Up in Smoke

efore you can enter K-block at the U.S. Army's Um-atilla Chemical Depot in Hermiston, Ore.--that is, before you're able to pass through the rigorous security checks, the multiple razor-wire fences and the painstaking vehicle searches--you must be fitted for a "protective mask." To the rest of the world, it's called a gas mask.

To get the mask, you must fill out a two-page medical-history questionnaire, assure officials that your facial hair is of an approved length, have your blood pressure checked by a medic, watch a film explaining how the mask works, perform several breathing tests to check for mask leaks, run in place for a few minutes and, perhaps most crucially, be instructed in the proper way to inject yourself in the leg with two vials of nerve-gas antidote, both of which are provided in a camouflage-colored carrying case.

Visitors never actually have to don their masks except in the highly unlikely event of a leak. But the Umatilla Chemical Depot does not mess around. Stored in 89 highly secured, earth-covered bunkers at Umatilla are 3,717 tons of chemical weapons, more than 12 percent of the United States' stockpile.

Umatilla is home to 2,635 containers holding one ton each of mustard blister agents. It stores more than 155,000 rockets, bombs and projectiles filled with nerve agent GB, also known as sarin. And it stockpiles more than 62,000 weapons filled with nerve agent VX, a clear, colorless, oily liquid that is the most dangerous of them all. Just one drop could, in short order, put the unlucky victim through a horrible death.

Umatilla's 20,000 arid acres hug the mighty Columbia River, which separates Oregon and Washington, deep in the heart of watermelon and rodeo country. It is one of eight chemical weapons depots that dot the United States; the others are in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland and Utah. Although the United States stopped producing new chemical weapons years ago, the nation's existing stockpiles have been sitting around, unused, in concrete bunkers--called igloos--like those at Umatilla's K-block. By law, they can't be moved anywhere else. And by international agreement, they must eventually be destroyed.

A surprising array of obstacles to their destruction has emerged, however. Some citizens take issue with the Army's chosen method of getting rid of the deadly chemicals--incineration--saying it is unsafe for the surrounding community. Others want the Army to pay up front for the local economic havoc that a temporary weapons-destruction effort is expected to cause. And most people around Hermiston have, at one time or another, shaken their heads over the apparent mismanagement of a federal program designed to augment local safety measures.

Safe Destruction

At first glance, Umatilla's stockpile seems well-protected. Most of its igloos are 80 feet long, 26.5 feet wide and just under 13 feet tall. The 2 feet of earth covering the igloos' exterior helps keep them at 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit at all times. Inside, stacked high on wooden pallets, are row after row of conical metal containers filled with nerve agent, many of them checked weekly for leaks. Their noses all face the thick rear wall rather than the front door.

However, since 1984, Umatilla officials have discovered 113 "leakers." In most cases, the amount of chemicals released is so tiny that, according to the Army, "a person could work inside the structure for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, totally unprotected and have no adverse health effects."

Unfortunately, officials aren't certain how long that level of safety can be assured. Of all the U.S. stockpiles, Umatilla has the largest collection of GB-filled M55 rockets, which specialists consider to be the most dangerous to store. The aluminum warheads have undergone unexpectedly high levels of degradation, perhaps due to corrosion caused by the GB agent. Officials are also worried about the degradation of the rockets' propellant. "The risk of something happening is extremely, extremely low, but that doesn't mean there's no risk whatsoever," acknowledges Lt. Col. Martin A. Jacoby, Umatilla's commander.

So when the world's nations agreed to destroy their chemical weapon stockpiles, the Army did not complain. That would probably come as a surprise to any 1960s-era weapons designer: Chemical stockpiles like those at Umatilla, unique among America's munitions, were carted off from their original factory bearing only instructions for storage and maintenance, not for their safe destruction. "That leads one to believe that they were solely intended for use," says Ronald Lamoreaux, the civilian executive assistant to Lt. Col. Jacoby.

For years, military officials in the United States and elsewhere got rid of their chemical stockpiles by burying them or by using the CHASE ("cut holes and sink 'em") method: filling an old ship with nerve gas canisters, and then drilling holes in it to sink it far out at sea. But in the late 1960s, the National Academy of Sciences convinced the Army that these methods were unacceptable. By the time alternatives such as incineration emerged over the next decade, the handwriting was on the wall. In 1985, even before the international treaties neared completion, Congress mandated the destruction of old stockpiles in exchange for authorizing the production of safer weapons. Then, under President Bush, even the new production stopped. The United States and Russia eventually signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, agreeing to a bilateral phaseout.

Because of communications gaps and policy disagreements, relations between the Army and nearby civilians have been strained at many of the depots, particularly those in Alabama, Kentucky and Maryland. But little of that antagonism has afflicted Umatilla. "Historically, there has always been a good relationship between the depot and the community," says Casey Beard, an emergency preparedness official for Morrow County, Ore. "People here are very conservative and patriotic, so the Army has always been viewed as a good neighbor."

