As preparation for burning the chemical weapons at the Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot nears its July target for start-up, local opposition groups to incineration of the weapons still hope to shut down operations.

In a hearing held Thursday on whether or not an Army lawyer had intimidated a witness from supplying critical information on the safety of the facility, a judge ruled in favor of the state and did not impose sanctions.

That means closing arguments for a lawsuit filed last year by G.A.S.P., a Hermiston-based group representing 22 local residents and other organizations, will go forward. In the lawsuit, G.A.S.P. alleges the Army never gave serious consideration to alternative means of destroying chemical agent and hasn’t considered the health and environmental effects of the process.

The no-jury trial was held in September, but closing arguments were delayed while the motion regarding intimidation was considered. Arguments now are expected to be completed by mid June, and a decision from the judge is expected in July, said Karyn Jones, G.A.S.P. executive director.

The Army plans to begin incinerating chemical agents in July.

The dismissal of Thursday’s motion was disappointing, but Jones said she doesn’t consider it a setback to G.A.S.P.’s litigation. The group has filed three lawsuits in the past five years. Two were decided in the state’s favor and are pending in the Oregon Court of Appeals. G.A.S.P. believes Thursday’s decision will help strengthen its other cases.

“While the court did not grant our motion for sanctions, it recognized that the state and their regulatory permits feebly protect workers’ rights to blow the whistle on unsafe operations,” she said.

In the case being decided this summer, “the ultimate result that we’re hoping for is that the judge will revoke the permits and shut down the facility,” she said.

The group’s overall worry is that the technology of the plant will not be able to handle the incineration of the chemical weapons stockpiled at the Depot. But Army and state officials say their worries are based on weak facts and a misunderstanding of the incineration facility’s design.

“When we go online, we’ll be the most modern incineration plant in the world,” said Rick Kelley, spokesperson for Washington Group International, the demilitarization company which built and is operating the incineration plant.

Building on experience

UCWDF is one of eight Army depots around the country with chemical weapons. It has about 12 percent of the nation’s supply, which includes 3,717 tons of nerve and blister agents contained in munitions. As part of an international treaty the U.S. signed in the 1980s, all the chemical agents must be destroyed.

The first incineration facility for the destruction of the weapons was built in the 1990s on Johnston Atoll, an island in the Pacific Ocean. That facility completely destroyed all of its inventory and closed in November 2000, said Dennis Murphey, administrator for the DEQ’s chemical demilitarization program. Another facility at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah started its incineration process soon after. It is still a work in progress. Facilities in Alabama and Arkansas began operations last year.

The Umatilla Depot will be the next facility to go online.

And that is good news, Kelley said.

“We’re the fourth generation incineration plant, and we’ve been able to improve upon the earlier technologies,” he said.

He explained that after an accident at the Utah facility two years ago, all the facilities linked together as part of a “lessons learned” program. “We are in weekly if not daily communication with other sites,” he said.

That information has allowed Umatilla to constantly improve upon the original design of the facility, making it safer to operate than the earlier incineration plants, Kelley said.

But groups such as G.A.S.P. and some residents from Hermiston, Irrigon, Pendleton and Kennewick aren’t convinced.

They say that past experiences with managers at the facility and incidents at the others have caused them to doubt the safety improvements.

Filtering facts

“We don’t believe that incineration is the best available technology,” said J.R. Wilkinson, a G.A.S.P. researcher. He said he has concerns that the monitoring equipment for the facility is flawed, based on workers’ accounts he has heard. Wilkinson expressed his worries about the facility recently at a public hearing in Hermiston, which highlighted the continued controversy between the state and local Oregon residents opposing the incineration process.

The hearing, held at the Good Shepherd Medical Center in mid-February, was on whether or not to modify the original 1997 permit that allowed the facility to be built. The modification request by the U.S. Army and Washington Group International asked that the point in the incineration process where the escape of emissions is measured be moved one step farther down the line.

For G.A.S.P. and others opposed to incineration, this was an important and sensitive topic.

When the original permit was approved, the point of compliance for emissions was heatedly debated. At the time, the use of carbon filters, an added component to many pollution abatement systems, was still new technology.

“Carbon filters had been used in various settings, but not to any significant degree for combustion facilities,” Murphey said. “Since the information wasn’t available at the time the permit was issued, it was reasonable not to factor them into the emissions compliance.”

