There are no highway signs outside town trumpeting: "Welcome to Tooele - home to 42 percent of the nation's stockpile of chemical weapons."
But as of Wednesday, there is an Army office downtown where anyone can get information about chemical weapons and what the Army plans to do to get rid of them.Tooele's distinction as home to the World War II-vintage stockpile is a dubious one. But change is ahead as the Chemical Agent Disposal Facility south of town undergoes final testing before beginning its work dismantling and incinerating the stockpile.
No one in Tooele is likely to miss having deadly mustard agent or nerve agents VX and GB upwind. Yet there is also some wariness about the safety of the complex incineration system.
Overcoming public concerns about the plant is the main reason the Army opened its "Community Outreach Office."
Unlike Tooele Army Depot's foreboding fences and guard shacks, the only sentinel outside the outreach office is the VCR repair shop down the hall. Inside the office are cut-away examples of rockets and artillery pieces, literature and a model of the Chemical Agent.
"We want people to feel comfortable with us coming to them instead of them having to come to us in a public meeting," said Army spokeswoman Suzanne M. Fournier. The office staff will field questions and concerns and arrange tours of the plant. "Tooele families have an intensive background with the plant" since TAD has been the biggest employer in town for decades. "We've had a lot of (employees') family members at the plant."
According to the current schedule, the plant could begin incinerating chemical agent simulants to test the facility in mid-July. Actual toxic operations are scheduled to begin in September or October with all of the chemical weapons and agent-filled bulk storage containers destroyed by 2002.
Construction, operation and plant dismantling costs are expected to total $1 billion, Fournier said.
The first chemical weapons incineration plant was built on a small atoll in the Pacific. It has already incinerated more than one million pounds of chemical weapons materials but has had to be shut down several times because of agent leaks. The Tooele plant is the first of eight incineration plants scheduled for construction in the continental United States.
The discomfort the incineration plant has brought to Utah has the Army planning to build outreach offices in its next plant construction locations in Alabama, Arkansas and Oregon before letting incinerator construction contracts. "We should have had an office like this sooner," Fournier said from Tooele.