Smoke incident halts nerve agent disposal
Chemical Agent Disposal Facility investigating cause
By Samantha Bates
The East Oregonian
Smoke filled a small portion of the liquid incinerator area at the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility around 7 a.m. Wednesday, but no one was in danger or injured.
Public Information Officer Bruce Henrickson said the area where the smoke appeared was manned by machines only. Automatic shutoff protective systems went into effect to extinguish the smoke quickly.
"The plant is mostly robotically controlled remotely," Henrickson said. "There were no people in that place when the smoke erupted."
The depot is in the midst of destroying 155 mm VX artillery shells, which its been processing since March.
"We have stopped processing now to work on fixing things," Henrickson said.
Thursday morning Henrickson said the depot was cooling down the liquid incinerator, which takes several days. The incinerator must cool from 2,000 degrees to less than 100 degrees before workers can go inside and investigate. Once it is cool, investigators will assess what happened and make repairs to ensure it doesn't happen again.
"Which also means we're not shipping any munitions from storage to the disposal unit at least until next week," Henrickson said.
A press release from the depot noted the smoke may be "apparently due to blockage in a piping system." The depot's weekly update said brine strainers became plugged, causing smoke and steam from a lack of cooling.
Henrickson noted the depot will take its time over the next few days to determine the problem and make sure it's fixed.
"We're never in a rush," he said. "In the whole scheme of things its relatively a small event, but obviously any time something like this happens we want to carefully and thoughtfully understand what happened and prevent it from happening again. Safety remains our highest priority. |
