A spokesman for the Army's chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele County has taken strong exception to statements by a lawyer for environmentalists that nerve agent may have escaped the plant in a March 30, 1998, incident.
Mick Harrison, lawyer for Chemical Weapons Working Group, the Sierra Club and others, said in a federal court hearing last week that something -- either nerve agent or byproduct of nerve agent that was broken down by combustion -- was detected by a duct monitor of the plant.In a response, incinerator spokesman Jon Pettebone issued a press release denouncing as false any suggestion that nerve agent may have been released.
The duct leads directly to the main smokestack. Whatever was there, it set off an alarm that went off the scale at 511 times the permissible level of nerve agent, Harrison said.
That was the minimum concentration of the chemical that was detected, according to the lawyer. "It could have been thousands of times" the allowable concentration, he said.
The incident involved workers feeding a nerve agent bomb into the waste metal incinerator before it was improperly drained. This caused the furnace to burn too hot and shut down, he said. Harrison said a pair of monitoring alarms in the main smokestack did not go off but that he believed they were not correctly in sync to detect nerve agent.
Also, Harrison said, a formal report indicates a sampling tube in the stack was being removed at the very moment of the incident. Because of the work, he believes the sampler, called a Depot Area Air Monitoring System, or DAAMS, tube could not have pulled out a sample at the proper time.
Then, when a sample was taken at 5:42 a.m., two hours after the incident, it showed that whatever caused the alarm wasn't nerve agent, he said.
Pettebone said that during the incident an automatic continuous air monitoring system alarm went off in a metal parts furnace duct, registering the presence of a high level of some unknown material, "not agent."
Material "such as small particulates of incomplete combustion or diesel fumes can mimic properties," causing the plant's automatic continuous air monitoring system to alarm, said Pettebone.
Although the triggering material "was not positively identified, chemical agent was ruled out as a cause for the duct ACAMS alarm. It is known that it was not agent because two other ACAMS units located at the main stack, as well as a second, independent air monitoring system, detected no agent."
The second system was the Depot Area Air Monitoring System, the sampling tubes cited by Harrison.
"The analysis results in this case were that no detectable agent was present in the stack emissions," Pettebone added.
He added that no worker ever has been exposed to nerve agent, "nor has there been any detectable release of agent into the environment."