had at least 500 gallons -- enough to send to a separate furnace for bulk processing.
Early Sunday afternoon, workers started feeding the sarin into the liquid furnace stoked to more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt sand into glass. Over the next 11 hours, the furnace destroyed about 560 gallons of agent, the Army said.
"So far it looks like it's going pretty smoothly," said Shelly Ingram, spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which regulates the incinerator.
Ingram said workers had only a few small issues, such as adjusting instruments, that are expected with complex machinery. Last month, the depot had to suspend draining rockets for several days after human errors, including a situation in which workers accidentally walked into a room containing traces of nerve agent.
Doug Hamrick, who manages the incinerator for Army contractor Washington Group, said in a written statement that burning the sarin represents "the complete elimination of the risk associated with those individual munitions. There is nothing left to harm the public or impact the environment."
Army spokeswoman Mary Binder said crews would continue to build up and burn batches of sarin as they process the roughly 91,000 sarin-armed rockets left at the depot. The Army, which is destroying chemical weapons under an international treaty, is burning the sarin rockets first because they are the most dangerous.
Crews are slowly increasing the pace of destruction over a three-month startup, which will be followed by a high-rate trial run. Army and state regulators will assess that trial to make sure the incinerator works properly at capacity, and move ahead if no problems are found.
Andy Dworkin: 503-221-8239; andydworkin@news.oregonian.com