The folks out at the incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot got a little confused at the end of last week when one of the alarms that is supposed to detect a chemical agent leak sounded.You see, they were perplexed because there are no chemical agents in the incinerator and there have never been any there. The thing isn’t even supposed to start burning the deadly VX, GB and mustard agents until the late fall. The culprit, officials at the incinerator believe, may have been a non-toxic substance found in new lab coats that are being used at the facility.
Obviously the alarms need to be adjusted so that they sound when they sniff VX, not the aroma from a broken bottle of perfume.
Even though the people on duty early Friday night knew the alarm was false, they were together enough to follow procedure anyway. Also many, no doubt, recognized that the alarm offered an excellent opportunity to see how the team would respond to a real emergency.
Indeed it turned out to be a good opportunity because it exposed what appears to be a number of weaknesses.
Officials on the scene treated this alarm as a Level One event, the lowest rating on a scale of one to four. Procedure put down by the Army and local and state emergency management officials calls for people at the incinerator to notify the Emergency Operations Center immediately after a Level One alarm sounds. The EOC then has one hour to notify the local and state agencies.
Instead of picking up the phone and calling the EOC after the alarm sounded, officials at the incinerator appear to have waited about 15 minutes. Then after the EOC received the notification officials there waited about 59 minutes to pass the word on. They managed to meet the requirements set down by procedure, just in time.
Why did they wait so long? Because it was impossible that any chemical agents were lose in the building. It was obviously a false alarm. So people in the chain of notification were reluctant to move forward.
That’s human nature, but it is not standard procedure and we certainly hope it is not the way they would behave once the real thing starts moving through the incinerator.
This is deadly serious business for the people who work around the stockpile, those who work inside the incinerator and the people of this community. Any problem, no matter how minor, should be highlighted, dissected and investigated. Something, we are told by the Army, is being done now.
The next time the incinerator has a false alarm everyone involved needs to treat it like it is the real thing, even if the real thing happens to be an impossibility.
