Wild Alabama
April-June 2002

Up in smoke

Anniston residents are watching what's left of their dreams for a clean community go up in smoke, as the Army prepares to incinerate its chemical weapons stockpile. Despite strong grassroots opposition and viable alternative technologies for the 2,254 tons of weapons in the stockpile, all that stands between the community and the incinerator is a lawsuit by Gov. Don Slegelman to gain maximum protection for the Anniston residents who will have to shelter in place in the event of a chemical accident.

The $1 billion incinerator will bum sarin, mustard gas, and other chemical agent weapons, producing a cloud of chemical vapors including dioxins, PCBs, arsenic, mercury and lead.

For the past 15 years, Craig Williams and the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) have worked to formulate alternatives to chemical weapons incineration, because, he says, "frankly the technology as designed does not function as predicted." Nine chemical accidents at a prototype incinerator in Utah, five more at a similar full-scale facility in the Pacific, and two more at the third-generation incinerator in Utah support his argument against incineration near Anniston's 75,000 citizens.

"If you can't control the most deadly chemicals on the planet in your prototype facility," Williams says drily, "that would be a good time to reconsider the direction you're going in."

While the local business community seems to be in favor of the incinerator, -- the Calhoun Chamber of Commerce has asked the Governor to withdraw his lawsuit -- local grassroots groups are bluntly opposed. "We're too passive," said Rufus Kinney, a local activist with Families Concerned about Nerve Gas Incineration. "This Chamber of Commerce and the local newspapers, the realtors, they don't realize they're cutting their own throats."

Kinney spoke with WildAlabama recently about his crusade to obtain "maximum protection" for the people of Anniston while pushing for alternative methods to incineration. "Now, $130 million dollars were spent by FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] in Alabama," he said, depositing a cardboard box onto the kitchen table. "And this is what they've come up with." Inside the box are FEMA emergency supplies: duct tape, plastic, and blunt-ended scissors. Until Governor Siegelman's recent intervention, this was the only protection intended for 75,000 area residents in the event of a chemical accident. An instructional videotape comes with the package.

"What are they gonna tell you?" Kinney said. "Basically the idea is, if there's a major accident, you're set to have eight minutes, and there are people who are not going to have eight minutes. There are people who live within a mile of ground zero. And if you've got your eight minutes, that's supposed to give you time to go inside and duct tape a room."

Maximum protection will mean gas masks for Anniston citizens, "first-responder" suits for the police, fire and sheriff's departments, pressurized hospitals and nursing homes, and individual plans for the county's approximately 3,900 shut-ins. Kinney says it will also mean pressurizing the county's 37 schools. "They only wanted to do about seven or eight and now we're going to make them do all of them."

While FEMA has delivered on part of the $40.5 million it previously promised, the residents closest to the incinerator complain that they have received the least preparation. "Incineration is right in the middle of the black and poor community," says Rev. N.Q. Reynolds, national secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "We'll be the first to be blotted out." Although some county buildings have been pressurized, Reynolds notes, "They went outside the black community to do it."

According to information from Environmental Defense combining data from over 200 state and federal databases, people of color are in Calhoun county are 3.51 times as likely to be exposed to releases of toxic chemicals than their white counterparts. They are also 4.51 times as likely to suffer from facilities emitting criteria air pollutants. Families below the poverty line in Calhoun county are 2.55 times as likely to be exposed to releases of toxic chemicals than their high income neighbors to the east. They are also 2.36 times more likely to suffer from facilities emitting criteria air pollutants than high income families.

Williams cites Anniston as an extreme example of environmental injustice. "It's compounded by the existing toxic burden that that community is already dealing with," he said. "To pile more of this stuff, knowingly, on a community like that is just unconscionable. There's absolutely no excuse for it." Reynolds says, that for the poor and black community, living near the incinerator is like "living within a shadow."

