State, Tooele County tell panel they need funds for personal protection gear.
Utah will allow chemical weapons incineration only when it is safe -- and only for the Utah-based stockpile, state and Tooele County officials told a congressional subcommittee Thursday."You might say the bottom line is that by the fall of 1995, the Army will have a billion-dollar facility with trained people ready to operate but will be unable to begin operations because Tooele County will not be prepared to provide the protection required," said Kari Sagers, Tooele County Emergency Management director.
"The cost for both the Army and the American taxpayer to have this kind of investment sitting idle while contractors stand by makes us wonder what the Army considers cost effective."
The House Committee on National Security's procurement subcommittee wants to know whether money being spent on the treaty-reinforced program to destroy the nation's stockpile of chemical weapons is going to the right place -- and why the program is costing so much, said retired Maj. Gen. John L. Matthews, Gov. Mike Leavitt's science adviser.
Estimates show projected program costs of $1.6 billion in the mid-1980s have mushroomed to $11.3 billion or more with only a fraction of the program com- pleted.
Matthews and Sagers were among the representatives of the eight chemical agent stockpile states scheduled to testify before the subcommittee Thursday.
Tooele Army Depot is home for 42.3 percent of the nation's chemical weapons stockpile. TAD is also the site of the Tooele Chemical Agent Demilitarization Facility, an incineration plant designed to dismantle and destroy the aging and sometimes unstable weapons.
A pilot incineration plant was built and is operational on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. Besides Johnston, Tooele is the only stockpile site that has an incineration plant under construction. Each of the nine stockpile sites is supposed to have its own destruction program -- weapons are not to be transferred to other sites.
Sagers said the main point she hopes to get across involves safety plans that exist only on paper at this point. "Don't cut costs at the point of impact here." Tooele County has received only about $6.5 million of the $281 million spent to date on the program's safety component, she said.
The safety program includes equipment and training for local emergency response personnel and hospitals who would treat victims of a chemical agent mishap. The Tooele incineration plant is nearing completion, and test burns are scheduled soon -- yet protective gear for police and ambulance crews is nowhere to be found, Sagers said.
"Under the existing funding process, it seems that federal bureaucrats are handing out pennies as if they were manhole covers while ignoring real cost containment issues," Sagers said.
Matthews said his statement to the committee echoes the local concerns.
"A long-standing problem has been the area of personal protective equipment for first responders. Numerous agencies have been involved in this issue, creating a bureaucratic nightmare in attempting to receive approval for specific equipment," he said. "It has literally taken years to attempt to obtain approval for the necessary equipment for first re-spon-ders."
The Tooele County incineration plant carries a price tag of somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. State and Tooele County officials anticipate pressure to allow the transfer of chemical agents from other states to eliminate the need for duplicate incineration facilities.
"I'm predicting there's a good possibility (moving the weapons) may become a real avenue," Sagers said.
Matthews said the Army has also stirred safety concerns and incurred additional expense by demonstrating there is a margin between maximum safety efforts and the "reasonable assurance" levels it uses as the benchmark for safety equipment and programs.