Workers, Army debate source of illness

The judge hearing a lawsuit on ailing construction workers at the Umatilla Chemical Depot says he will tour the site

11/01/03

The judge hearing a lawsuit involving workers sickened at Umatilla Chemical Depot said he will personally visit the Eastern Oregon chemical weapons site this month, as lawyers for the workers and the U.S. Army made closing arguments on Friday.

Magistrate Dennis Hubel, hearing the case for the U.S. District Court in Portland, said he hopes to tour the depot on Veterans Day to help him understand the facts of the complicated case. There is no jury in the trial, which could be just the first of several phases of the lawsuit against the government.

In the first phase, the plaintiffs are trying to show that the Army was negligent in not providing decent health care to workers who built the depot's big incinerator complex for chemical weapons. That incinerator is being tested and may start burning the depot's killing chemicals in the spring.

But in 1999, workers for defense contractor Raytheon Co. were still building the complex when something sickened many of them.

On Sept. 15, 1999, dozens of workers began coughing and complaining of pain, nausea and breathing problems. One of the workers was taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance, while nearly three dozen others went by bus.

Both sides agree that the Army quickly decided that the workers had not been exposed to nerve gas leaking from the concrete "igloos" where chemical weapons are stored at the site. The Army and Raytheon declared that some sort of chemical being used in construction caused the workers to fall ill.

Many of the sickened workers think that they were exposed to sarin gas, however, and that the Army covered up that exposure.

For this phase of the trial, they don't need to show nerve gas was present, their lawyer, James McCandlish, said in court Friday. They just need to show that the Army did not check thoroughly for nerve agent or provide the medical care it was supposed to. As several of the workers watched, McCandlish called the Army negligent on both counts.

He argued that agreements among Umatilla-area hospitals, the Army and Raytheon show that Raytheon was responsible only for minor health incidents during construction, those involving one or two workers. The Army kept responsibility for responding to major emergencies, whether or not they were caused by chemical weapons, McCandlish said.

But when the workers got sick, it took Army officials more than an hour to go to the construction site, McCandlish said. He also said the Army relied on poor information -- wind measurements and insufficient chemical tests -- in deciding the incident wasn't a nerve gas release.

"In short, your honor," McCandlish said, "we've got a situation where the government sticks its head in the sand in a major event that happens within an Ichiro Suzuki throw of the most dangerous weapons known to man."

But Jim Brennan, the government's lawyer, said it was Raytheon's job to care for its workers' health unless there was a release of chemical weapons, in which case the Army would step in. And Army scientists knew there was no sarin released, based on their chemical monitors, weather data and records of when Army personnel worked on weapons igloos.

"It didn't take them too long" to rule out nerve agent exposure, Brennan agreed. "That doesn't reflect that the Army was too hasty. It reflects that they know how these chemicals act. . . . And there was no evidence there was a chemical release."

Hubel said he will tour the depot before weighing in on the case, so a decision is weeks away.