Incinerator monitor enjoys challenging assignment

This story was published Tue, Jan 5, 1999

By Theresa Goffredo
Herald Oregon bureau

HERMISTON - To Darrel Johnston, it sounded like the dream job.

It included a competitive salary and benefits, along with a good chance for advancement. He'd get to work in a dynamic field on a tropical Pacific atoll. And meals and housing were paid for.

But there were a couple of hitches: Johnston would have to work around lethal chemical nerve agents. And he would have to leave his family behind.

Johnston took the job.

It was eight years ago when the budding chemist was hired to work at the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System southwest of Hawaii where the Army was burning an aging stockpile of chemical munitions.

Johnston said the nerve agents "didn't turn me off." He added, "I figured it was a safe assignment. The job was good. I stayed and adjusted to new challenges, and I got good support from the management, and they were feeding me more responsibility."

So he stayed at Johnston Atoll for seven years, working eight-week rotations on the 3-mile-long island with two weeks off to return to his wife, Sandy, and their three sons in Texas.

Then in June 1997, Johnston moved to Hermiston after being selected to oversee the monitoring of air and liquid samples during the incineration of chemical agents at the Umatilla Chemical Depot.

Johnston works for Southwest Research Institute. It is the nonprofit organization under subcontract to Raytheon Demilitarization Co., the contractor building the incinerator at the depot eight miles west of Hermiston where 3,717 tons of aging nerve agent stored there are to be destroyed.

Currently, Johnston heads a staff of five. But by the time the lab at the incinerator is up and running in October, Southwest expects to hire 33 full-time employees. Ultimately, when the incinerator is burning the weapons - sometime around April 2002 - Johnston will head a team of 80 workers.

At 31, Johnston is not the youngest lab manager employed by Southwest. But he would be in charge of one of the institute's largest projects - to help ensure the workers, the environment and the public are safe during the five-year weapons incineration process at the Umatilla depot.

That process will mean 24-hour, seven-days-a-week monitoring for any presence of chemical agent. Johnston's staff will check the air inside and immediately outside the incinerator plant, as well as test effluent that is produced as the munitions are drained and cleaned.

During incineration, chemical agents will be burned at high temperatures in a closed system. The burning produces an acidic gas that is filtered through a pollution abatement system. The metal containers that held the agents also are heated to destroy any leftover agent.

To keep monitoring at a continuous pace, 100 small automated machines called gas chromatographers will be placed throughout the plant to collect air samples every three minutes, or about 40,000 samples a day, Johnston said.

Scientists and technicians will analyze the samples, looking for minute amounts of chemical agent, "in the parts per trillion," Johnston said.

Johnston's boss, Michael G. MacNaughton, said the documentation Southwest will be doing in its monitoring at Umatilla is "greater than anything that would be necessary in normal plant monitoring."

"At the demilitarization plants, we focus on detecting these chemical agents under the strictest quality control," MacNaughton told Technology Today, a magazine put out by Southwest Research Institute.

Parts of the Umatilla lab also will come equipped with automatic alarm systems called ACAMS, or Automated Continuous Air Monitoring Systems. The ACAMS can be set off by extremely small amounts of chemical agent - one-fifth of the permissible exposure limit, Johnston said.

Johnston said he's comfortable enough with the safeguards used at Johnston Atoll and those that will be in effect at the Umatilla depot that "I moved my family to Hermiston."

Johnston said there have been some changes during his career with Southwest Research that improved safety of the incinerator technology. He said the biggest change has been in the incinerator's carbon filter system, used in conjunction with the pollution abatement system to filter emissions.

It was discovered that the carbon filter was permitting small emission leaks, Johnston said. To correct the problem, a vestibule or room was built around the carbon filter system to give a "secondary stage of protection," he said.

"That was a lesson learned that we applied to this site," he said.

Though leaving the Pacific took an adjustment, Johnston said he brought his tropical hobby of outrigger canoeing back to the states. He and two other teammates have started the Tri-City Outrigger Canoe Club.

Johnston said he's also happy to be living full time with his family, though that, too, has taken a bit of adjusting.

"I remember when I was having some car trouble and I had to ask my wife who to take the car to," he said. "Now that's normally something a guy would know."

 

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