Chemical exposure incident reviewed at forum

This story was published Wed, Nov 20, 2002

By Karen Zacharias
Herald Oregon bureau

PORTLAND -- Questioning the Army's attention to safety earned top billing Tuesday at a three-day forum focusing on the 24,000 tons of deadly chemical munitions stored in the United States.

The Army always preaches safety, but the question of how much was the first topic discussed when the Army's contractor presented a review of a July incident in which two workers were exposed to sarin at the chemical weapons depot in Tooele, Utah.

Army officials said safe disposal rates paramount concern.

"We need to get rid of the chemical weapons stockpile for the nation's good," said Mario Fiori, assistant secretary of the Army for the nation's chemical stockpiles. He was a keynote speaker Tuesday at the event, which drew about 100 people to the Benson Hotel in Portland.

"And we need to do it as quickly as safety and environmental considerations will allow us. The stockpile grows older every day, and we have the added terrorism dimension of Sept. 11," Fiori said.

Questions ranged from how will the Army keep a leak like Tooele's from happening again to the quality of its chemical agent monitoring systems.

Officials reviewed the Tooele incident and measures to correct the problems.

Billed as the "flagship of chemical weapons disposal," the Tooele facility had destroyed all the munitions containing sarin when the incident occurred. Workers were preparing the facility for a change over to destruction of VX when sarin was discovered in an air purge valve. The workers did not immediately know they had been exposed because their air-monitoring systems double-faulted and "mucked up," Army officials said.

The Tooele plant still is not operating. And Chip Jones, risk manager for EG&G, the Army's contractor for the Tooele plant, said he doesn't expect the plant will be operational this year. He said the exposure was traced to a managerial error.

"We screwed up, and we need to fix it," he said.

Jones said the company has contracted with safety and training consultants from Fluor and CH2M Hill to help revamp Tooele's program. A team has been helping retrain Tooele's staff in safety procedures since September.

"We turned to the nuclear industry for help because there was too much wiggle room in our procedures," Jones said. "We had a lot of opportunities to handle this thing, and the engineer in charge didn't take ownership for it."

That engineer is no longer employed at Tooele, Jones said.

Moreover, Jones said "lessons learned," what the Army uses to describe its remedies to screw-ups, were never implemented at Tooele.

"One of the lessons we learned at Johnston Atoll was that you had to use soap for decontamination. That was passed on to the Army but wasn't picked up on at Tooele," Jones said.

Decontaminated workers in the July incident were scrubbed with cold water and bleach, rather than hot water, soap and bleach, which better removes all the agent.

The July incident was a wake-up call for everyone at Tooele, Jones said,

"We're turning this thing around, so we are going to be ahead of the game now," he said.

Deborah Kim hopes so. As chairwoman of the Utah Citizens Advisory board and an emergency room nurse, she said she was dismayed to learn there also had been agent leaking from the same valves at the Tooele facility in January as had leaked in July.

"This is the first I've heard of this," Kim said. "I'm steamed."

Kim also said she was appalled that, initially, workers were not properly decontaminated.

"My expectation is that the people at the depot are the experts on agent. These workers weren't even treated to basic human comfort or dignity. There wasn't hot water. There wasn't any privacy. They didn't even have any soap."

Kim said she still does not have any faith in the monitors used to detect leaks of chemical agent.

Jones said both workers are back on the job. But the worker who suffered the greatest amount of chemical exposure did not return to his previous job.

"He's working in the control room now," Jones said.

 

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