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Judge to hold hearing on bid to block nerve agent waste shipments
Associated Press
July 16 , 2007 07:16 PM
Indianapolis - Opponents of the Army's shipments of nerve agent waste from Indiana to Texas will ask a federal judge Monday to order a halt to the trucks, contending that the liquid waste poses an imminent threat to public health and is more toxic than the Army claims.
U.S. District Judge Larry McKinney has set aside up to three days starting Monday to hear testimony from witnesses for the Army and environmental and activist groups.
The hearing in Indianapolis comes about a month after the Army agreed to suspend the shipments from western Indiana to Port Arthur, Texas, until McKinney decides whether to block the transfers of the waste created by the destruction of the deadly VX nerve agent.
On May 8, the Sierra Club, the Chemical Weapons Working Group and other groups sued the Army, seeking a preliminary injunction to halt the shipments of the hydrolysate that's being produced by a VX destruction project at the Newport Chemical Depot.
VX is a Cold War-era chemical weapon so deadly only a tiny droplet can kill a human. It is being destroyed in chemical reactors at Newport, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute.
The lawsuit claims the 900-mile truck shipments of the VX hydrolysate from Newport through eight states to Port Arthur pose "an imminent and substantial endangerment" to public health and the environment and violate state and federal laws.
Craig Williams, director of the Berea, Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, said the witnesses his group plans to call will provide new information supporting the plaintiffs' claims and refuting much of the Army assurances of the safety of the hydrolysate.
Williams said he'll argue the Army has mischaracterized the nature of the hydrolysate. The Army contends the waste contains only a minuscule amount of VX - 20 parts per billion or less - and is no more dangerous than other hazardous wastes shipped each day across the nation.
But Williams said testimony during the hearing will show the waste contains detectable amounts of both VX and EA2192 - a highly toxic byproduct - and will also cast doubt on the Army's methods of analyzing the waste.
"Your results are only as valid as your testing methods," Williams said Friday. "We believe the analytical methods that are being used are suspect at the very least and intentionally rigged at the very worst to prop up their contentions."
Williams' group and the other plaintiffs want the Army to stick to its original plan of disposing of the waste created by the VX destruction onsite.
In April, the Army signed a $49 million contract with Veolia Environmental Services to incinerate about 2 million gallons of the hydrolysate. That agreement came after two earlier deals, with Perma-Fix Environmental Services Inc., in Dayton, Ohio, and DuPont Co. in Deepwater, New Jeryse, were scuttled because of strong opposition.
Williams said the Army acted "secretively" by signing the contract with Veolia to ship the waste to Port Arthur, a predominantly black industrial city in southeastern Texas.
"That's not a proper approach ethically and it certainly reeks of environmental racism based on the demographics of the city they're sending it to," he said.
Army spokesman Greg Mahall said the Army is confident that the VX waste is safe for transportation and that it has not violated any law by contracting with Veolia.
"We still are of the belief that everything we did was legal and above board and was fully protective of human health, the environment and our workers," he said.
Mahall said that by the time the Army voluntarily halted the shipments, 103 tanker trucks with hydrolysate had been shipped from Newport to Port Arthur, Texas.
Although those shipments are on hold, an Army contractor continues to chemically neutralize Newport's VX stockpile, which was originally more than 250,000 gallons.
As of Tuesday, that project had destroyed 59 percent, or about 177,000 gallons, of VX.