Foes Seek to Halt Start-Up of Chemical Arms Incinerator

At this isolated military outpost, visitors receive a kit containing a black rubber gas mask and two stout hypodermic needles loaded with a potent antidote for nerve gas and mustard gas.

A grim Army video shows novices how to grasp the needles with a closed fist and jab them into the thigh after exposure to poison gas. Samples of giant crimson blisters caused by mustard agent, shown in the video, erase any doubt that the risks are extraordinary.

Inside the depot’s barbed-wire fence, the Army has built the nation’s first incinerator to destroy its thousands of tons of chemical weapons, some of which date from World War I. But the $1.6-billion facility, which the Army intends to start operating in the next few months, has become a national controversy.

Army officials insist that they have spared no expense in assuring the plant’s safety. Their twin goals: to minimize long-term environmental impact and to protect against loosing a catastrophic poison cloud over the nearby community of Tooele, about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Hypersensitive instruments will detect the most minute quantities of poison gas. Banks of charcoal filters will cleanse the air inside the plant. Scrubbers will purify the gases coming out of the plant’s five furnaces before sending them up a tall stack painted in bands of red and white.

“I expect no dead bodies here,” said Dave Jackson, the Army’s deputy manager at the incinerator and a trained safety engineer. “Every prudent safety mechanism has been incorporated into this plant.”

That has done little to mollify the critics, who demand that the Army delay starting up the plant or even abandon it. Incineration, they say, is inherently risky, and they accuse the Army of failing to pay for adequate emergency preparedness in the surrounding county.

The sheriff contends that he does not have the gas masks his deputies were promised. Sirens to alert residents of a poison gas leak have glitches, county officials say. Environmentalists charge that the incinerator will belch dioxin, PCBs and other cancer-causing agents. The former safety chief at Tooele, Steven Jones, says the plant is riddled with engineering flaws.

The controversy at Tooele is emblematic of a much wider political, environmental and financial crisis that is the legacy of the nation’s massive chemical warfare program.

With little consideration of the environmental consequences, the Army produced hundreds of thousands of tons of nerve and mustard agents over the last 80 years. Most of it was quietly dumped in the ocean after World War II, but 31,000 tons of mustard and nerve agents are still loaded into 3.3 million rockets, artillery shells, bombs and spray tanks that are stored in concrete-reinforced igloos at eight Army installations around the country.

When Congress in 1986 ordered the aging stocks of poison to be destroyed, it was estimated that the entire job would cost $1.8 billion.

A decade later, the cost has soared to $31 billion and will probably go much higher. Incinerating the weapons stockpile will cost roughly $12 billion, and removing weapons buried in 215 pits around the nation--originally not thought to represent a problem--will cost an additional $19 billion, according to Army reports.

When Congress ordered the old stockpiles destroyed in 1986 as part of a chemical weapons modernization plan, the job was supposed to be completed by 1994. An international treaty awaiting Senate ratification would also require the destruction of chemical stocks.

Now the Army plans to finish destroying the old weapons in 2004, a full decade behind schedule. So far, the job has barely started.

As for digging up buried munitions, no schedule even exists.

Cost Run-Up Defended

Army officials say the delays and the cost spiral, huge even by federal government standards, are not their fault. Maj. Gen. Robert Orton, program manager for chemical demilitarization, bluntly rejects suggestions that the Army mismanaged the program.

“I don’t think the folks putting this together in the mid-1980s could have predicted the kinds of changes in regulatory policies that we have had,” Orton said.

A 1994 audit by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that a lack of effective management had increased the program’s cost, schedule and performance risks. It detailed a long list of financial management shortcomings.

Indeed, the program to destroy the chemical warfare stocks has been bedeviled by almost everything that can go wrong with federal programs--changing regulatory policy, lax financial oversight, naive assumptions, government secrecy, poor planning and politically expedient legislation.

Only last year, the Defense Department belatedly acknowledged its weak oversight and put the program under the stricter control of a senior Defense Department acquisition board, a panel of officials that oversees major projects.

Congress set the stage for much of the unbridled cost growth in the chemical weapons destruction program when it required the Army to meet a standard of “maximum safety,” a poorly defined concept that essentially forced the Army to pay any cost for even modest additions to safety.

“To ensure safety is paramount; cost has played second fiddle,” said Louis Jackson, a chemical weapons expert at a suburban Washington engineering firm and a former senior official in the Army program.

Seen as a Showcase

The Tooele incinerator, in the Army’s view, is a technological showcase. The plant’s computerized control room looks like it belongs at a space agency launch pad. Operators, largely recruited from the nuclear submarine program, run the plant from 12 computer consoles.