Those who opposed incineration on the grounds that it is an unsafe process thought – and many still do – that the use of the carbon filters could only add to the facility’s potential harm. In the end, they were reassured that the facility would not count on the effectiveness of the carbon filters to reduce emissions, Jones said.

“During the permit process we were told repeatedly by the Army that the incineration worked so well that they could meet all the emissions standards,” Jones said. “The carbon filters were added on just in case there was a safety accident, and they said that they would never take credit.”

But now, with the permit modification, there is concern that the Army is requesting to take away that safety precaution in the form of using the filters as a necessary part of the pollution abatement system. That means there will no longer be a backup technology in place if something should go wrong, Jones said.

But Murphey said the filters will still operate as they were intended.

“You’ve got a host of air pollution control equipment on the stack, the last of which are still the carbon filters,” he said.

In explaining why the permit modification is necessary, Kelley said that right now, several emissions standards at the one incinerator (there are four) can’t be met at the current testing compliance point, which is before the carbon filters. He said the need to modify the permit couldn’t have been foreseen in 1997.

“Because of new regulations we have to subscribe to, modifying the compliance point is essential to completing the incineration on schedule,” he said.

The new federal air regulations, known as the MACT standards, were put in place after the permit was approved and increased the threshold for emissions compliance. Before that standard change, the facility would have met the emissions standards at the compliance point before the carbon filters. Now, the facility will still meet the increased emissions standards – but only if it is able to “take credit” for the reduction in the emissions resulting from the carbon filters.

If it is unable to, the emissions exiting the incineration system into the atmosphere will be the same, but the rate of rockets fed into the one incinerator would have to slow to one or two an hour versus the planned 30 to 40. The incineration process would then be delayed by up to seven years – four times longer than expected.

Ted Haigh, an air quality specialist for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, said that G.A.S.P. members are right in saying the carbon filters were originally only supposed to act as an additional safety measure.

“Sure, that’s the way the permit was originally written,” Haigh said. But since the time the filters were added to the facility’s design, they’ve gone through enough testing to convince Haigh that not only will they work safely, but they can be relied on to reduce risks from emissions.

“The filters are tried and true technology,” Haigh testified at a permit modification at a public hearing in Portland in early February. “Meeting the emission standards at the exhaust stack (post carbon filters) is going to be more protective of human health and the environment,” he said.

Engineers at the DEQ, which is charged with monitoring the incineration process and protecting the public’s health, also believe the filters decrease the risk of harm.

“The air contaminants are actually less than from other facilities in the area,” Murphey said.

The DEQ is tentatively recommending that the permit modification be approved. A decision will likely be reached in late May, after all public comment has been gathered. The deadline for that comment is end of the business day Monday.

G.A.S.P. members say that if the permit modification is approved, they will challenge it.

“I would say that is a very strong possibility,” Jones said. “I told the court clerk yesterday that I was sure that we would be seeing him again shortly. G.A.S.P. four is just around the corner.”

Conclusion nears

So the debate isn’t likely to end in a way that makes both groups happy at the same time. G.A.S.P. members are adamantly convinced that incineration of the weapons is a bad idea, and vow to continue fighting the incineration efforts. But the Army and the state are just as convinced that incineration is the best and quickest method for the weapons’ destruction.

And at this point, there is much invested in the state’s position. About $2.4 billion and years of paperwork.

Mary Binder, spokesperson for the depot, couldn’t comment on the litigation by G.A.S.P., although she did say it is unlikely the legal challenges will change much.

“We believe it won’t affect (the process), and we’re focused on getting the plant ready,” Binder said.

On Monday, Washington Group International, the contractor for the incineration plant, will announce it is prepared to start the next to last stage of readying the plant for operation – integrated plant runs. This means all systems will be operating at once for testing.

“Instead of testing individual components, they’re now taking them and running them all together,” Binder said. “It’s going to demonstrate that we can continuously operate the plant.”

This stage of the process is also the first of the official approvals the plant must receive before incineration of actual chemical agents can take place in July. The IPRs are expected to run through March, after which the Army and DEQ will run their own tests and, it is hoped, give their stamp of approval.

Then the DEQ will make recommendations to the Environmental Quality Commission, which must give the final okay before the plant can operate fully, according to Binder.

In the meantime, if the lawsuits don’t prevent it, G.A.S.P. intends to file an injunction to stop the incineration process, Wilkinson said.

But G.A.S.P. can only go on as long as it has the finances to do so, Jones said. The group is funded by private donations and grants. Wilkinson said that as long as the money holds out, “everything’s open for options.”