Citizens opposed to the incinerator complain that the Army has withheld the truth about the risks, the costs and the duration of the planned incineration. "They keep saying that steam is going to come out the stack," Kinney said. He thumps the Army's own emissions data sheet for emphasis. "That 's what's coming out the durn stack." According to the Army's "Final Screening Risk Assessment," published in March of 1996, dioxins, PCBs, arsenic and a laundry list of other chemicals will be emitted from the incinerator stack during normal operations.

At a U.S. senate hearing last April, Kinney and his panel blew the lid off of the Army's claims that the incinerator in Anniston would bum for only four years and cost $14 billion. "Our panel got up and revealed from their own memos that they were going to bum for twelve years in Anniston," Kinney said. "We had a congressional audit team go in and corroborate everything we said. They said that the cost of the program would be $14 billion; their own memos said $24 billion."

The engineering of the Anniston incinerator is based on a similar chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele, Utah. The Tooele incinerator is the only full-scale facility incinerating weapons from the eight stockpiles in the continental United States as of press time. CWWG has documented two agent releases at the Tooele facility, and Williams adds, "we have ancillary evidence about dozens more."

"It [the Tooele incinerator] is woefully behind schedule, astronomically over budget, it has all kinds of worker exposure issues, environmental issues, whistleblower issues, you name it, all on the wrong side of the ledger," Williams said. "Emissions, agent releases, cost, schedule, steady operations, all of these things, you go down the list, they fail on every count. But, yet, they're telling everybody in Alabama that everything's fine," Even the Bush administration, not characteristically known for its environmental awareness, has labeled the chemical weapons demilitarization program "ineffective" in its 2003 budget proposal, citing a 60 percent cost increase estimate as well as "unrealistic schedules, site safety and environmental concerns, and poor planning."

Despite local media support of the Anniston incinerator, Williams remains skeptical of its safety. "Based on the historical performance of these facilities," he said, "it is predictable that there will be agent release incidents at this [the Anniston] facility."

The Army is obligated, because of a chemical weapons treaty, to dispose of the stockpile. Yet opponents of the incinerator believe that the population numbers in Anniston are too high and the technology too uncertain for incineration to occur safely. Approximately 1,500 people live near the Tooele, Utah incinerator, and the Johnston Atoll site is an uninhabited 1.5 square miles in the Pacific. Williams also points out that the Anniston environment is fundamentally different from the Johnston Atoll and Utah facilities. "It's just absurd for them to use ecological studies done on Kalama Island [at the Johnston Atoll incinerator] for people that are in a populated area like Anniston, Alabama," he said in a recent interview. "It's blatantly misleading, and fundamentally dishonest."

Although a Congressional mandate (public law 99-145) requires maximum protection for the people, environment, and workers involved in the destruction of lethal chemical munitions and weapons, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) denied an appeal against the Anniston incinerator permit of 1997, thereby placing the responsibility and costs of an accident almost entirely on local authorities.

"We're relying on the moral authority of our highly elected officials, and on a federal mandate," Kinney said, "because Alabama justice is not giving us any protection."

Liability in the event of an accident is vague, partly because of the nature of incineration itself. Legally, any citizens who feel their lives have been impacted must be able to prove that impact as the sole result of the incinerator. In a community already critically overburdened with PCBs, lead and mercury, Williams calls this "an impossible burden."

"You can't track it, because you don't know what or how much material is coming out at any given moment," Williams said. "That's part of the advantage, that's why it's attractive to polluters; it limits their liability."

"Twenty thousand people could get killed," Kinney says, "and the total liability of the contractor, Westinghouse, is $2 million. The same amount as the liability insurance of my washing machine repairman for his one-man company. We're set up for a Bhopal."

"They're using us very badly."

The original Army plan was to build incinerators at all eight stockpile sites, but many of those states passed laws that prevented those incinerators from ever being built.

"They passed permitting laws in their states that made it virtually impossible, they couldn't build an incinerator," Kinney explained. "So they picked on Alabama, where our woefully ignorant leaders were saying, 'Yeah, build the incinerator here.' Once they build it and bum the stockpile we'll be the biggest dumping ground in the world."

