The Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility (ANCDF) is methodically and painstakingly reviewing and double-checking some 8,500 activities to ensure the ANCDF is fully ready to begin chemical weapons disposal operations, an event now scheduled to take place this summer, that will ultimately rid our community of the threat these weapons pose. But first we will conduct a series of surrogate trial burns designed to demonstrate the facility’s ability to destroy chemicals that are much harder to destroy than chemical warfare agent itself.It is a fact that a similar facility on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean is now closing after an unqualified successful run that safely destroyed all chemical weapons stored there. Likewise, the operational plant in Tooele, Utah, has successfully destroyed more than 44 percent of its chemical weapons, including virtually all of the weapons filled with nerve agent GB (sarin). From the successes of the Johnston Atoll and Tooele facilities, we feel confident of the capabilities of our Anniston facility.
A Jan. 18 letter to the editor made reference to the publication in The Birmingham News on New Year’s Day of a story about our community and the ongoing controversy surrounding PCBs.
I understand and share the concerns of the community regarding PCB’s and other safety issues. Our facility is designed to destroy the small amounts of PCBs that are contained in the shipping and firing tubes of the M55 rockets. PCBs will no longer be an issue at our facility once all M55 rockets are safely destroyed.We anticipated that taking about two years time, not the four years presented as fact in the Jan. 18 letter. Stacked up against the amount of PCBs already in the city of Anniston, the PCBs we are dealing with at the depot amounts to about as much as the period at the end of this sentence.
There is simply no comparison, by any stretch of the imagination, between safe chemical weapons incineration and the manufacturing of PCBs.
We continue to move forward to the day in the near future where our community is safer and more secure because the work force at the ANCDF built a safe facility, which will be safely operated and will be closed at the end of disposal operations. Thus the chemical weapons in Calhoun County will be gone, only leaving behind a legacy of safe operations documented by our regulators and international treaty inspectors.
We all need to keep in focus that the problem with chemical weapons is their continued storage in our community. The solution to the chemical weapons problem is the facility. I would ask that the community support the efforts of your neighbors, the professionals associated with the ANCDF, so that we can move each day one step closer to making the community a safer place to live.
Timothy K. Garrett
ANCDF Site Project Manager
Anniston
