A former manager for the Army’s chemical weapons
incinerator in rural Tooele County says he was told he would lose
his job if he talked about the plant’s environmental
problems.
During a January press conference, Gary
E. Harris made public a list of over 100 questionable activities by
the Army and its contractor, EG&G, at the Tooele plant. He
charges that the Army illegally obtained the plant’s operating
permit and that the state has overlooked unsafe
operations.
“The environmental issues at the
plant became my health problems,” he says. Harris says he became
severely ill from toxic exposure and yet was unable to recoup
compensation from EG&G.
Harris is the fourth
top-level manager to raise environmental and safety concerns at the
Tooele plant, the first of its kind in the United States (HCN,
9/16/96). The incinerator burns chemical agents such as nerve gas
that have been in storage since the early
1980s.
Shortly after Harris went public with his
charges, Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio called for the immediate
shutdown of a chemical weapons incinerator in Umatilla, Ore., one
of several plants modeled after the one at
Tooele.
Army spokesman Gary Mahall says he’s
confident that the “sensational charges’ will be proven false.
Because incineration is a touchy issue, adds Dave Jackson, a
project manager at Tooele, “my belief is that we will be under
litigation forever.”
Critics hope the evidence
Harris has will stop incinerators planned for other states. If this
case doesn’t prod the Army to rethink incineration, says Jason
Groenewald of Salt Lake City-based Families Against Incinerator
Risk, “it’s going to take a dead body.”
*Catherine Lutz
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Incinerator unsafe, says former Tooele manager.
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