Sen. Richard Shelby threatened to withdraw his support for the chemical weapons incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot.Why?
Because he doesn’t like the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency has placed demands on the way protective hoods should be distributed to residents around the depot.
So let’s get this straight. Our fair senator would rather have us live with a deadly cache of chemical weapons longer, with the possibility of an chemical accident longer, with the threat of a terrorist attack longer, because he doesn’t agree with the federal government’s stipulations for providing gas masks to residents.
Let’s live with this stuff longer until we get “maximum protection” and then, and only then, will we begin destroying it. In the meantime, we’ll cross our fingers that nothing happens at the stockpile like a lightning strike or an airplane crash because that, in the words of scientists from Harvard to the University of California and the National Research Council, would dwarf an accident at the incinerator.
So what should we do? Wait for a so-called “safer” alternative. There’s biodegradation in which microbes compost mustard agent. Mustard is a mere fraction of the stockpile at the depot and that doesn’t work on sarin and VX, the deadliest agents. Or benign-sounding “neutralization,” otherwise known as supercritical water oxidation, in which extremely high temperatures and pressures render the nerve agents inert. Unfortunately, the scientists haven’t figured out how to do that without destroying the destruction plant in the process. Or there’s the Silver II method, still in its infancy and the scientists are unsure that it will work when it’s all put together.
What would Sen. Shelby have us do? Wait and hope and pray that nothing happens while the technology catches up to the need to rid ourselves of this deadly cache of chemicals. Is he prepared to do that because of a dogfight with FEMA over the conditions for issuing gas masks to the community?
In the words of the Calhoun County Commission, these “outrageous demands” by FEMA ask the commission and the Anniston City Council to pick the hood and tell the public that shelter-in-place will offer a higher level of protection.
Anniston Mayor Chip Howell sees that shelter-in-place needs to be an option in our limited toolbox of emergency responses.
There’s only so much you can do and the Calhoun County EMA’s long-held plan to evacuate won’t work by itself. Everyone knows it. Studies prove it.
The Calhoun County Commission has received commitments for all of its demands from an upgraded software system to more sirens to the protective hoods. Although the hoods have not yet been acquired, FEMA said it will no longer withhold funds for them.
The decision for choosing the hoods is fraught with responsibility and liability, should someone injure themselves while using one. The Calhoun County Commission and EMA should use some of the money promised to them by FEMA to hire a consultant who will help them choose a hood and in the process, assume some of the liability.
We should have had an emergency plan 40 years ago when the Army first brought those weapons into our community. We certainly need one now.
If we learned anything from Sept. 11, it is the immediacy of the threat in our back yard. The county must get an emergency education campaign under way immediately. The county must formulate a cohesive emergency response. The Army must get rid of those chemical weapons.
