Utah Toxic Stockpile Is Smaller, but It’s Still a Handful

Six years after the job started, the Deseret Chemical Depot has destroyed 44% of the nation’s largest stockpile of chemical weapons, officials said Thursday.

The remaining stockpile at the site southwest of Salt Lake City is scheduled to be destroyed by 2004, but the incinerator has been shut down since July 15 after two maintenance workers, wearing charcoal respirators, were exposed to residual amounts of sarin nerve agent.

The workers were treated for minor symptoms and released that day in good health, said Maj. Rudy Burwell, an Army spokesman. He said the plant will reopen within weeks, after a safety report is done.

The depot has destroyed more than 6,000 tons of sarin, or GB, a highly volatile nerve agent that can paralyze the lungs. It had been stored in bombs, rockets, warheads and bulk containers.

The depot will then destroy 1,300 tons of VX, a more toxic but less volatile nerve agent that has the consistency of vegetable oil. It’s contained in mines, rockets, warheads and aircraft tanks designed to spray a deadly mist.

Finally, the depot will move on to 6,100 tons of mustard gas, a blister agent that can dissolve tissue on contact.

The campaign started Aug. 22, 1996, when the incinerator began burning the depot’s 13,616 tons of chemical warfare agents--weapons the U.S. military has never used in combat. They are being destroyed under international treaties signed by more than 200 countries.

Utah once stored about 42% of the nation’s stockpile of chemical warfare agents. Now that’s down to 25%.

Though the job is expected to be done by 2004, the depot has missed earlier deadlines and almost anything can set back the effort.

“It’s a tough question. There’s still some unknowns in the stockpile,” said Marty Gray, who oversees the Army depot for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. Seven other U.S. sites and one in the central Pacific Ocean also store chemical weapons.

Gov. Mike Leavitt used the six-year anniversary to declare that Utah residents are safer.

“The disposal of the chemical weapons stockpile is a great example of how regulators can work collaboratively to solve environmental problems in a safe, efficient and responsible manner,” Leavitt said.

Still, hardly a week goes by without the Deseret Chemical Depot announcing a spill or vapor leak, usually from broken seals in the Cold War-era munitions.

Those mishaps haven’t been a serious problem for depot workers, people living around the base or the environment, Gray said.

On Thursday, the depot said it was temporarily closing a chemical agent destruction test facility over inconsistencies in air monitoring data.