Gearing Up to Destroy Weapons

These are uneasy days for this slice of eastern Alabama -- a mood perhaps best understood by considering the unusual packages that Calhoun County officials are passing out to residents.

The cardboard boxes contain high-tech gas masks -- see-through protective hoods with a built-in fan and filtering system -- plus portable air filters and sheets of plastic and duct tape for the home.

The hoods are being distributed to the 35,000 residents who live closest to a new military incinerator that on Wednesday is scheduled to begin burning a decades-old stockpile of chemical weapons, despite organized opposition and some community queasiness over a possible accident. Those who live farther away get some of the protective equipment but not the hoods.

“I’m nervous,” said Haley Joiner, a 25-year-old hairstylist. She was standing in line Monday to get protective equipment at the distribution center on the grounds of Ft. McClellan, a shuttered Army base here. “People make mistakes. What if they drop something? Then what? We’re dead.”

Residents were asking a lot of what-if questions, and talking a lot about praying, even as activists opposing the incineration plan went to federal court Monday in Washington, D.C., to block the start-up of the weapons burner at the nearby Anniston Army Depot.

Storage Is Also Risky

The U.S. Army, which is to dispose of the 2,254 tons of nerve agents and mustard agents contained in rockets and artillery shells, insists that its plan to burn the toxins and their containers at extreme temperatures is far safer than continuing to store them at the depot, where they could fall prey to terrorist attack, accidental release or leakage.

U.S. military officials last week won a state hazardous-waste permit for the incineration and immediately scheduled destruction of the first sarin-laden M-55 rockets for this week, following months of controversy and bumpy negotiations with the state’s politicians.

The issue has created a lot of divided opinion around Anniston. Although a group of mayors near the depot had urged the Army to begin the burning as soon as possible, Gov. Bob Riley declined to add his signature to the start-up after the Army rebuffed his request for authority to shut down the program if he saw fit.

The Anniston depot is one of eight sites around the country where chemical and nerve agents are stored and designated for disposal under an international chemical-weapons compact joined by the United States in 1997. With about 7% of the chemical stockpile, Anniston would be the third such depository to begin destroying the weapons, joining sites in Utah and Maryland.

The Utah site, known as the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, is the only other U.S. location that has relied on incineration. The Maryland facility, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, employs a process known as chemical neutralization, which destroys the agents by treating them with water and other chemicals to render them harmless.

Incinerators have been built at two other depositories in Arkansas and Oregon but are not yet operating. The three remaining chemical-weapons depots -- in Indiana, Colorado and Kentucky -- are to destroy the toxins through the chemical treatment.

Opponents charge that incineration is risky because of the possible release of toxins into the air, especially in this populated area that includes Anniston, a city of 24,000, and its surrounding communities. They say that the Utah site has experienced the inadvertent release of chemical agents into the environment but note that at least it is far away from where people live.

“It’s irresponsible. It’s dangerous,” said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, based in Berea, Ky.

“There are safer ways to do this, and the track record of this technology ... demonstrates the impropriety of trying to perform this task in a populated area.”

An estimated 250,000 people live within 30 miles of the Anniston depot and its $1-billion incinerator, which was completed in 2001. Military officials agreed to a number of safety measures to prevent harm to residents in case of an accident during the weapons disposal, which is expected to take seven years to complete.

In dozens of schools, certain designated areas such as gymnasiums are being made airtight and outfitted with equipment to filter the air and pressurize the indoors in order to keep noxious fumes from wafting inside.

Residents who live within six miles of the depot -- a ring known as the “pink zone” -- are receiving the protective hoods, room filters and the so-called shelter kits: plastic sheets, tape, a cloth towel to stuff under the door and scissors for trimming the plastic sheets. Those up to nine miles away receive the filters and shelter kits but no hoods; those up to 30 miles away receive only the shelter kits.

A Dubious Distinction

Local officials say it marks the first time in U.S. history that the government has distributed protective gear for chemical warfare to the civilian population.

“We certainly hope that none of this is ever needed -- that it goes after the fallout shelters of the ‘50s,” said David Ford, spokesman for the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency.

The Army argues that residents will be safer by being rid of tons of deadly Cold War-era toxins -- including sarin, VX nerve agents and mustard agents -- that have been stored in their midst going back to 1961. The U.S. government is scheduled to destroy 31,000 tons of chemical weapons nationwide under the 1997 treaty.

Officials maintain that incineration at the Utah facility and at a separate disposal site on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean has proven itself a sound method over the years. To date, those two facilities have destroyed a little more than 8,000 tons of chemical weapons.

“We honestly believe that storage is what is driving the risk in this community,” said Michael B. Abrams, spokesman for the disposal facility. “Every weapon we destroy is one less weapon that gives us grief [and] presents risk.”

The incineration is to be done on a limited basis and only during nights and weekends until all the safeguards, such as preparing area schools, are in place. So far, the Army Corps of Engineers has outfitted fewer than half of the 38 area schools, but expects to finish the rest by Oct. 1, said Ford, spokesman for the county emergency management agency.

The weapons depot’s 745 employees plan to destroy the chemical arms by punching holes in the rockets and draining the liquid toxins, which then are to be burned at 2,700 degrees. The old casings will be cut into pieces and destroyed in a separate incinerator. A typical M-55 rocket, which stands about 6 1/2 feet tall, holds slightly more than a gallon of liquid nerve agent.

Opponents have filed a lawsuit to stop the burning program, seeking instead to have the weapons destroyed through neutralization. A separate suit seeks to block the program on the grounds that the risks will be borne disproportionately by blacks and impoverished whites living near the depot.

Depot officials were conducting a series of last-minute briefings for the public in a downtown storefront in preparation for Wednesday morning’s start-up.

Despite the flurry of activity, some residents near the depot were in no hurry to pick up the safety gear, even now that a start-up date has been set. Nancy Dobbs, a 54-year-old waitress at a restaurant in Oxford, about a mile from the incinerator, said she saw no reason for fretting because acquaintances who work at the depot seem unworried.

“I have faith in our government,” she said. “If they’re not worried out there, then I’m not worried in here.”