False Alarm Rekindles Fears About Disposal of Chemical Weapons

Shelly Ehrmantraut will long remember the morning before New Year’s Eve, when the nerve gas warning sirens went off by mistake and she wondered whether she might ever see the rest of her family again.

Her husband, Frank, had taken the three elder children to help clean a restaurant in Hermiston, and she was cuddling in bed in their home in nearby Umatilla with their 20-month-old, Samantha, waiting for the toddler’s favorite TV show, “Blue’s Clues,” to come on the Nickelodeon channel.

The sirens outside wailed, and loudspeakers blared an incomprehensible message in Spanish. Ehrmantraut reached under the bed for the shelter-in-place kit--a cardboard box containing a roll of duct tape, a plastic sheet, a towel and a pair of child-sized scissors that she is supposed to use to seal her bedroom off from deadly gas if it ever escapes from the Umatilla Chemical Depot.

Then she tuned the radio and TV to local stations and waited for instructions. But none came. The sirens had been triggered by mistake. A state official said a Morrow County dispatcher pushed the wrong button, but Morrow County said the control board malfunctioned.

The question over how to dispose of a stockpile of deadly chemical weapons stored on the Army’s Umatilla Chemical Depot was supposed to be settled three years ago, when the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission approved permits for the Army’s $1.2-billion program to build, operate and close a special incinerator.

But the Dec. 30 false alarm that made Ehrmantraut think the unthinkable had happened in this small farming town in the eastern Oregon high desert has rekindled doubts and frustrations about disposing of the Cold War arsenal.

The depot is home to 6.6 million pounds of rockets, bombs, land mines, artillery shells and storage tanks containing liquid forms of GB sarin, VX and mustard agent. Stored in bunkers known as igloos, most date from the Cold War, but some go back to World War II. A total of 120 weapons has leaked very small amounts.

The stockpile accounts for 13% of the nation’s chemical weapons and is one of eight in the continental United States slated for destruction under an international treaty.

The Army’s schedule calls for Raytheon Demilitarization Co. to start work in October 2001 drilling the weapons, draining the chemicals and incinerating the materials.

Citing the false alarm and a whistleblower’s criticism of a similar incinerator already in operation in Utah, U.S. Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) has urged Gov. John Kitzhaber to suspend the permit for the incinerator’s construction and consider alternative chemical methods of destroying the agents.

“We all want these deadly chemicals out of our midst as quickly as possible, but we shouldn’t let the Army stampede us into accepting a chemical weapons incineration plan that poses threats to our state,” DeFazio wrote.

Kitzhaber sent an aide to try to get bickering local agencies back to completing an emergency preparedness program that has spent more than $40 million since 1989, but has yet to fully prepare the 27,000 people living within 12 miles of the depot against a catastrophic release of chemical weapons.

An independent evaluation of equipment glitches that have plagued the alert system has been authorized, which state police will monitor.

Under conditions set by the Environmental Quality Commission, incineration cannot begin until Kitzhaber is satisfied the emergency preparedness program is working properly. There have been repeated problems.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency already has gotten sharp criticism from the General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, for not working more closely with state and local officials.

Auditors faulted state officials for seeking only one bidder, TRW Inc., on the siren and reader board system, which has been marked by glitches.

FEMA took over distribution of 17,000 tone-alert radios to homes and businesses after delays while the project was in state hands.

The Sierra Club and a local group called GASP are pressing the Environmental Quality Commission to rescind the incinerator permit based on claims by whistleblower Gary Harris, the former permit coordinator for the chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele, Utah.

The commission is to take up the issue when it meets at the end of March.

“Many questionable practices that were not environmentally protective, safe or legal occurred at Tooele during my five years of employment there, and many documents were submitted to Utah regulators by the Army and its contractors that were dishonest,” Harris has said.

Among his claims are that the Army and its contractor hid defects in the Tooele incinerator to win permits from Utah and Oregon, falsified trial burn reports and allowed scrap metal laced with nerve agent to be sent to a recycler.

The Army cannot comment on Harris’ claims because of pending litigation, depot spokeswoman Mary Binder said.

“A lot of research time and effort has gone into the process, and it’s proven to be a safe one,” depot commander Lt. Col. Thomas Woloszyn said. “Alternative technology has specific uses at specific locations. Those same situations don’t exist here.”

Karyn Jones, a founder of GASP, worries that low-level emissions from the incinerator stacks could harm people for miles around.

“While I am concerned about a catastrophic accident, I am even more concerned about the day-to-day operations,” she said. “No incinerator can do a 100% burn.”

People who joined Ehrmantraut for a recent meeting with governor’s aide Stephanie Hallock complained bitterly: Test messages put out by the 42 sirens throughout the area are incomprehensible, there is no way to put out a message correcting a false alarm, few have confidence in the shelter-in-place kits, and no one has seen any of the radios that have been promised.

Mark Severson of Hermiston expressed the feelings of many about the false alarm: “If it had been the real thing, how many people would be in this room? Not many.”