Twenty-two thousand gallons of Vietnam War-era napalm is on a train headed for a recycling plant in Texas after an earlier plan to bring it to Indiana was scuttled by community protests.
The shipment, which left Southern California on Tuesday, was the first among many bound for GNI Group Inc.'s recycling facility in Deer Park, just east of Houston.Last week, the company signed a $10 million contract to recycle the chemical that has been stored for more than two decades in Fall-brook, 55 miles north of San Diego. Under the contract, GNI will recycle more than 3 million gallons of napalm into fuel for cement manufacturing.
In April, the Navy thought it had found a company to accept the napalm. But after community protests, Pollution Control Industries in East Chicago, Ind., refused to a shipment, and a Navy train was forced to turn around.
Ten thousand gallons stored at the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Facility and 12,000 gallons temporarily kept at the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station are now on a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train, Navy spokesman Lee Saunders said.
The Navy said napalm - a mixture of polystyrene, gasoline and benzene - is far less volatile than common gasoline and will not explode without a fuse.