STOCKTON, Tooele County — Since 1996, workers at the U.S. Army's Deseret Chemical Depot here have destroyed more than 1 million chemical munitions, a milestone no other facility in the nation has — or ever will — reach.
As of Wednesday morning, when Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and Army officials gathered at the depot with facility employees to celebrate, the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility had destroyed 1,036,304 weapons as part of an international treaty seeking to eliminate all chemical weapons worldwide.
Tooele County's chemical weapons stockpile is the largest in the nation. No other facility has enough munitions to ever reach the 1 million mark, depot officials said.
Huntsman called the event "a milestone of which all of us should be proud." He said workers at the depot were engaged in "a critically important national security measure," leading the nation and the world in the major undertaking of getting rid of such weapons as GB and VX nerve agents and blistering agents like mustard.
Commanding Gen. Benjamin S. Griffin of the Army Materiel Command went a step further: "There is no command that is more critical to our nation," he said. "Nothing is more important than what you're doing today and what you do every day."
The munitions destruction is part of a national attempt to meet the 2012 treaty deadline for the entire U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons to be destroyed. The Tooele County facility began destroying weapons in 1996, and by 2002 its entire stockpile of GB nerve agent was gone. The depot expects to be finished destroying its VX stockpile by the end of spring. It will start destroying mustard early next year.
"We have an enviable record," Army Chemical Materials Agency director Michael Parker said of the overall safety of the Army's munitions destruction program. "We will only go as fast as we can to hold that high level of safety." Still, he said the Army "will make every effort" to meet the 2012 deadline.
Huntsman praised the depot's record of emphasizing safety and environmental protection while working as quickly as possible. Col. Raymond T. Van Pelt, the depot's commander, said there have been no fatalities at the depot and only minor injuries typical of any workplace with a high level of manual labor.
In May 2000, there was a small release of GB nerve agent into the environment, but it had dissipated to untraceable levels by the time it reached the depot's boundaries. And in the summer of 2002, the depot's only confirmed case of an employee being exposed to an agent was a minor GB exposure that left no lasting effect on the employee, who is now healthy and still works at the depot.
E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com