Rubble-ization

Built on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, Umatilla was originally intended to store only conventional weapons. Hermiston Mayor Frank Harkenrider, 71, was a high school freshman when World War II broke out. "They had to build 1,000 igloos, and they did it all in less than a year's time," recalls Harkenrider, who once worked hauling ammunition at the depot. "Before the war, we were a sleepy town built on a sand dune, home to 804 people. Overnight, we grew to 10,000 people. People lived in tents. Up on Fourth Street, people lived in chicken houses."

By 1962, the Army began to send chemical weapons to Umatilla, a practice that continued until 1969. Except for a couple of public flare-ups, the weapons' presence attracted little community notice. But by the 1990s, two things became clear. One was that Umatilla would be targeted by the Pentagon's base-closing process, and sure enough, by August 1994, the last of its conventional weapons were shipped elsewhere. The other reality was that continued progress toward an international ban on chemical weapons meant that Umatilla's chemical stockpiles were likely to be destroyed.

Because the Army says no one knows how long its stockpiles will remain safe, officials have been pushing ahead with plans to start incineration by 2002. Army officials say incineration is the only technology that would allow them to safely dispose of stockpiles in the near future. An on-site incinerator is now under construction. Once it is operational, remotely operated machines will punch holes in individual chemical munitions, drain them and then incinerate the bulk liquid separately from the residue-covered shards of metal that comprised the munition casings, says Patricia Silva, the assistant site project manager.

If all goes according to plan, the facility will begin testing the new system by 2000 and burn the last of Umatilla's weapons by 2005. Then Raytheon Demilitarization Co., the site's contractor, will, in the words of company officials, "rubble-ize" it. The destruction program is budgeted at $1.2 billion; nationwide, the cost for all eight sites is slated to reach $15 billion. (Skeptics say the national cost is likely to rise, thanks to the inevitability of delays.)

"As a concerned citizen, I say get rid of them sooner rather than later," says Charles D. Galloway, resident engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing Raytheon's construction work. "These things are not getting better sitting around in the igloos."

At several depots across the country, including Umatilla, the decision to incinerate has been controversial. Critics, such as Hermiston resident Karyn Jones, who founded a group called GASP, note that when the Army incinerated weapons at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, small leaks occurred and an explosion damaged part of the incineration facility. In the past three or four years, the once widely dispersed band of critics has begun sharing information and strategies over the Internet--a "force multiplier" that the Army well understands.

The critics favor an alternative, lower-tech process--already slated for chemical-weapons demilitarization projects in Indiana and Maryland--that neutralizes the chemicals without burning them, which proponents say would be safer. The neutralization process may take longer to perfect, they say, but they do not perceive the danger of continued storage to be as great as Galloway and others do. In Oregon, citizens groups--aided by such politicians as Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.--have filed an anti-incineration lawsuit.

Silva counters that the Army has learned "thousands of lessons" from its earlier mistakes, and Army officials are certain that their incineration plan can meet Oregon's permitting standards, which require the demilitarization plant to remove better than 99.9999 percent of most contaminants. Officials also contend that only incineration--and not the alternative technology, which is still being fine-tuned--can adequately remove all toxins from the metal weapons casings that are left behind when rockets and projectiles are punched or sliced in half to remove the nerve agents.

The National Academy of Sciences is on record concurring with the Army's judgment. So is Amy Smithson, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute that specializes in national security issues. "The Army's incinerator is unlike any in the world, with hundreds more engineering safeguards and alarms than any other incinerator," she says.

Unpreparedness

In Hermiston, most residents seem to be satisfied with the incineration plan; many defer to the Army, which has provided safe and bountiful employment for generations of local families. Less friendly, however, has been the local reaction to the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP).

The program was created by Congress almost a decade ago to safeguard the communities near chemical-weapons depots, partly to address concerns over the risks inherent in shuttling the fragile stockpiles around for the first time in decades. The idea undergirding CSEPP was noncontroversial: that the federal government should aid local and state emergency-response systems so that they could, for the first time, be capable of handling a chemical-agent disaster with "maximum protection for the public."

Because the Army felt uncomfortable overseeing a mostly civilian program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was tapped to administer the effort. CSEPP officials responsible for Umatilla say the recent completion of safety renovations at schools and the acquisition of advanced communications equipment for emergency workers are significant accomplishments. But during its decade of activity, many local officials found CSEPP to be deeply flawed.

"When CSEPP was created, it was supposed to be a bottom-up program," says Casey Beard, the Morrow County CSEPP director. "The emphasis was supposed to be on the first responders. But unfortunately, it became an inverted pyramid--a great deal of bureaucracy at the top, and a small group here near the depot, where the rubber meets the road."

One problem, Beard says, was that for FEMA, a program like CSEPP "was terra nova. Not only was this a new program with a great deal of money and all the institutional problems that entails, but more importantly, FEMA has historically responded after disaster happens, which is a different challenge than preparing for one before it occurs. They've had difficulty coming to terms with what their role should be."

