Tim Garrett of Anniston and Gary McCloskey of Johnston — the two Army managers — and their contractors — Bob Love of Anniston and Steve DePew of Anniston and now Johnston — talked over valuable operation points during our visit. The mayor, the Chamber president and the journalist threw a steady stream of questions at the four incinerator chiefs.The place we stood heightened the reality of our interrogation. We were safely inside the kiln where deadly nerve agent would have snuffed our lives out in less than two seconds before the scrubdown of the chamber, following agent incineration at Johnston. Now the surfaces are rough with scrabbling that chipped the cement for decontamination in the super-heated furnace.
The Army reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other official monitors as it burned up 400,000 rockets, projectiles, bombs, mortar rounds, ton containers of raw nerve agent and 13,000 land mines. The total thrown into the fiery furnace comprised 2,031 tons of GB and VX and blister agent until elimination of 100 percent of the Johnston stockpile in the same composition as Anniston’s.
If that sounds like a whole lot of the worst anti-personnel military weapons this side of a hydrogen bomb, well, so does the total stored in Calhoun County while we debate whether to go ahead with the Johnston-like disposal program as soon as this summer.
Did accidents occur at the Atoll? Of course. Nothing human happens without incident. The bigger point is that redundant safeguards worked and that lessons learned have made design of the Army’s third-generation plant in Anniston even safer.
The National Research Council of the Academy of Science examined five Johnston mishaps from 1992, 1993 and 1994: A worker blistered himself; a fire required an equipment change; a rocket explosion stopped a kiln rotation in a contained area; a minute amount of agent reached the exhaust stack; and some agent had to be exhausted through charcoal filters in another event.
None of the cases got hushed up. Severe critics of incineration, regulators, politicians, newspapers like The Anniston Star and scientific investigators have all pored over the details.
Process and equipment changes resulted. The continuous conversation about ever increasing safety was what the Lenten visitors from Anniston witnessed on Johnston.
No one died from the processing of chemical weapons in the Atoll. Except for hurricane, no mass evacuation alarm sounded for Johnston, which is a good thing since mass evacuation from the island could never have been speedy. One headquarters building had been fitted for the reverse air flow protection schools in Calhoun County also seek, but the equipment was never used in the 10 years of incineration on Johnston.
Now that the Pacific process is complete and examined and going through decommissioning practically down to ground level, the scientific National Research Council has issued its recommendation Number One concerning the hazards of chemical weapons stockpiles like the one in Anniston:
The destruction of aging chemical munitions should proceed as quickly as possible, consistent with operational activities designed to protect the health and safety of the workforce, the public and the environment.
Over the years I’ve followed this issue, the National Academy of Science consistently declared Anniston is in more danger from continued storage of our stockpile than from incineration.
One semi-doubting Thomas I met on Johnston in 1994 was safety officer Sonny Smith. He left his family back home in Golden Springs, since the island is a hardship post with no schools. Sonny wanted to see for himself if the process works safely, before he would let his family be exposed to it in Calhoun County.
Now he is Garrett’s deputy at the Anniston plant where Bob Love is chief operating contractor after previously managing the incinerator on Johnston.
A steady flow of experienced experts and lessons learned and even campaign-tested equipment flow back to Anniston from Johnston. The demilitarization program is a band of brothers looking out for each other and for us all by extension. McCloskey’s and Garrett’s sense permeates — if it’s good for the workers, it’s good for the public. So when good people get laid off on Johnston as it shuts down, managers steer them to Anniston.
An honor roll of brass plaques at Johnston Atoll ranks the number of entries into hazardous areas workers make in their hot and super thick protective gear that’s as bulky as a moon suit. Two of those names at the very top of the list were David A. Matula with 300 entries and Dennis Strickland with 400. Both men will be reporting to work in Anniston.
I ate my Johnston Island breakfast of papaya and eggs with fellow-Texan Mike LaBeth, who’s getting married July 26 in Surf Side, near Corpus Christi. He’s going to raise ponies and grandkids on a ranch in Texas after Johnston closes this year, so Mike won’t be making the trek to Alabama.
