Activists: Army 'distorts' truth about nerve agent disposal

INDIANAPOLIS -- Activists from six states accuse the Army of distorting the facts in a recent letter rejecting their proposal that the waste from a deadly nerve agent being destroyed in western Indiana be disposed of on-site.\nLast month, several watchdog and environmental groups urged the Army to abandon plans to ship millions of gallons of wastewater to a DuPont Inc. plant in New Jersey for treatment and eventual discharge into the Delaware River.\nTheir joint letter to the Army declared it would be safer, cheaper and ultimately faster to dispose of the waste at the Newport Chemical Depot, where a VX nerve agent stockpile is being destroyed and its byproduct temporarily stored.\nThe director of the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency, Michael Parker, called the suggestion premature in a Sept. 27 response to the groups.\nParker said DuPont has successfully demonstrated it has the technology to treat the waste, a caustic substance called hydrolysate. He stated that the on-site process the groups endorse poses "very significant engineering challenges."\nCraig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group in Berea, Ky., said his group and activists from Indiana, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio and Pennsylvania are upset with Parker's letter, which they said is filled with "distortions" and "inaccuracies."\nWilliams pointed to Parker's statement that after the 2001 terrorist attacks there was "universal support" among Newport-area residents to treat the neutralized wastewater off-site.\nHe said Newport-area activists overwhelmingly support treating the waste on-site.\nAmong them is Sara Morgan, a retired schoolteacher who led protests that prompted the military to drop an earlier plan to incinerate the VX waste. She has said repeatedly that she and others don't want their problem shifted to another state, he noted.\n"To come out and say that everybody in Indiana supports moving this stuff off-site is just atrocious," Williams said, adding that opposition to the DuPont disposal plan is strong in New Jersey and Delaware.\nHe also said the Army has exaggerated technical problems involving the process the activists suggest be used to treat the hydrolysate at Newport, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute.\nArmy spokesman Jeff Lindblad said the Army stands by its response.\nIn his letter, Parker also said DuPont's plant in Deepwater, N.J., had treated more than 4 million gallons of mustard hydrolysate left from the destruction of mustard agent stored at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He said that work demonstrates that the process is "safe and cost-effective."\nWilliams said that is misleading because mustard hydrolysate is chemically different from VX hydrolysate.\nHowever, Lindblad said DuPont intends to use the same biological treatment process used on the VX hydrolysate that it used to treat the mustard hydrolysate. The company, however, has added a pretreatment process intended to remove phosphorous compounds that environmentalists fear could pose a threat to humans and wildlife in the Delaware River.\n"The pretreatment would be the only thing that would be different," Lindblad said.\nIn May, an Army contractor began destroying more than 250,000 gallons of VX, a Cold War-era chemical weapon, using a chemical neutralization process at the Newport depot. The project was halted in June after a leak but resumed in late August.