Power outages plague Umatilla Chemical Depot

This story was published Thu, Aug 19, 2004

By Jeannine Koranda
Herald Oregon bureau

IRRIGON -- The power keeps going out at the Umatilla Chemical Depot, and officials are looking at ways to fix the problem.

Birds are the likely culprit for the outages, Lt. Col. David "Doc" Holliday, depot commander, told the Oregon Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Plan Governing Board on Wednesday.

The blackouts do not affect the emergency operation center, which has a backup generator, and no weapons would be destroyed during a power outage, he said.

The depot, 35 miles south of the Tri-Cities, stores munitions and other containers filled with 7.4 million pounds of deadly nerve and mustard agents.

But Holliday explained that most of the power system for the depot dates to 1942. In the short term, he wants to replace parts, such as automatic switches that shift power to the generators.

And long term, Holliday said the emergency operation center might need to be on a separate power grid. He said he's not sure how long that would take.

In the meantime, he assured the board that power to depot functions, such as the agent monitoring systems or equipment that forecasts where a chemical plume might go, work despite an outage.

"I'm confident we can continue to do modeling even if we lose commercial power," he said.

Also, Holliday said he's sure the depot's new incineration facility will fire up next week. The plant was to begin destroying M55 rockets today, but was delayed because of concerns raised after a test burn.

Doug Hamrick, project general manager for Washington Group International, which runs the incineration facility, explained that some of the chemicals used in testing the liquid incinerator were detected by monitoring systems beyond the carbon filters in the plants ventilation systems.

The company was testing if the chemicals should have been trapped by the carbon filters and were replacing the first set of the filters.

Other incineration sites in Arkansas and Alabama didn't have similar problems, he said. The difference is Umatilla was doing the tests with the chemical monitoring equipment at a state of readiness, as if real chemical agents were being processed.

 

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