Chemical weapons are brought into the plant inside blast-proof, 10-ton steel shells called “oncs.” Handlers pull the munitions out of the onc and feed them onto conveyor belts that take them into a room full of automated machinery--but no people.

Big industrial machines punch holes in the munitions, and the chemical agents are drained out. The munitions are then chopped into pieces by a sheering machine inside an explosive-containment room with walls 28 inches thick. The pieces are fed into furnaces that consume the explosives and burn off any chemical residues.

Chemical agents, which are highly flammable, are burned in a separate furnace at 2,700 degrees. What is left is water vapor, brine and some other hazardous materials that can be buried in landfills, the Army says.

Stack gases are continuously monitored down to the smallest quantities that instruments can measure, said Tim Thomas, the Army’s project manager at Tooele. The instruments can sense a discharge of roughly one-millionth of a pound of chemical agent over 24 hours. If any agent was detected, the plant would shut down.

Thomas does not deny that the plant would emit dioxin and other cancerous agents. But he says a single diesel truck emits greater quantities and that the air coming out of his stack is cleaner than the air on a typical urban street.

Critics scoff at the Army’s assurances. A prototype Army facility operating on Johnston atoll, about 800 miles southwest of Hawaii, has a deeply flawed safety record, according to Craig Williams of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a citizens organization.

Assurances Rejected

On two occasions, the Johnston incinerator sent unburned nerve gas up its stack. In March 1994, the Environmental Protection Agency fined the Army $50,000 for one of the incidents and $72,300 for other safety violations.

Separately, a weapon once exploded inside the incinerator and blew a hole through the furnace wall, forcing a shutdown for several months. Such problems contributed to the plant’s operating far less often than had been expected and ultimately forced the Army to revise its program cost estimates upward, Army officials said in interviews.

Environmental activists are armed for a major political battle at Tooele and the seven other chemical weapons sites where the Army plans to build incinerators. Rep. Peter A. DeFasio, a Democrat from Oregon whose district is also designated for an incinerator, recently demanded that the Army stop its construction program.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, American Indian tribes and the Chemical Weapons Working Group demand that the Army develop an alterative technology to chemically neutralize the agents. Acting on a recommendation from the National Research Council, the Army has stepped up research on chemical neutralization technology.

Public controversy also grew worse in 1994, when the Army’s contractor for Tooele, EG&G; Corp., hired engineer Steven Jones to be the chief safety officer. Within months, Jones said he had found numerous safety hazards in the plant’s design, particularly in the large unpacking area where munitions are taken from the oncs and loaded onto an automated conveyor belts by workers.

A major poison gas release, triggered by a chain-reaction explosion in the unpacking area, would create a health hazard up to 40 miles downwind from the plant, said Jones, who claims he was fired by EG&G; for raising safety concerns.

Allegations Dismissed

EG&G; manager Skip Hayes says Jones doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Seven investigations were convened to examine Jones’ allegations, Hayes says, and none found any merit in any of the charges.

Both the Army and EG&G; officials say there is no credible set of circumstances under which poison gas would escape past the plant boundaries, let alone 40 miles away.

But local emergency-preparedness officials in Tooele are not convinced. They maintain that it is entirely possible for poison gas to escape into their county.

Tooele County has spent $11 million, funded by the federal government, for an emergency communications center that looks like a command post for a small army.

The county has purchased two portable decontamination units to help emergency teams cleanse residents who might be pelted with chemical agents. It has mounted 37 sirens in the county to alert residents of a toxic release.

But the emergency-preparedness system remains incomplete because the federal government has not, county officials say, provided the necessary funds. The county commission has written to state regulators asking them to withhold a permit to operate the incinerator until the emergency-preparedness system is finished.

“The Army says there is no chance of a toxic release, but what if it happens?” asked Teryl Hunsaker, chairman of the Tooele County Commission. “As a public official, I don’t have the privilege of saying, ‘Forget about it.’ [What if] next week we kill 10,000 people because of something I did not perceive? I don’t feel I have the right to disregard the program Congress mandated to protect my people.”

Army officials say Tooele County faces far greater risk from more delays in destroying the chemical weapons than from any risk posed by the plant when it operates. About 2,000 of the mustard and nerve gas weapons already leak, and the Army discovers more each month.

“We have to destroy this stockpile before we have a major incident,” said Col. James Coverstone, the Army’s program manager for chemical destruction. “There is a risk. We have done our best to articulate the risk, but we don’t want to get to the point where it is a scare tactic.”

Residents of Tooele have mixed feelings. Fred Merhtens, a generator mechanic, said his friends “laugh about the way everybody makes a big deal about it.”

A woman who works at the chemical weapons plant, however, expressed a different view. “I see the problems all the time,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. “I don’t care how many alarms or sirens they have. By the time the alarms come on, it will be too late.”