Last month, the Army told the Senate that destroying aging chemical arms would cost $7.9 billion - about four times as much as originally thought. On Tuesday, a general told the House that it may cost yet $1 billion on top of that.
"There are still unknowns remaining in the program. We've yet to build the first full-scale disposal facility in the continental United States (at Tooele Army Depot)," Brig. Gen. Walter Busbee told a House Government Operations subcommittee.Busbee, director of the Army's Chemical Materiel Destruction Agency, said all those unknowns could add up to an additional $1 billion.
As an example of overruns, the Army announced last month that a chemical arms destruction facility under construction at Tooele would be delayed by a year because of a variety of mismanagement, design flaws and safety concerns, and its cost has risen from $49.6 million to $180 million.
Tooele stores about 42 percent
See CHEMICAL on B2
of the nation's chemical arm stockpile, and many of the munitions are aging and deteriorating.
The U.S. General Accounting Office - a research arm of Congress - agreed that many more cost overruns are likely in the Army's overall destruction program but didn't venture a guess at how much the overruns could cost.
That all upset subcommittee Chairman Mike Synar, D-Okla. "The cost of the Army's chemical-weapons disposal program is like the Energizer bunny - it keeps on going and going and going."
He noted the Army in 1985 said the program would cost $1.7 billion, but it increased the cost last month to $7.9 billion officially. "If the truth be told, the Army itself doesn't even know for sure when the project will be finished or how much it will ultimately cost."
Richard Davis, director of Army issues for the GAO, listed several reasons his agency feels overruns will continue in the program.
One is that while the Army was helped by cooperative officials in Utah and Alabama to obtain permits needed to begin early work on plants there, destruction plants are unpopular in other states. "In the future, regulators may not be as cooperative," Davis said.
In fact, Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland and Colorado have considered or enacted legislation that could delay or even prevent construction of chemical-arms incinerators by making obtaining environmental permits difficult.
Also, the Army has had numerous problems with its first full-scale destruction facility at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. Mechanical breakdowns, corrosion and problems with explosions in incinerators led to numerous shutdowns.
Solving the continuing problems and redesigning it and other plants adds to costs.
Also, the Johnston plant has not been able to destroy arms as quickly as anticipated. Such slowdowns also could drive up costs.
Synar and other members called for the Army to look at alternative methods of destruction and called for a slowdown in some construction and design money until problems at Johnston Atoll are resolved.