Not only have two workers lost their jobs at the Army's chemical weapons incinerator because they allegedly disobeyed safety procedures, but plant managers now say five supervisors were also issued letters of reprimand because of the April 22 incident.
The workers went through doors into hazardous areas without permission, wore insufficiently protective clothing for the amount of nerve agent present and split up when they should have stayed together to help each other in case of an emergency, plant officials say.Also, the workers did not wait for a safety light to go on before opening a door, according to a stop-work order.
News of the incident did not surface until Tuesday, when the Deseret News reported on Army documents ordering a halt to all procedures involving toxic material at the $600 million plant.
At a news conference here Friday, Tim Thomas, the official who ordered the stoppage, apologized for a misleading press release that implied the plant was idled only for routine maintenance.
Thomas, the Army's project manager, actually ordered the stoppage because of the safety lapse.
A day or two later, he allowed 1-ton containers of nerve agent, already being processed, to go through the system before shutting it down again. It remains closed while procedural and physical problems are corrected and maintenance is carried out.
Thomas and plant manager Henry Silvestri detailed the shut-down. Asked by one reporter to comment on the Army's "vague and misleading" press release that attributed the closure to maintenance and not any stop order, Thomas said, "I apologize. I think we just made the wrong call" about how to handle the closure.
In the future, shutdowns will be announced promptly both to the public and to the Tooele County emergency response system, he pledged. "We thought we covered it appropriately. We did not."
The restrictions he ordered following the incident are still in place, he emphasized.
Silvestri said the workers who allegedly violated procedures were on track for firing when they resigned. In addition, five people above them were slapped for failing to ensure that standard operating procedures were followed.
Their failures involved the control room operation, plant management and senior management, he said. Other procedural bypass incidents have occurred, Silvestri said.
"This was a procedural violation. There was no public risk," Thomas said of the April 22 incident. Even the two workers were not in danger because rules about protective clothing are extremely conservative, Silvestri said.
While maintenance continues, a new team of Army and experts working for the contractor, EG&G Defense Materials, will be studying the plant's management. So will an independent group hired by the Utah Citizens Advisory Commission, which reports to Gov. Mike Leavitt.
Thomas said new problems were uncovered by a quality control audit. Differences were found between design drawings and actual configuration in some systems like breaker maps in electrical panel boxes. These are being corrected.
If all goes well with improving procedures, correcting those errors and the maintenance projects, the plant should resume its work in June.
The good news from the press conference was that so far, trial burns appear to have successfully destroyed nerve agent even better than required by the strict federal standards.