Air Pollution Concerns May End Ordnance Disposal at Army Base

Each workday for the past couple of generations, the sound of war would briefly shatter the lonely afternoon peace of Honey Lake Valley, out on the backside of the northeast Sierra.

Like clockwork, the military blew up unwanted bombs, rockets and munitions in open pits at Sierra Army Depot in Herlong, Calif. Plumes of smoke billowed into the sky. Windows rattled. Locals mostly shrugged. It was life’s routine.

Now the practice, dating to Cold War days when military need trumped environmental nicety, seems destined to be scrubbed.

Lassen County air pollution control officials recently refused to exempt the Army base from federal clean air laws, effectively putting the depot’s ordnance disposal operations out of business.

Pentagon brass could decide this week whether the Army base should fight back. In the meantime, the depot has sought a 45-day reprieve from the Lassen County officials’ decision so it can resume the blasts, used since the mid-1950s to dispose of outdated munitions cast away by America’s war machine.

At stake are 50 jobs on base and loss of an operation that has long been the Army’s most prolific ordnance disposal unit.

Foes say they’ve got a lot more to lose.

Though base officials have long maintained that the depot complies with environmental rules, the toxic mix of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, mercury and lead that billows into the air during blasts is suspected by locals of hiking cancer rates in the little towns around the base and on the reservation of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, 14 miles downwind in Nevada.

Last spring, the tribe and other local opponents filed suit in federal court. A covey of Lassen County doctors, meanwhile, urged a cease-fire for the open-air blasts. The base got pegged the state’s No. 1 air pollution problem by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, though the findings are in dispute.

“We’re pleased that this caveman way of disposal has been shut down,” said Jack Pastor, chairman of Residents Against Munitions. “We just hope it stays that way.”

Base Could Be Targeted

The disposal operations account for only 15% of the base’s operating income, but remain the key reason the Army has maintained the far-flung military facility, 70 miles north of Lake Tahoe. The Sierra Army Depot is among scores of California installations being eyed for a new round of base closings. Without the bomb disposal operation, insiders say, it could be an easy target for shutdown.

Pastor and other foes believe the base should have long ago adopted environmentally safer methods of disposing of the munitions, but dragged its feet because it was cheaper to continue the old ways.

“It’s like the guy who dumped his crankcase oil beside the garage instead of paying a little more at the recycling center,” Pastor said. “It’s always cheaper to throw it in the ditch.”

The open-air explosions seem to run headlong into the Pentagon’s own regulations.

In 1997, Congress gave the Department of Defense five years to develop and demonstrate environmentally acceptable technologies to dispose of ammunition, explosives and rockets. The Pentagon has developed policies that encourage recycling and demand that all forms of pollution be prevented or reduced at the source.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year doesn’t give the Army any cover. The court ruled that the cost of reducing harmful air emissions should not stand in the way of complying with environmental rules.

New disposal techniques have been developed, among them a technique to super-freeze bombs so they can be safely cracked apart without being ignited. Bomb chambers already exist that can allow smaller explosives to be detonated in a vault; toxins are filtered out before the smoke is released.

“If you have the technology, why burn and blow them up?” Pastor asked. “We’re not a Third World country.”

Larry Rogers, a base spokesman, said the Sierra Army Depot is eager to see new technologies adopted and has altered its operations in anticipation of advancements.

For the last year, the practice of burning the aged packs of gunpowder propellant--used to lob artillery shells from cannons--has been stopped in the expectation that the base will start using a process that can convert the explosive charge into fertilizer.

Moreover, Rogers said, the base has dramatically cut back its open-air explosions over the years. In August, ordnance disposal took place just one day a week. The annual tally of munitions disposed of by the base has been cut in half since 1995, when 25,000 tons a year were destroyed.

The shutdown, base officials worry, threatens to undermine efforts to gradually shift to the new techniques.

Rogers said a more than two-year stockpile of ordnance remains to be dealt with, some of it in very unstable shape.

“It’s one thing just to throw a lock on the gate, but there are some things that need to be done,” Rogers said. “We can’t just turn it off. It’s not that easy.”

Skepticism for Army’s Intention

Pastor and other foes are dubious of the Army’s intentions. The base never before embraced their calls for a shift to new technology. In countless community meetings in the last couple of years, foes would argue against environmental ruin while a flood of workers from the base would argue for their jobs.

“They spent two years denying that better technologies exist,” Pastor said. “If they had taken that same energy and tried to get this new technology instead of fighting with the community, they would have been a lot farther along.”