-It’s like standing on the dock and watching the
Titanic set out to sea,” says Craig Williams of the Chemical
Weapons Working Group, a Kentucky-based organization that monitors
chemical weapons activity around the U.S. “Nobody wants to listen
to us.”
Williams is talking about the chemical
weapons incineration plant in remote Tooele, Utah, (HCN, 9/16/96)
and a federal judge’s March 24 decision to allow weapons
destruction there to continue. Judge Tena Campbell said the group’s
evidence “failed to show that they or the public would be
irreparably harmed,” and that the public interest favors continued
operation of the incinerator.
“In Tooele County,
the public is very, very supportive of the plant,” says Carol Cisco
of Utah’s Environmental Quality Department. Cisco said her agency
believes burning weapons in the highly monitored facility is much
safer than letting them disintegrate on site.
The
$250 million Tooele facility has been closed temporarily at least
six times because of leaking floor cracks, nerve and mustard gas
leaks and power failures. Despite what Williams describes as
“wheelbarrows full of evidence” that has been gathered, in part,
from former employees, Judge Campbell has twice denied the group’s
requests for a shutdown since the facility opened last August.
“Judge Campbell’s threshold for evidence is
extraordinary,” says Williams, whose group will appeal her
decision. “We might have to start wheeling in body bags to prove
our point here.”
* Emily
Miller
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Shutdown attempts go up in smoke.
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