The Planet
August, 2003

Army Burns—Club Fumes

“THE PLANET: A Publication of the National Sierra Club

As the bus pulled up to the gates of the Anniston Army depot, half a dozen police cars were already waiting for us, along with a bevy of reporters from regional newspapers and network television affiliates. Three armed troopers stood in the parking lot, hands on hips, reflector shades gleaming; three more barred the entrance to the depot, arms folded across their chests.

Sierra Club activist Rufus Kinney, a member of the Anniston-based Families Concerned about Nerve Gas Incineration and a professor at nearby Jacksonville State College, stood at the front of the jam-packed bus and commandeered the microphone. “OK,” he said. “Let me get off first and talk to the officers. I’ll let them know this will be a non-violent protest; we don’t want anyone ending up in jail. I’ll find out where we can assemble, and if there’s a line past which we can’t go. Then I’ll give the signal for you to come out.”

The occasion was a June 21 Sierra Club rally in west Anniston, Alabama, a mostly poor and African American community that abuts the Army depot. The Army has built, and now wants to fire up, a chemical weapons incinerator to destroy the 2,254 tons of outdated but deadly chemical munitions currently stored at the depot. The Sierra Club, as part of a coalition of environmental justice and citizens’ groups and concerned Anniston residents, is pushing to retrofit the incinerator for an advanced alternative called neutralization that has been shown to be both safer and more effective than incineration.

When Kinney gave the sign, we filed out of the bus. Several additional carloads of locals and Club activists had pulled up, and they now joined the busload of 50 or so marchers, chanting “Incineration, no! Neutralization, yes!” One protester was dressed as the grim reaper, replete with sickle and gasmask, and marchers carried signs and banners with messages like, “Environmental justice for all” and “Incineration hurts children and other living things.” One little girl carried a sign that read, “Children should grow, not glow.”

As the TV cameras rolled and reporters scribbled, several speakers, including Kinney, Alabama Chapter Chair Neil Milligan, Club EJ co-organizer John McCown, Club Senior policy Advisor Ross Vincent, and several local residents addressed the crowd, calling on the Army to make the health of Anniston residents a higher priority and consider alternatives to incineration.

“This is Crazy In Alabama taken to a new level,” charged Kinney. “There is zero enthusiasm for the incinerator on the west side of Anniston, but the people aren’t being given a choice. Governor Riley, you must not sign off on this before safety measures have been taken to protect the residents of this community.”

“The Army has developed several other methods for getting rid of these chemical agents that are much safer,” said Vincent. “The liquid neutralization processes that have been developed and demonstrated by the Department of Defense will work on the Anniston stockpile. I live in Pueblo, Colorado, one of the sites where we will be using neutralization methods. Why aren’t the folks in Alabama being given the option of choosing those other alternatives?”

The rally was just one component of a larger event, a daylong workshop sponsored by the Sierra Club’s Alabama Chapter and its Environmental Justice Committee, and attended by Club activists from across the south, as well as Anniston and area residents. The workshop was organized by Alabama organizer Peggie Griffin; Alabama Chapter Chair Milligan; Louisiana Sierra Club activists Barbara Coman and Maura Wood; and Environmental Justice Grassroots Organizing Program Co-directors John McCown and Jim Price.

While the afternoon protest focused on the Army depot and incinerator, the day’s events focused on a host of challenges the community has faced, including the fact that for upward of 40 years west Anniston residents were subjected, however unintentionally, to PCB pollution and other toxic releases produced by the Monsanto (now Solutia) company’s Anniston plant. Some west Anniston residents now have the highest concentrations of PCBs in their blood of anyone ever tested—anywhere—and many people feel it is no coincidence that the Army has located one of its eight incinerators in west Anniston, where the local populace is overwhelmingly poor and minority, not politically empowered, and already poisoned.

“We believe that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color bear disproportionate environmental burdens in our society,” said Neil Milligan in his opening remarks to a packed conference room of Club activists from Alabama, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, in addition to locals from Anniston and the surrounding area. “On behalf of the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club, I ask that you take on some of the burden hand help these victims lighten their load.”

Several speakers addressed the crowd, including a panel of Anniston residents who have suffered—or seen their family and friends suffer—from the pollution that has been inflicted upon them.

Arameta Porter was an Anniston schoolteacher until she was beset with symptoms such as impaired vision and involuntary facial contortions, which rendered her unable to work. Her doctors believe she was exposed to nerve agents leaking from the Anniston depot. Another longtime west Anniston resident, Jeanette Champion, has difficulty seeing and walking. She sat beside her granddaughter, who had to undergo massive surgery when she was one day old to correct birth defects that Champion attributes to PCB poisoning. Champion told the audience that she had seen whole families wiped out by cancer.

“My daddy’s liver was destroyed by PCBs,” she said. “My children have seen so much death, and I’ve had so many of my family die in my arms. If you live past 57 around here it’s a landmark. Now I see my own government rushing to get an incinerator up and going to put more chemicals and harmful things on us. In our Pledge of Allegiance it says ‘One nation under God with liberty and justice for all.’ If this is true than why is this happening to us? Is it because we are a poisoned community to begin with? Is it because we are poor and just don’t count because we have no money?”

