Disposal of Waste Exposes Lethal Legacy

While the Pentagon struggles to dispose of napalm stored in Southern California, the Army is seeking to transport a toxic solution of heavy metals from a Pacific island chemical weapon site through the port of Long Beach to an incinerator near St. Louis.

The Army’s plans, like the unwanted train transporting the napalm, point to a growing problem facing the military as it tries to rid itself of aging weapons and dangerous substances left over from the Cold War by transporting them to disposal sites throughout the United States.

For most of this century, the military has had wide latitude to dispose of arms and dangerous trash as it wished, often in back lots of wide-open bases.

But rising environmental sensitivities, the need to dismantle the Cold War’s deadly legacy and the pressure of population centers near once-remote bases have made cleanup more urgent--and much more difficult.

From long-buried but live artillery shells near Sacramento to nuclear waste in the Southwest and uranium shipments scheduled to pass through the San Francisco Bay area, the government’s hazardous wastes are causing concern and resistance.

The most urgent issues today are the estimated $300-billion cleanup of U.S. nuclear weapon plants and the $14-billion destruction of chemical weapons now scattered in depots around the country. But across the nation, dozens of military bases are wrestling with smaller-scale waste disposal issues that often embroil their neighboring communities.

In the case of the 65,000-gallon heavy metal shipment, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it is being pressured by the Army to approve the procedure--even before a period of public comment ends on June 1-- because the containers holding the liquid on Johnston Atoll, 800 miles southwest of Hawaii, are deteriorating.

“They aren’t in pristine condition,” said Gary Hlavsa, an Army chemical weapons demilitarization expert. But he denied that the operation is urgent.

The slurry is a mix of decontamination solution used a quarter of a century ago to clean chemical weapons and nerve agents out of containers and heavy metals, which officials believe have leached out of the steel walls of the containers holding the solution.

While not volatile like napalm, Hlavsa said the heavy metals--lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and chromium--are particularly hazardous if mishandled. Human exposure to the various metals has been linked to extensive brain, kidney and nervous-system damage, among other dangers.

The origins of the current problem date to 1971, when the poisonous munitions were moved to Johnson Atoll from Okinawa and the storage containers began to leak.

The chemicals were then placed in new containers and the old vessels were cleaned. As described by military, environmental agency and other experts, the decontamination solution (generally sodium hypochlorite or bleach) and a mixture of water and sodium carbonate (baking soda) turned into a toxic soup of tar-like sediment.

Although the sediment contains the metals, only some of the containers included minuscule amounts of the leftover chemical agents--sarin; VX, the highly lethal nerve gas; lewisite, which is an early generation blistering agent; and mustard gas components. But Hlavsa said the amounts are below what are considered safe levels in drinking water.

As part of its congressionally mandated effort to destroy chemical weapons stored on the island, as well as the remaining hazardous material there, the Army said that it contracted with the UXB Co. of Virginia to transport the material by barge to Long Beach and from there by truck to an incinerator the company operates in Sauget, Ill., southeast of St. Louis.

Before the transfer can begin, however, the slurry must be moved to about 10 6,000-gallon, carbon steel shipping containers, nearly the size of the trailer of an 18-wheel truck. And before that can occur, the Army needs permission from the EPA to pump the solution from the 250-gallon tanks in which it is now held to the larger traveling units.

Eric Moe, the company’s general counsel, said that he was prohibited by the firm’s contract with the Army from discussing any aspect of the operation without government approval. Nor would he discuss the general operation of the incinerator.

John McCarroll, chief of the hazardous waste permit office of the EPA’s San Francisco branch, said that the urgency being expressed by the Army is unusual.

But EPA officials “haven’t been convinced” that the threat is immediate enough to justify cutting off the public comment period, he said.

Although heavily contaminated military sites are given priority, insufficient money has slowed cleanup efforts and complications abound, especially when the weapons or waste are sent off base for disposal.

The Army has engaged in a “shell game of moving material all over the country as a solution rather than focusing on appropriate treatment approaches for hazardous treatment where it is,” said Craig Williams, executive director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, which describes itself as a coalition of U.S. and Russian citizens groups monitoring demilitarization activities.

Sacramento-area officials have been arguing over who should pay for removal of live artillery shells, destined for Vietnam, that spilled off a railroad train there in 1973. The munitions are believed to be buried beside the tracks, live and dangerous.

Often, the military’s plans to discard materials have been delayed or even blocked when anxious neighbors have declared that they do not want the waste stored or destroyed nearby or even passing through their towns.

Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau in Los Angeles contributed to this story.