As part of an effort to accelerate destruction of chemical weapons stored near Anniston, the Army has made significant changes to the order in which weapon types will be destroyed at its incinerator.
In recent weeks, incinerator officials have begun to lay the groundwork for the facility to destroy artillery shells filled with sarin nerve agent during lulls in its first campaign on rockets. The Army had intended to focus exclusively on nerve agent-filled rockets, first sarin and then VX, before moving on to other munitions.
Under its new schedule, which uses a practice known as "complimentary processing," the facility will turn its attention to the shells during routine maintenance and mechanical downtime for machinery needed to process the rockets. These changes, the Army says, will cause a small increase in the overall risk to the community.
Yet even as it sets into motion one series of changes, the Army is considering another plan that would further speed things up. This would require the reconfiguration of the shells - that is, the removal of their explosives before they are processed -that would allow them to be burned at the same time as the rockets. This co-processing plan, unlike the schedule changes that have already been made, entail a permit modification that would have to be approved by state environmental regulators and go through a public notice period.
"It would be a major modification," said Justin Martindale, Alabama Department of Environmental Management staff engineer. A public meeting on the issue has already been scheduled for August.
Tim Garrett, the Army project manager at the incinerator, said this plan would increase the speed of the program "considerably" above and beyond the strides he expects the complimentary processing schedule to make.
"I want to stress that the rockets remain the number one focus," Garrett said. "We're only going to proceed if it's safe and we're going to evaluate where we are in the process."
"We would not start co-processing unless we're comfortable with complimentary processing," he said.
Officials from the Army and its contractor, Westinghouse, forced to adapt long-standing schedules to the new pressures of an increased terrorist threat after Sept. 11, revealed these developments to The Anniston Star in a series of recent interviews. The interviews are part of a larger effort under way to explain to regulators, local civic leaders and public officials schedule changes that could be taken as a shift in a well-defined structure of priorities that has shaped the incinerator program.
Eliminating all the sarin munitions at once, the officials say, will shorten by eight or nine months the time it will take to destroy the entire 2,200-ton stockpile. However, they concede, this shortening of the overall timeline will delay the beginning of the VX-rocket campaign by about six months, according to current projections.
This is a crucial change because it challenges the logic that has long been the foundation of the incinerator program. The Army, relying risk assessments, studies and experience at older incinerator facilities, has long insisted that the M55 rockets are the least stable of the weapons types in the local stockpile, pose the greatest threat to the community and consequently must be eliminated as soon as possible.
Indeed, the sarin, or GB rockets, still appear to be the thorniest kind of munitions for those responsible for storing and destroying them. They comprise most of the weapons detected as leaking by Army caretakers. And the thickening of the liquid sarin over time has challenged the incinerator technology, forcing controversial permit modifications that have spawned a political backlash from local and state officials.
However, a recent study of risk at the depot concludes that a majority of the storage risk comes from the VX rocket stockpile.
Since 1992, the Army has planned to first do away with rockets loaded with sarin, whose threat to the community lays in the relative ease with which it could turn to vapor during an accident. After a five-month changeover period, during which the facility's equipment will be decontaminated, modified to handle a different agent, and re-tested, the destruction of the rockets loaded with VX would begin. VX is the more toxic of the two nerve agents stored at the depot, but its threat to the community is limited by its motor oil-like consistency that makes it slow to evaporate.
Following the destruction of the rockets, the facility would then move on to destroy VX-loaded artillery shells and then it would be re-fitted to handle the rest of the sarin munitions. Finally, it would destroy mortar shells and ton-containers of mustard agent.
The new plans will eliminate a changeover from VX to sarin, a boon to workforce safety, but they will also give the VX rockets a longer lease on life. The result, Garrett said, is a "slight increase" in the overall quantitative risk "because you've extended the elimination of the rockets by some number of days, which increases the number of days we'll store the rockets."
Lightning strikes involving VX rockets are responsible for about two-thirds of the overall storage risk, said Greg Mahall, a spokesman for the Army's Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization. A new quantitative risk assessment "evaluates both the original and proposed schedule," said Mahall. "Thus it was a factor that identified the opportunity to modify the schedule to eliminate the overall risk sooner."
Garrett said the increased risk would be tempered some by the risk to the workforce being removed in the elimination of a changeover period.
"You're putting a person in an encapsulated suit in the presence of chemical agent working on mechanical things," Garrett said. "You're putting that person under physical duress."
Early last week, an employee at the Tooele incinerator in Utah was exposed to sarin as he broke open an agent purge line during a changeover period.
The schedule shuffling will cause changes within the incinerator facility itself, requiring managers to hire additional staff and to begin to ready the third and last of the furnaces for operations sooner than expected.
"We've had to gear up in terms of training," said Donavan Mager, a local spokesman for Westinghouse. "The training department is overwhelmed."
In September, incinerator officials hope to begin surrogate testing on the metal parts furnace designed to burn what's left of the shells after they've had their explosives and liquid agent removed. Plans for testing the furnace with industrial compounds more difficult to destroy than nerve agent have already been submitted to ADEM.
These changes at the Anniston incinerator are part of a national effort to accelerate the destruction of chemical weapons stores. Fear of terrorism, added to existing urgencies from an international treaty and threats to the public from a man-made or natural accident, have led the Army to pick up the pace at stockpiles in Maryland and Indiana and to re-examine schedules and plans at all of its stockpiles.
Co-processing work has already been done at the chemical weapons facility in Tooele County, Utah.
Removing the explosives from the projectiles would mean that equipment typically needed in the processing of both rockets and the still-explosive projectiles would be dedicated to the rockets. Perhaps the most important equipment is the deactivation furnace system, which was designed to handle explosives removed from the projectiles as well as sheared rocket parts.
Reconfigured projectiles would be drained of their agent and sent to the metal parts furnace, Garrett said. The drained agent would be sent to the liquid incinerator.
Terrorism is not the only factor that led to the schedule changes.
"Environmental regulations are
becoming more stringent," Mahall said. "The aging stockpile presents new challenges for destroying these weapons ... Terrorist attacks on the United States have intensified the need to see these weapons destroyed safely."
