Cleaning up Umatilla county’s chemical weapon deposits

 

 

By Envision Magazine on June 1, 2014

Words by Jayati Ramakrishnan
Photos by Devin ream

 

Donald Chance drives his van through the front gates of the Umatilla Chemical Depot and points to a large trapezoidal mound covered with dirt and shrubs. The front of the mound has a concrete wall and a door labeled B-1001. The buildings, or “igloos,” were used to store chemical weapons from 1964 until 2011.

The Umatilla Chemical Depot stored both blister agents, like mustard gas, and nerve agents, called “VX” and “GB.” Chance says the U.S. never used these weapons, but kept them as a deterrent. Since 2004, the U.S. Army has been working to destroy those munitions. The weapons were incinerated at a facility within the Depot over the course of the next seven years. Now, Chance’s employer, the Local Reuse Authority, is trying to figure out how the land, a total of 17-thousand acres, will be used.

  

 

Chance looks at the igloos, which, made of solid concrete, cost about thirty thousand dollars each to get rid of.

“What are you going to do with this much space, turn it into the largest dirt bike track in North America?” He laughs. “We tossed around a lot of crazy options.”

The depot itself was constructed in 1941 for standard military munitions with the goal of storing these weapons safely. The weapons were used in U.S. military operations in Korea, Vietnam, and Operation Desert Storm, among other places.

In 2011, the last of the chemical weapons were destroyed via the process of incineration, which Chance says is a safe method of disposal.  To incinerate weapons, they removed the munition from the igloo, shipped it to the incinerator site in bullet-proof containers, and put it in a secure chamber called a “clean room.” Using a remote attachment to open the container holding the weapon, they put it into the incinerator. The room was heated to a temperature between 2000 and 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. They destroyed the entire supply of one weapon, then moved on to the next. “There were no air emissions because the weapons were heated to such a high temperature,” says Chance. “The DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) sampled the air before and after.”

The weapons stored in the facility have different levels of potency, says Michele Martin, the Base Realignment and Closure Manager, and Environmental Specialist, for the depot. “GB, or Sarin,” she says, “works through inhalation, or if it gets on your skin. VX disperses and scatters into air. It lands on grass and soldiers would touch it. The amount that fits on a pinhead would kill you. Mustard gas is a burning agent – also called a blister agent, so it will cause skin burns.”

  

 

The Army has always kept a tight level of security on the facility, using heavy safety precautions every step of the way. The igloos that stored the weapons were equipped with airtight steel doors and monitors were inserted under the doors to check the air quality before a door was ever opened. “The igloos were constructed so that one could have an explosion and not affect the others,” says Chance. The igloos were constructed with walls of concrete two feet thick, and covered by several feet of soil.

“They worked exactly as they were supposed to,” Chance adds. “There were never any chemical weapon spills of any sort, and the incineration all went as it was supposed to go, so there was never any clean-up in that sense of spills.”

Still, the history of the facility includes one mishap: in 1944, while workers were loading bombs into the igloos, the weapons exploded and killed six workers. The cause of the blast was never found out. Tremors from the explosion were felt up to 20 miles away, but because of the construction of the igloos, the explosion went up, not out, protecting the other igloos in the vicinity.

The army has yet to turn over the land, and is in the process of doing so. Since the incineration was completed, many potential uses for the land have been discussed. Martin says that most of the responsibilities for the land now fall under the realm of the Land Redevelopment Authority. She adds that different pieces of the land will go to different people. Some of the land will go to the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife to be used as a wildlife sanctuary.

“A lot of people don’t realize this, but military installations have almost become a sanctuary for natural and cultural resources. There are huge stretches of land. We have a burrowing owl breeding plan out here,” Martin laughs. “They become animal sanctuaries just because no one else can use them.”

Chance describes the history of the property. The storage units are located on a 17-thousand-acre plot of land in Umatilla County, in the northeast corner of Oregon. The weapons were stored in small quonset hut-like structures dispersed across the grounds. “There was one small area on the base where they stored all the chemical weapons when they showed up in 1964,” says Chance.

The weapons were destroyed as part of a treaty that the U.S. signed in the 1980s. Along with 190 other countries, the U.S. made the decision that they would begin to phase out the weapons.

“It took a lot of time and money  to build the incinerator – about $700-million,” Chance says. The next six years were spent burning up the chemical agents. After incinerating all the weapons, a process completed in 2012, the Army dismantled the incinerator.

“We tried to prevent that from happening,” says Chance. “The facility was ideal for medical waste disposal.” But the Army didn’t want to use the facility for a secondary purpose, so  the incinerator was removed.

The Army base is split in half by the county line between Morrow and Umatilla counties. Within the base are two large port districts as well as the Confederated Tribe of the Umatilla. To decide what do with these 17-thousand acres, the Army has to go through a land-use planning process.

“This is the most massive planning legislature I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been a planner for forty years,” says Chance.

The plan was complicated, Chance notes, for four main reasons: First, the military has a bureaucratic process that is completely unique from that of the federal government. Second, the state of Oregon’s land-use planning laws are effective, but also incredibly complex. Third, there are a lot of entities who will be affected by this decision: the people of both Morrow and Umatilla County,  the Confederated Tribe of the Umatilla, and any major economic players in the area. Finally, the nature of the facility itself makes finding uses for it more complicated: it’s a 17 thousand-acre plot with no water rights. It’s hard to find productive uses for the land. “The one thing the base has going for it is that it’s at an interstate junction,” says Chance. “Those spots tend to have a lot of economic value.”

Hal McCune of the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, describes the process the U.S. Army  has been going through since the destruction of the weapons. They demolished the plant,  along with all the parts of the system that could have any pollution in them.

“Our agreement with the state was that once we were done, we would try to return the land to as similar as  it was before the plant.” He notes that the army didn’t want to get rid of all the buildings,  so a handful remain on the site. “But we agreed with DEQ [Department of Environmental Quality] standards to take soil and concrete samples.”

In order to assess whether any traces of contamination remain in the soil, the army has taken about 1,300 samples in a mile radius around the site. They’re in the process of completing the reports and sending them to the DEQ to ensure that the site is no longer contaminated.

However, before the land can be used again, it needs to be cleaned to ensure that any lingering chemicals from leaks or contaminated soil will not harm people on the land.

Bioremediation, or using microbes to clean up chemical waste, has been used for the Superfund site also located in Umatilla County, but Martin says this process only applies to conventional munitions, not to the hazardous waste materials from the chemical depot.

“Every place that stores munitions in the U.S. has to have a spill prevention management plan,” he says.