Between D-Day and Earth Day, the military simply buried old chemical arms. Last year, in an effort to clean up the environment, Congress ordered it to find out where.
Through old records, 190 sites nationwide have been identified as burial sites or are strongly suspected of containing buried arms. One of every four of those old dumps is in Utah, twice as many as in any other state.The Pentagon released a report Tuesday saying areas near Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, Tooele Army Depot and Defense Depot Ogden have 45 known or suspected chemical arms burial sites. Four are off bases on public and private land in Tooele County.
On top of that, Dugway and Tooele are among six bases nationally to which the military has transported some chemical arms it found buried elsewhere - and they may receive more as environmental cleanup proceeds nationally.
That all reveals a largely unknown side to chemical arms hazards in Utah. The state also stores 42 percent of the nation's working chemical arms stockpile at Tooele, where a new $392 million plant will soon incinerate them - the method that replaced burial in the late '70s.
Army Corps of Engineers officials gave Gov. Mike Leavitt a brief preview of the report Tuesday. Col. Larry Sadoff, Sacramento, explained the process of pinpointing the sites.
It is not too surprising that such a high number of dumps were found in Utah. Three of its bases have a long history of work with chemical arms.
That is demonstrated by one startling figure in the report: Between 1945 and 1968, "12,000 field tests employing 47,900 munitions or dissemination devices with nerve agents GA, GB and VX (that) were conducted" at Dugway.
That is thousands more than previously estimated by Army watchdogs and does not include thousands more tests of germ weapons.
Obviously, Dugway was a major chemical arms test facility. Tooele's South Area still is the nation's largest chemical arms storage facility. And Defense Depot Ogden stored more than 1 million pounds of mustard gas during World War II.
The new report says the area around Dugway has the most probable chemical arms burial spots of any base nationally - 37 total, including 24 verified, 12 strongly suspected and one additional possibility.
Most alarmingly, four of the sites are off the base on public and private land. The Deseret News previously revealed contamination at two of the sites in 1988 by documents it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Off-base contamination sites include a tunnel in the Great Western and Old Ironsides mines (not previously revealed), plus the Yellow Jacket Mine area, all of which are in the Dugway Mountains on public land administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
These sites were "attacked" by "large amounts" of chemical arms in Project Sphinx, which tested the penetration capabilities of chemical arms systems for use in Japanese caves and underground fortifications during World War II.
Additionally, the report says BLM and private land may be contaminated in the South Triangle - an area the size of Washington, D.C., south of the base where live chemical munitions were tested in the 1940s and 1950s.
The other public land suspected of continued contamination (not previously disclosed) is a pit a half-mile north of the base where many of the 6,000 sheep killed in a nerve gas accident in Skull Valley in 1968 were buried. The Army says some residue could persist there.
The Army reported that it is negotiating with the BLM to take over the sheep burial pit and the South Triangle, which it said should help protect the public.
That is news to Howard Headrick, manager of the BLM's Pony Express Resource Area. "They haven't applied for that," he said. "They talked about it in 1988 when the earlier stories came out, but I thought they dropped it - and they haven't mentioned it since then here."
He adds, "The BLM has always preferred that the Army clean up the land and leave it in public domain."
Also, the new Army report says that in the South Triangle, "due to the remoteness of the area, it is not believed to present any immediate threat to human health and safety."
However, it is an area where gold companies have been prospecting and where hikers, rock hounds and four-wheel-drive enthusiasts travel.
Other dumps at Dugway are suspected of housing everything from old nerve and mustard gas munitions to entire contaminated trucks and old German chemical arms from World War II. The report noted that the base has identified scores of other hazardous waste sites, too, with everything from PCBs to old oil.
The report says Tooele Army Depot may have six chemical arms contamination sites - all in its South Area in Rush Valley.
One of those sites is huge, containing 20 pits over 1,476 acres where mustard bombs and smoke devices were buried. Other sites range from trenches containing test tubes of mustard agent to pits where some munitions were burned but may have left contamination.
Defense Depot Ogden has two dump sites listed in the report. At one, workers last year accidentally unearthed buried kits that soldiers used to learn how to identify chemical agents. The kits include small bottles of mustard agent.
Also at the Prestone Wall area, it said five- to 10-gallon containers of mustard agent were dumped into a pit with chlorinated lime and soil designed to neutralize them. It also contained vials from chemical agent test kits.
The Pentagon report said the military is in the process of determining how best to handle the cleanup at each of the old dumps. It said it prefers to handle the arms on site without moving them, but transporting them may sometimes be necessary.
Tooele and Dugway are two of six bases that have received weapons from other burial sites. Dugway still is storing 54 chemical munitions it received from other sites, and Tooele is storing 64.
Brig. Gen. William Busbee said at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday that only arms that are certified as safe for transport would ever be moved.
He said they would be packed in cases that are both vapor- and explosive-proof. Also, he said the Army would work with states and the EPA on routes, emergency response plans and other details.
Busbee said the Army prefers to use airplanes for such transport where possible, because it reduces risks to neighborhoods along highways. The report added, though, that no transport can be performed with zero risk.
The Army is also beginning work on a variety of methods that may be used to chemically neutralize, drain or otherwise dispose of chemical arms at sites where they are buried - or at least prevent them from harming the environment.
It says incineration plant methods, which will be used on the working stockpile, may not be of use on the buried arms because officials often do not know what is in the arms they find, and the arms have often seriously deteriorated.
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(Additional information)
45 sites in Utah
Dugway Proving Ground, Tooele Army Depot and Defense Depot Ogden have 45 known or suspected chemical arms burial sites. Here is a breakdown:
Dugway 37
Tooele 6
Ogden 2