But his brother Ralph LaBeth of Anniston is a maintenance shift superintendent, working for Bob Love in the Anniston plant after spending six years on the island.
Johnston Atoll environmental scientist Joe Dowdey likely will end up working at the Anniston incinerator. He already has a home in Oxford. Joe is 41 and married to Lisa Dowdey. They have sons Nicholas, 5, and Ian, 8.
“If I could have had my family out here, “ Joe told me on Johnston, “I wouldn’t have hesitated.
“And think of the proximity.”
It’s true. You can stand on one edge of the island, the mere length of an airfield, and can see the lagoon lapping the shore on the other side.
Joe grew up near the Anniston stockpile. He loved the time he spent on his aunt’s and uncle’s farm off Highway 202 next to the Depot where nerve agent sat all these years while we debated getting around to destroying it.
After he got his Auburn environmental degree, Joe spent one tour on Johnston during the incineration phase. Now he’s working online toward a master’s from the University of Maryland. He’s completing his second tour during the plant closure phase for a total of six years on the island. They need his skills on Johnston, because environmentalists monitor the shutdown just as keenly as they did operations.
“We’ve improved the safety of managing these weapons, the people and the environment,” Joe said.
“We overcame the challenges of these munitions. We’re much better able to deal now with the continental stockpiles.”
He and I stood eye-to-eye in a headquarters building when Joe Dowdey of Oxford and Bynum and Auburn told me he has no qualms about the Anniston plant.
“I’m glad to see us deal with this issue (at home),” said the slender, confident man with the reminder of an Alabama tow head from his summer days on the family farm.
“The public overlooks the human need for survival when it criticizes these plants. They forget the workers’ instinct for self-preservation.
“If we didn’t feel safe,” he said in a safe-for-workers-safe-for-the-public echo, “self-preservation would mean we wouldn’t be here.”
Human beings are far from alone in their safety on Johnston Atoll. The U.S. Interior Department’s Fish & Wildlife Service and a collection of world class visiting scientists carefully watch over an Eden full of beautiful birds and fish unmarred from plant operations.
The U.S. Air Force holds title to the Atoll from old rocket test-fire days. The Army runs the weapons incinerator. But the sharks and game fish and water-butterfly tropical fish own the surrounding seas. Ocean-going tropical birds dominate the feather-saturated land surfaces of four islands within the Atoll.
Ornithologist Betty Anne Schreiber is a Ph.D. from UCLA and a research scientist from the Smithsonian in her 20th year of studying the Johnston birdlife. She bands the prehistoric-like frigate birds beneath their giant wingspans. She checks the delicate red-tailed tropicbird chicks. She cradles white terns in her hands while monitoring the military presence.
“We haven’t lost any bird as a result of the plant,” she told me.
“A lot of expert people are running the plant, highly conscientious people.
“There are no voting constituents downwind — no voters — so they could have been sloppy. But they weren’t.”
She and her research partner Gary Schenk recently published a scientific paper with a finding of no wildlife damage from the incinerator on Johnston. I thought of the deer and wild turkey populating the compound around the Anniston plant.
“The government went to huge expense,” Gary told me. “They could have opened the chemical weapons to the air and let it vaporize. But they said, no, they weren’t going to do that.’”
I climbed into a small boat with Betty Anne and Gary and Jeff Spendelow, a U.S. Geological Service biologist who specializes in terns like the whites, which sit on their eggs without nests. We sped over clumps of coral that looked like a child’s undersea garden of delight, painted aqua and jade and lapis shades in varying depths of the lagoon.
We landed on the man-made North Island, where nuke engineers once observed the rocketing warheads fired down range from Johnston Island. The transformation to peaceable kingdom became complete. The red-footed booby and sooty tern and brown noddy and Pacific golden plover frolic and nest on the ground so thickly yet so calmly that I had to watch where I stepped for fear of crushing bird or egg.
