There are times I suddenly feel that I have been asleep all of my life. These times occur when I have had a particularly awakening moment of some sort. A while back, in my AOL journal, I wrote about the DOD and DuPont's plan to "neutralize" a nerve agent called VX at the Army storage facility in Newport, Indiana, ship the resulting hydrolysate east to New Jersey, and then, after some more processing, dump the remaining material into the Delaware River. At the time my outrage was about the environmental effect of such an activity on the river, the aquatic life within it, the human life along its banks to whom the river supplies millions of gallons of drinking water, etc. There has been no word on this plan for about two years now, but it suddenly resurfaced this past week, for reasons that will be explained further on in this post.
This time as I surfed for information I suddenly realized that I was simply taking for granted the first outrage - the fact that there are more than 250,000 gallons of VX stored in a facility in Indiana. There, in the very heartland of this country, is a stockpile of a nerve gas so deadly that one pinhead-sized drop could kill a human, quite horribly. The material has been stored at Newport for some forty years now, since production and shipment of chemical agents and weapons was stopped in the late sixties. VX is not the only CBW (Chemical/Biological Weapon) stored at this and other facilities around the country. The reason that the Army is now scrabbling for disposal plans is that the Chemical Weapons Convention, in force as of April 29, 1997, requires destruction of chemical weapons by the year 2007. The clock is ticking.
The clock is ticking for compliance with this Convention, so the EPA (I'm beginning to wonder why we currently even bother pretending that the letters in the agency's name stand for Environmental Protection Agency. Perhaps the middle word has been changed without any announcement to the public?) has signed off on this plan to truck the VXH across the country to DuPont's Chambers Plant in Deepwater, NJ.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won't oppose the U.S. Department of Defense and DuPont Co.'s plan to dump a wastewater byproduct of a deadly nerve agent into the Delaware River.
The agency said it's assured of a safe treatment for up to 4 million gallons of caustic wastewater created in the treatment for VX, a chemical weapon with a pinhead-size potency to kill a human. DuPont is treating VX for disposal at its Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana.
It's hard to imagine who could have the answers for the underlying questions, however. The sudden-awakening-from-a-long-sleep questions, such as: Why in heaven's name did we manufacture huge quantities of such an agent in the first place? Did we ever actually use this agent? { There are two stories I have encountered about its use, one during the Iraq/Iran conflict, when we may have provided it to our then-friend Saddam Hussein, to use on missiles sent into Iran and later in the attacks on the Kurds in Halabja. And the other, more apocryphal, story having to do with a "live test" of two fifty-pound canisters of VX in 1968 on an NVA equipment recovery station on the K2 front about ten miles inside NE Cambodia (Earth magazine, April 1972).}
Another of those questons might be why have we left such an enormous amount of the deadliest nerve gas ever created in minimally-secure storage for such a long time? In an earlier attempt to get rid of this stuff, it was sealed into shells, which were packed onto ships. The ships were then sunk, some in far Pacific waters, some in the Atlantic not too far off the coast of Atlantic City. The effects of longterm life in deep ocean waters on this material is completely unknown.
Eh, dangerous chemical waste? Dump it in or near New Jersey. Place is already so polluted folks'll never even notice. Don't worry too much about getting bitten by sharks when swimming off the Mid-Atlantic coast. There's far worse things lurking in those waters. This proposal for dumping the VXH into the Delaware, a river traversing the states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, ultimately emptying into Rehoboth Bay, a resort area known as the Summer Capital because of the large number of influential Washingtonians who own summer homes there, is still being opposed by the states' governors, by Riverkeepers and other environmental groups. This clip kinda tells me who will, in all probability, win this controversy:
DuPont in mid-2004 said the company could make $13.5 million annually during the two- to three-year treatment process. Details of the contract or government payments to DuPont during preparations for the work were unavailable. (EPA OK'd Plan)
There was a time when I sneered at the bumper sticker that said "Love My Country, but Fear My Government." As time goes on, as I wake up more every day, I no longer sneer. Are we a totally different place now than we were in the 1960's when this nerve agent was being manufactured and stockpiled? Seems unlikely. What sorts of things are going on, even as I froth and rage at this outdated outrage, right now?
There are times I suddenly feel that I have been asleep all of my life. These times occur when I have had a particularly awakening moment of some sort. A while back, in my AOL journal, I wrote about the DOD and DuPont's plan to "neutralize" a nerve agent called VX at the Army storage facility in Newport, Indiana, ship the resulting hydrolysate east to New Jersey, and then, after some more processing, dump the remaining material into the Delaware River. At the time my outrage was about the environmental effect of such an activity on the river, the aquatic life within it, the human life along its banks to whom the river supplies millions of gallons of drinking water, etc. There has been no word on this plan for about two years now, but it suddenly resurfaced this past week, for reasons that will be explained further on in this post.
