If all went according to plan on Saturday, incinerators destroyed the final remnants of the vast inventory of deadly U.S. chemical arms once stored at Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele County. It has taken about 16 years for the Army to get the job done, but Utahns can finally breathe a huge collective sigh of relief.
The state long suffered the dubious distinction of being home to 44 percent of the nation’s aging chemical arsenal. The numbers were staggering: 13,600 tons of what the military calls nerve and blister agents loaded on 1.1 million rockets, shells and mortar rounds or stored in bulk containers. Some of the weapons were stored in underground igloos. The deadly stuff went by innocuous-sounding names like VX, GB and GA (nerve agents) and H, HD and HT, Lewisite and mustard (blister agents). The initials don’t hint of their purpose: to maim, incapacitate or kill.
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As these weapons deteriorated over decades, some of them leaked portions of their noxious contents, risking injury to the workers on the Tooele base and, under the worst of possible imagined scenarios, to people in nearby towns and cities. That was one of the reasons why the United States and other nations eventually signed an international treaty in 1993 to destroy their stockpiles of these weapons.
After the treaty was signed, debates erupted in the United States about the best method to safely dispose of the weapons. Incineration was one, chemical neutralization was another. Critics of incineration worried that dioxins and other nasty byproducts of burning the weapons could find their way past filters and into the air.
The Army tested incineration at a remote atoll in the Pacific, then settled on that method for Tooele. We agreed with the Army at the time that the risks of continuing to store the aging weapons were probably higher than burning them in the specialized $400 million incinerator that was designed and built especially for the purpose.
The main incinerator began its work in 1996. There were periodic problems with munitions that jammed in the works or alarms that warned that chemicals might be escaping. But the process eventually became routine to the point that reports of the ongoing work rarely made it into the news.
That’s a tribute to the civilian and Army workers at the incinerator who have completed the difficult job of getting rid of these weapons. Now most of what remains is dismantling the incinerator and final cleanup of the base.
Because of this work, a once-serious danger to Utahns and the natural environment in Tooele County has been eliminated.
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