Kinney and other activists also worry about the Army using incineration techniques specifically advised against by the National Research Council (NRC). In a 1994 evaluation of the incineration program, the NRC emphasized separating the weapons into "distinct streams of [nerve] agent, energetic materials, metal parts, and dunnage (packaging and other miscellaneous material) prior to disposal or destruction." The report also notes that "this material separation is a major safety feature." According to Kinney, ADEM is considering allowing the Army to modify its original incineration permit to allow only one waste stream. "When it comes to the gelled rockets, the rockets that you can't drain because the liquid nerve agents turn to a jellylike substance, they're going to 'chop and drop' them into one furnace," Kinney said. "In complete opposition to everything that was permitted originally .... You have to have four separate waste streams in order to bum these rockets in line with the NRC's recommendations. And even then it is still emitting toxics on a chronic basis."

"ADEM lets them make up the program changes as they go along" Kinney said. "They just come up with more permit changes; ADEM rubber stamps them."

Dr. Suzanne Marshall, a local activist with Serving Our Future Environment (SAFE) is also critical of the Army's "piecemeal modifications" to its ADEM permits, complaining that the community often doesn't hear about any changes until after the fact. Marshall cites the fact there is often no public comment period for the people whose communities are affected by ADEM's decisions. "Even if there was," she said, "there's no way that normal human beings could keep up with their little modifications, [until] ultimately it's not anything like what the permit said."

"They never wanted public input. They don't care what the public thinks, they don't care what happens to the public. The public is definitely not invited to the party."

Despite the fact that the Colorado and Kentucky stockpiles -- similar if not identical to the one in Anniston -- do not have incinerators, and Anniston does, activists argue that it is still not too late for alternative disposal methods in Alabama. "We have an opportunity to have a safer disposal process deployed here [in Kentucky] and you all do too, it's not too late," Williams said. "The facility they've got there right now can be retro-fitted. Ninety percent of what's out there would be used just as it is. Only the actual treatment components of the plant need to be changed."

An approach called RNR, Reconfigure, Neutralize and Restore, based on Army engineering and Pentagon safety contingency plans drawn up in the 80s and 90s, provides for a quick elimination of risk in the event of a national emergency. In the aftermath of the events of Sept. 11. people on both sides of the incinerator issue are anxious to eliminate the risks these weapons pose to communities as quickly as possible. Under this plan, also called "Quick Elimination of Risk," weapons are dissembled so that they cannot explode, and the nerve agent is neutralized in a simple, low-temperature process.

Kinney states that "Quick Elimination of Risk," or "Quick Path," will be used at the Maryland stockpile. at a savings of roughly $200 million. "Quick Elimination of Risk" is also being implemented in Indiana.

Williams ventures that "Quick Elimination of Risk" could save the Anniston Army Depot up to $43 8 million in operations and maintenance costs, based on estimates gathered from sources inside of and surrounding the incineration program. His figures are based on reduced schedule costs and include the cost of retro-fitting the facility.

"Once it [nerve agent] has been neutralized it's still hazardous waste and it would still have to be treated in an appropriate secondary manner," Williams said. "But the point is that you eliminate the risk of the agent, you mitigate the risk during process, you're using a safer approach, you comply with the [Chemical Weapons Convention] treaty and you render the material useless to the terrorist community faster.

"Hopefully," says Kinney, "we can get everybody to see that this 'Quick Elimination of Risk' is the best way to go.

Alabama voters will be selecting a new governor this year, and the citizens of Anniston want the candidates to be aware of the responsibility before them. "There has to be a catastrophe before the conscience of the nation wakes up," Reynolds said in a recent interview. "All of us have got to be protected in this thing together. That's where the injustice is."

"Judgment's gonna really come," he said. "One way or the other. And you have to be careful about who you're trying to protect and who you're trying to forget about. If something really goes wrong, it'll be mass murder."