Next, a panel including area residents Brenda Lindell and Rufus Kinney, Club Senior Adviser Ross Vincent, and Craig Williams, director of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG), addressed the gathering. Williams described how in 2000, rocket pieces jammed in the deactivation furnace in Tooele, Utah—where chemical incineration is already underway—resulting in the release of deadly sarin gas from the facility. He insists that the Army is pursuing a program in Anniston that is neither as safe nor as effective as liquid neutralization, and that it is rushing to fire up the incinerator before the so-called “collective protection program” promised to Anniston residents has been put in place.

“Incineration is a perfect example of the way you don’t want to handle this material,” said Williams,” which is to expose it to heat, change it into a gas, and have a delivery system in the form of a smokestack.” He explained that of the eight sites around the country where toxic nerve agents are set to be destroyed, the four that have been given alternatives to incineration have all opted for neutralization. Alabama has never been given that alternative.

Lindell, who has testified in the U.S. Senate against the incinerator, said she is encouraging her own college-age children not to return to Anniston if the incinerator fires up. “The army has told us for years that the stockpiling of chemical weapons is the greatest risk, and they’ve drummed into us that the risk will diminish once burning begins. But they never talk about the effects of the incineration process itself.”

Vincent, a chemical engineer by training, told the crowd that incinerators inevitably release toxic chemicals. “No matter how many layers of containment they put around it, some of that material escapes,” he said. “When incineration was a new idea in the early ‘80s, it may not have been such an outrageous idea, but now it is.”

“You picked the right place to have your Gulf Coast RCC meeting,” said Rufus Kinney, “because our backs are against the wall.” That afternoon, Kinney led a chartered bus on a Toxic Tour of the abandoned neighborhoods (due to PCB pollution) and toxic sites around west Anniston. The afternoon’s events culminated in the rally at the gates of the incinerator.

In preparation for the incinerator to commence operation, nearly 12,600 protective hoods, 8,571 portable air filtration units, and 9,633 “Shelter-in-Place” units—boxes containing duct tape, plastic sheets, a towel, scissors, and an instructional videotape—have been distributed to west Anniston residents by the Calhoun County Emergency Management Association. But a spokesman for the county said only 50 percent of homes in the so-called “pink zone,” the 6-mile swath of homes surrounding the incinerator, have the safety gear.

“This is the only American community where a civilian population has ever received gas masks,” Rufus Kinney told the interviewer in an MSNBC News segment. “That’s not very reassuring, but we demanded them. [The Army] wouldn’t have given us anything except that groups like ours demanded protection we have a right to by law.

“We’re not asking that [the chemical weapons] be moved somewhere else,” he continued. “We believe that everybody should take care of their own mess in their own backyard. But the Army is far from having the maximum protection in place that we have a right to by federal law. Other communities that have chemical weapons stockpiles in this same program, in Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland, and Colorado, [have] said ‘we’re not going to have an incinerator’…and they’re all going to neutralize their stockpiles.”

On July 16 the Alabama Department of Environmental Management said it had notified Alabama Governor Bob Riley that it was nearly ready to let the incinerator begin a “shakedown period” that will include trial burns of live agents. Club organizer Peggie Griffin and other Alabama activists quickly coordinated an effort with the CWWG to flood Governor Riley’s office with phone calls “from far and wide,” asking him not to sign the incinerator permit. The governor subsequently requested that the Army not start burning the chemical weapons before granting him the authority to shut down the incinerator if there were any problems, but this was denied. "The Army obviously doesn't care about community protection, preparedness, or the position of the Governor,” asserted Brenda Lindell of Families Concerned about Nerve Gas Incineration.

But in the weeks that followed the June 21 protest at the gates of the Anniston depot, national media, including NBC Nightly News, CNN, and various cable news networks, have featured segments on Anniston, and a groundswell of public opposition to the incinerator has begun to grow.

On July 18, the United Church of Christ announced a unanimous resolution calling on the Army to stop the incineration of chemical weapons and immediately replace incinerators with safer technologies. “When I heard that my 92-year-old grandmother was given a gas mask as protection from a chemical agent release, I knew that we had to act,” said UCC Minister Pamela Cheney. “To burn chemical weapons when there is a better alternative—that is simply shameful!”

On July 31, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management issued its final approval even though governor Riley’s request had been denied. (Alabama has a statute which specifically prohibits the governor from having any authority over the state regulatory authority; in most states the governor would have to sign such a permit.) Army officials immediately announced their intention to start burning on August 6. The following Monday, August 4, the CWWG filed a Temporary Restraining Order petition in federal court in Washington, D.C., against the fire-up of the Anniston. Unfortunately, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled against the injunction on August 8, allowing the Army to commence burning.

“Justice has not been served,” said CWWG spokesperson Monica Rohde, who attended the hearing. “We will continue all of our efforts to ensure that workers and families in Anniston and the surrounding communities will be granted maximum protection from lethal chemical agents that they so deserve.”

At this writing the Judge Jackson’s ruling has just been handed down, and it is not known if and when the incinerator will fire up. The CWWG is considering further legal action, and a march and rally has been planned in downtown Anniston for Saturday, August 16.

But whatever transpires from here on in, thanks to the efforts of the Alabama Sierra Club, the CWWG, and activists throughout the southeast who traveled to Anniston to make their voices heard, the situation in Anniston has risen startlingly fast from being a local issue that few outside Alabama even knew about, to a story of national import. The incineration juggernaut has been cast into the media spotlight, and pressure continues to be brought to bear on the Army to put in place a contingency plan and comprehensive safety measures to protect the residents of west Anniston and the 75,000 people who live immediately downwind of the Army depot.