-You don’t start a $500 million piece of equipment
and expect it to hum like a jewel the first time you turn it over.
It’s gonna have bugs in it,” says Gary Griffith, a county
commissioner in Tooele County, Utah. He’s talking about the Army’s
chemical weapons incinerator 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City,
which began destroying bombs, with stops and starts, a year ago
(HCN, 9/16/96).
“We’re making good progress,”
Army spokesman Craig Campbell says. So far, EG&G Defense
Materials, the company that runs the plant, has destroyed nearly
12,000 rockets and 651 one-ton containers of nerve agent, roughly 4
percent of the Tooele stockpile. This, despite numerous shutdowns
and the fact that the Army is still awaiting the state’s approval
to run the incinerator at full capacity.
Chip
Ward, a critic from nearby Grantsville, says some “big red flags’
went up during the first year. In June, hazardous waste supervisor
Trina Allen quit, charging she had been discriminated against for
pointing out safety and environmental problems. In September, the
Labor Department ordered EG&G to pay her
$5,000.
Allen was the third manager in two years
to make such allegations. Last month, a federal judge ruled that
former safety manager Steve Jones was illegally fired after raising
safety concerns, and ordered EG&G to rehire him or pay him up
to $1 million.
The slow start in Tooele has given
other states time to look at alternatives, says Craig Williams of
the Chemical Weapons Working Group, based in Kentucky. Weapons
incineration projects in Colorado and Kentucky are on hold while
government and citizen groups look at other options; Maryland and
Indiana have decided to build chemical neutralization plants rather
than incinerators. The Army is working to finish a permit for an
incinerator in Oregon.
* Greg
Hanscom
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tooele sputters through first year.
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