A monitor at the Anniston chemical weapons incinerator sounded a false alarm for a nerve agent Friday night while employees were performing routine maintenance and training, a spokesman for the facility said.Officials quickly ruled out nerve agent as the cause, since none has yet been transferred to the incinerator from the Anniston Army Depot’s aging stockpile.
“Specialists from our on-site chemical laboratory have confirmed the alarm was a false alarm,” said Sonny Smith, the deputy site project manager for operations.
He emphasized, “That is only logical since we do not, and I stress, do not have any chemical agent within the demilitarization building.”
Nerve agent monitors at the incinerator are extremely sensitive — so sensitive that they have sounded alarms when exposed to cleaning solvent and after-shave lotion, said public affairs officer Mike Abrams.
Officials have no definitive reason for the false alarm but speculate new lab coats set it off when workers removed them from plastic bags in an engineering area.
“We are confident there is something in the lab coats,” Abrams said. “We are confident it’s not chemical weapons material. We just don’t know what’s in the lab coat that might have made the alarms sound.”
Incinerator officials have added the lab coats to a growing list of banned products that could produce future false alarms, Abrams said.
He described the current phase of operations at the incinerator as a time to work any bugs out. It is a time when officials are simulating having weapons in the plant, a precursor to upcoming trial and test burns later this year.
Abrams said the false alarms present a challenge for employees who must constantly guard against becoming desensitized to them.
“We cannot afford to take anything for granted,” he said. “Any time we hear an alarm we’re going to expect the worst until we can prove otherwise.”
Certain that Friday’s alarm had not detected chemical agent, officials treated it as a Level 1 event, the lowest rating on a scale of one to four.
Anything above a level one event requires community notification within five minutes, said Cathy Coleman, an Army public affairs officer. She added that Level 1 notification must be made within an hour.
The incinerator alarm sounded at 9:07 p.m. Officials there notified the Emergency Operation Center, which notifies state and local officials, by 9:24 p.m., said Coleman. She said local and state Emergency Management agencies were notified by 10:23 p.m.
She said, “Knowing that there was nothing at the incinerator — there were no chemicals there — (giving notification) was just a matter of waiting to see what might have happened.”