The seabirds were beyond counting. So numberless were the flocks that when the mayor and the chamber president and I saw terns rise and swarm at dawn over nearby Sand Island, they looked in the distance like clouds or branches of trees on the treeless land.
Yes, it’s callow to talk about “canaries in the coal mine” but inevitable, and the ornithologists do. El Nino, the Pacific water temperature variable, wreaks havoc on the flocks by displacing the tuna that usually send the flying fish airborne so the birds can seize dinner in their serrated beaks.
The wildlife of Johnston Atoll may go hungry from the sea change. Incinerator exhaust did not do them in. Wildlife constantly flew through the vapor in huge numbers.
A temporary mobile ventilation filter system vents the plant now. Workers are chopping and feeding the rest of the structure into the kiln for purification of any agent residue. The image in my mind was a cannibal dining upon itself. The smaller, replacement filtration system reminded me of the lesser crane that construction workers erect on a skyscraper to dismantle and lower the larger construction crane at job’s end.
The decommissioning of Johnston Atoll’s incinerator is far along. That’s what I went to see. I had already seen the plant in full operation back in 1994. I needed to experience the closure of a process that for a mixture of social and political and legal reasons has not yet even begun in Alabama. Anniston is the legacy storage site and potential disposal plant for chemical weapons of mass destruction.
How peaceful, I reflected, are the woods and fields and neighborhoods around Anniston and its Depot where Joe Dowdey played as a boy and where his own sons one day will roam without thought of nerve agent stored nearby.
Yet how violent a natural history Johnston Atoll radiated! Surf crashed on the rim of nature’s harshest invention, the once hellish volcano. The crater rim encircles the lagoon with its islands of abrasive, crushed coral.
The nation’s former nuclear program visited the plague of a plutonium spill upon Johnston. Our Vietnam War era spilled pestilential Agent Orange on the place. Then came the stockpile of nerve agent.
The atomic soil has been gathered and buried and safely capped. The saturated defoliant has mostly undergone thermal purification for safety. And incineration has eliminated the threat from the Army’s chemical stockpile so like Anniston’s.
All the cleanups are nearly complete. The land is almost ready for returning to nature. Only some bunkers and the runway will remain, yet the attack of ocean atmosphere will render even the airfield’s asphalt unusable in a matter of years.
The steady state of the Pacific Ocean will reclaim the spot created by volcano and rendered even worse by humankind until America cleaned up the playground and put everything back the way Mother Nature wanted her den to be.
Could Anniston use an alternative clean-up method? Well, yes. Opponents of incineration crow over an Army agreement to use chemical bath technology where disposal plants remain to be built.
For Anniston to switch technologies, however, would mean turning our back on the $1 billion incinerator ready to run, perhaps retrofitting it or perhaps not. We would use caustic liquids over our water table and still use high temperatures for disposal, still have a vapor release.
Mostly Anniston would be turning its back on a technology used to completion in Johnston Atoll precisely as the government always envisioned pioneering the process for our benefit off-shore. And we would be taking up an alternative technology not operationally tested in such a configuration of weapons as Calhoun County stores.
Am I prejudiced? Judge me not and be not judged. I am at least informed about incineration’s success at Johnston Atoll for performing my Lenten penance there. If Lent is all about making choices between heaven and hell, I can tell you Johnston is a heaven now for safely disposing of its hellish stockpile like ours.
We flew away above the jillion birds of Johnston Atoll in a sky tinted flamingo on the horizon above a violet ocean. Some of the clouds dripped in golden-red sops. The color repeated in cups of guava-passion nectar served by the attendants on our airline named Aloha, that Hawaiian hello-goodbye word.
Goodbye Johnston incinerator.
Hello, Anniston. Will you forever doubt what eye has seen and hand has touched and good men have rendered harmless in a faraway place so their families and ours can now endure the same process safely at home?
Beyond doubt and beyond even faith is the real-life experience in the natural world that is Johnston Atoll.
The Star’s Chris Waddle has followed chemical weapons issues in the nation since 1982.