Another big problem, participants say, was that Umatilla's CSEPP was set up to encompass two states, three counties, two sovereign Indian nations, the Army and an alphabet soup of civilian federal agencies. That, most agree, virtually ensured a surplus of bureaucracy and communications gaps. Moreover, city administrators were angry that they weren't included in the structure, even though their own emergency workers were assigned to the front lines. "It's been a challenge for everyone," acknowledges Kathleen K. Gibbs, the public affairs officer for CSEPP issues at the Army's Chemical and Biological Defense Command, headquartered at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.

Around Hermiston, almost everyone griped about the arrogance of Washington officials. "The people inside the Beltway see it as them doing us a big favor, but we see it as us doing them a favor by providing response to a threat created by the federal government itself," Beard says.

The horror stories abounded:

• Protective equipment not ordered, or ordered but not distributed.
• A mobile decontamination trailer purchased without a vehicle to lug it around.
• Hospitals not yet pressurized to resist nerve agent leaks.
• Protective clothing stored but not yet wearable because safety protocols had not yet been drawn up.
• Communications equipment installed years late, or not at all.
• Washington, D.C.-based officials, used to living in communities with paid fire and rescue services, not understanding how to work with volunteer personnel.

The resentment became so heated that last spring the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" aired a scathing piece about CSEPP, based largely on critical studies by the General Accounting Office. Many officials near Umatilla, and even some of CSEPP's critics, acknowledge that the "60 Minutes" piece was oversimplified and did not report enough of CSEPP's benefits. Still, the high-profile attention did help focus senior Clinton administration attention on fixing the program.

"The airing of that show started a chain reaction," says Mayor Harkenrider, who appeared in the segment lashing out at CSEPP. "Four or five us went to Washington. [FEMA Director] James Lee Witt was at the meeting--he's a friend of the President. We laid a lot on the table--you know, 'Goddamn it, where's the money? Where's it been spent?' It seems a lot of it was wasted on in-house operations. But after all those meetings, we think we're now on the right track."

In recent months, CSEPP's bureaucracy has been eased significantly, says Chris Brown, a 28-year military veteran who has served since September 1997 as the CSEPP program manager for Oregon. "A very important agreement was signed last October, a memorandum of understanding between FEMA and the Army," he says. "That cleaned up the lines of communication: The Army was given responsibility for everything on post, and FEMA assumed responsibility for everything off post."

In addition, CSEPP's once-nightmarish budgeting process has been streamlined. "The way it used to work, the county had to submit a budget to the state, and after that was approved, it had to go to the FEMA region, then to FEMA headquarters in Washington, and then to the Army for funding approval," Brown says. "People took whacks at it all the way up. There needed to be communication, trust and openness. Decisions would get bogged down in bureaucracy. It was very difficult to manage the program. But that's significantly improved."

Participants credit FEMA's Russ Salter, the new head of CSEPP, for creating the right atmosphere for reform. "Russ has, to his credit, been very willing to break down the old barriers that had been either deliberate or caused by the poor exchange of information," Beard says. "He has been much more approachable, and extremely reasonable in his decision-making."

But sources say that CSEPP has not improved as much everywhere else as it has in Umatilla, in part because local officials have asked too much of it, but mostly because of nagging internal problems. "It is just a program that doesn't seem to get it," says one well-placed source. "It seems to have gotten into a mind-set of, 'We'll be ready for destruction,' even though its original intent was to prepare for stockpile-storage accidents. It's a breach of faith that local citizens are aware of."

Even Brown, one of CSEPP's strongest defenders, believes that perfection is probably out of reach for such a complex program. "Do the communities here now have what they need to respond to an accident? The answer is, 'No they don't.' From my foxhole, I'd say that if 10 represents everything we want, we're probably at 7. We may never get to 10. I personally don't think it's possible."

Residents can take some comfort in the fact that the Army reportedly considers the chance of a fatal accident to be 3 million to 1--or slightly more likely than getting hit by lightning.

Impact Fees

With CSEPP now significantly improved, another problem looms: paying for the incineration process and its effect on the surrounding community. In order to build, operate and tear down the incinerator, the localities around Umatilla will have to absorb 500 to 1,000 newcomers between now and 2005, only to see them leave once the job is done. That will mean a substantial spike in school attendance, sewer and road use, and housing demand.

"We're rural, so handling the influx from the building of the plant and then its operation and its demolition will be difficult," says Tamra J. Mabbott, Morrow County's land-use planner. Morrow County estimates its hit at just under $20 million, while neighboring Umatilla County projects its costs at $35 million. Neither figure includes housing.

Despite pressure from state and local officials, the Army has not yet agreed to help offset these costs. "We have not disagreed. It's just fair to say we're still in the negotiation phase," says Jacoby.

However the negotiation works out, local people--and even critics like GASP founder Karyn Jones--applaud the Army for its willingness to work out its problems in good faith. But there's also a palpable eagerness in Hermiston to get the job done.

"No one can tell you how long this stuff is going to be safe in storage," Harkenrider says. "So why piddle around and wait?"

Louis Jacobson has written about weapons of mass destruction for Government Executive, The Economist and National Journal, where he is a staff writer.